Stephen Tozer’s ten-year journey bringing ‘fine dining kebabs’ to London

A lot has changed in the UK both culinarily and in wider society since Stephen Tozer launched his first restaurant a decade ago.

But something which very much remains is the appetite for a kebab.

Aged just 24, former commis chef Stephen moved into restaurant ownership with friends and former Le Gavroche chefs Ed Brunet and Manu Canales, which soon earned rave reviews.

Le Bab now has six sites across London, as well as branching out into Bucharest, Romania. Stephen also launched a more high-end experience with Kebab Queen in Covent Garden in 2019 and has recently opened a pub in Camden, called The Dark Horse.

london KEBAB RENAISSANCE

Discussing the concept and growth of his business, Lancashire-born Stephen told The Staff Canteen: “It’s a bit of a funny combo. We have Le Bab, which is a casual restaurant group in London. It's sort of like restaurant service, but it's at the very, very casual end.

“The whole premise of Le Bab was about bringing fine dining credentials into the dishes that we make, the cuisine and the eclectic opportunities around kebabs, because it's such a heterogeneous dish and we always wanted to push it into fine dining.

“So in 2019, we opened this unorthodox fine dining restaurant Kebab Queen. It’s a very weird place, but it's all based on the idea of getting back to the joy of eating in a fine dining context.

“Trying to encourage people to fine dine, but consume food and feel very similar to how they feel when they’re stuffing a kebab down their neck in a kebab shop at two o’clock in the morning. Eat with your hands, we don’t use plates, which is the only restaurant in the world that serves this way.

“We have a big, heated counter, which is made of a material called Dekton, which you can't scratch. So it's like a diamond, it's very clean. You heat it up and the chefs plate everything straight onto the table in front of you and they have a chat to you while they’re plating the dish.

“So it's very, very immersive, very interactive. But it’s really trying to encourage people that despite the fact that we’re really pushing the food and the service to be in the fine dining echelon, to make people feel like they’re at home, they’re comfortable, they're chilled, they're happy, and they're just eating greedily not feeling like they're being judged, or that they have to sit up straight. That's the idea in there.”

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He continued: “Kebab Queen is the pinnacle of what we do really. It's like the ultimate expression of what we can do gastronomically, where we push the food as far as we can.

“Since then we've opened a couple more Le Babs and we've opened some restaurants in Bucharest, which is a really funny project. Romania has some of best fruit and vegetable produce in the world. It's an incredibly fertile country. We have friends there who are restaurateurs and we collaboratively opened these restaurants where we worked with Romanian seasonal produce to deliver the concept there.

“We took one of our former head chefs, who was sous chef at Ikoyi, and another guy from Robin Gill’s group to go and lead the kitchens out there, bringing that fine dining western European eye to that market, which was quite unprecedented out there.

“Then much more recently we’ve opened this pub in Camden, called The Dark Horse. There's a focus on music, because it's a collaboration with a record label and a recording studio. So there's live music, there's electronic music, but there's also a very, very big focus on the food.

“What we're trying to do with the food and the pub is to get back to real British pub basics, like proper vintage pub food, but really focusing on great ingredients, amazing provenance and just trying to do the best possible expression of a very traditional form of English dishes.

“It's not like a typical gastropub there. We're not getting cheffy and French with it at all. It’s like proper pub core.

“It's really hard to find that in London, because a lot of the better pubs go much more cheffy in what they do. They're fantastic and it's a brilliant presence in the food scene, but I think what there’s less of is old school pub fair that’s done really well.”

kebab a 'blank canvas'

Asked where the inspiration for Le Bab first came from, Stephen said: “The idea that kebab is this beloved concept in food. Everyone knows what they are, most people have had one, but it’s very fascinating because there are very few dishes out there which have a single name, like a burger or pizza, but represent so much diversity in the forms in which you’ll encounter them.

“If you eat kebab in Turkey or you eat a kebab in South Asia, Lebanon or Greece, they're so fundamentally different. And even within those territories, there's so much difference as well. Different proteins, different preparations, different spices, different presentations – fried kebabs, steamed kebabs, baked kebabs, grilled kebabs.

“There are kebabs made out of all manner of things, right? So from a gastronomic perspective, it gives you a huge amount of creative liberty to first of all draw on local, unique produce, because you're not really constrained to a specific format.”

He continued: “A kebab is this really blank canvas, where we can draw inspiration from a lot of different places, but still bring a unique touch again of this sort of western European fine dining cookery, and it still makes sense as a kebab.

“As chefs, our relationship with food is creativity. There is the ability to originate something.

“Kebabs were amazing in London before we came along, it's not like we needed to come and save the kebab. It was an opportunity to carve out some new territory in food, which is a modern expression of kebabs, using different ingredients and different technical approaches, and we felt that it was a very legitimate gastronomic project to do that.

“Reimagine this dish with people who like it, but have only eaten it in its orthodox forms.”

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stephen Tozer's food background

Stephen admits starting out on his journey as a restaurateur happened earlier than planned, having previously worked at a Michelin star restaurant and also a gastropub, but he is now conscious of spreading himself too thin.

“Cooking was the hobby of my entire life,” he explained.

“Since I was about 10 years old, I always wanted to have a restaurant. Truthfully, I thought it was something I would do when I was much older and I could lose some money, because so many of the restaurants I loved growing up closed down, so I kind of grew up with a lesson of on a commercial level, this just doesn't work.

“I moved to London and saw this incredible food scene that was happening, 12 years ago and I was very inspired.

“I thought, you know what, maybe I can have a go at this a lot earlier than I thought, so I did it at 24!

“We want to keep going. There's so much we want to do. Where you completely screw yourself over in hospitality, because these businesses are so hands on, if you attempt too much, you try and do everything, you’ll do nothing.

“We've taken 10 years to get Le Bab to where it is, but we've done it as the same team and we're always working together.

“We'd love to do more things, but we can't do anything else until all these things are kind of going swimmingly, which you know in hospitality, they rarely are!”

(Pictures: Justin De Souza)

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