Chefs and their suppliers share a common goal - to
find and deliver the best to their customers. Neither are initially
impelled by money alone. In a chef’s case when fortune arrives it is
invariably from the spin-offs around the restaurant rather than the
restaurant itself whereas a supplier’s main financial preoccupation is
when, or even whether, the restaurants will eventually pay.
Chefs and suppliers are however distinguished by their
respective age profiles. While the former tend to mirror sports
personalities and have often moved into executive positions by the age
of 45, suppliers go on and on, a little wiser and often a lot more
philosophical.
Randolph Hodgson, whose Neal's Yard Dairy will soon celebrate 25
years of supplying British cheese to top restaurants in the UK, the
USA, France and Japan, has just spent a hectic week taking chefs and
the cheese buyers from America’s Whole Foods (who have now taken
over Fresh & Wild in the UK) around the country. Julian Birch is
still physically delivering wet, heavy boxes of the freshest fish from
the south coast to London’s restaurants more than twenty years since I
first bought from him although, as testimony to quite how precarious
this business is, he is now involved with his seventh different
company.
As befits her character Wendy Sayell has created a more
idiosyncratic business model to ensure that her company Sayell Foods,
which supplies over 250 restaurants, gastro-pubs and a few private
customers across the UK and Ireland with a range of over 400 different
Spanish ingredients and ceramics, has a long life.
She started the company when she was in her mid-fifties - in
response to demands from chefs for better quality produce at lower
prices - by which time she had a son James and daughter Camilla who not
only share her enthusiasm but are also prepared to load their vans at a
moment’s notice with anything a chef has just phoned up for.
I met Sayell at her Victorian warehouse in fashionable Hoxton, north
London, and was greeted by a still strikingly good looking woman,
although now over 60, in a dashing skirt and mules. The untidiness of
the office and the presence of a dog by her feet gave the room the feel
more of a theatrical agency than a major food supplier although the
poster for a bullfight confirmed that here is a little outpost of
Spain. Her comment, as she lit a cigarette, that “I suppose I will have
to give these up pretty soon” suggested a no-nonsense disposition.
“I first went to Torremolinos when I was 18 in the early 1960s when
it was underdeveloped, beautiful and stylish. I furnished apartments
for a while and then we started a restaurant on the beach where,
without running water or electricity, we used to serve a hundred
lunches a day. That is when I began to appreciate that this part of the
world has the best raw ingredients even if they know how to cook
only fish really well.”
Family life intervened but then she was approached by the chef at
The Eagle, the seminal gastro-pub in Farringdon, to see whether she
could put her knowledge of Spain to commercial use. “The chef thought
he was being overcharged for his piquillo peppers and Judión beans and
I discovered that I could supply him at five pounds a kilo cheaper and
still make a profit. I started from home - by then I was too old, too
set in my ways to work for anyone else,” she added with a smile.
Her business grew as more and more chefs came to her to source the
best produce. “We are bugged by chefs all the time,” she explained with
some pride. “One of our biggest selling lines is Harina de Trigo, flour
which Spanish chefs specifically use for frying fish which is coarser
than British flour so it coats the fish more evenly. Sam Hart from Fino
asked me to track it down after he had spent a year in Spain and now we
deliver it in 40 kilo lots to J.Sheekey, the very English fish
restaurant in Covent Garden.”
Two particular characteristics have contributed to Sayell’s success.
The first is the maternal aspect she brings to her business. Chefs know
that they can trust her and she, in turn, seems to look on them rather
like her extended family who may survive without her advice but not
quite so well. When talking about one chef about to set up a fish and
chip shop where they will fry the fish in olive oil (supplied by her
company, naturally) as they do in Spain, she did refer to him as ’a
very nice boy’. And she has just placed two of Jamie Oliver’s trainee
chefs in the kitchens of El Portalon in Marbella for an immersion in
Spanish cooking.
Since becoming an important part of the business, James has acquired
a more commercial perspective. “We look at those who supply the small
restaurants and delicatessens in Spain and only deal with family-owned,
artisanal companies. The key is that they must be family-owned rather
than their size. If we are talking to the owner of a company we can
persuade them occasionally to adapt one of their products to suit
British chefs but you cannot do that if you have to deal with an export
manager.”
Recommendations from chefs and suppliers in Spain have taken Sayell
to places she didn’t think possible seven years ago. “I've been into
the kitchens of Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse and Diageo to show them
how to cook tortilla properly. And an introduction to a small family
ceramic business, where father and son make and mother and daughter
decorate, led to us importing a wide range of ceramics. One particular
round dish goes to Rowley Leigh for the fish pies in the fish shop next
to Kensington Place while another, with three divisions, goes to
a cinema that wants to sell food but not have the intrusion of noisy
wrapping paper.”
But the biggest surprise has been the popularity of the Serrano ham
and suckling pigs she imports from Avila with Britain’s Chinese chefs
(although Sayell is quick to point out that correctly they should be
called sucking pigs as it is the mother who suckles). “They can no
longer import meat directly from China because of the health scares so
they buy our Serrano hams and use the meat for dim sum and the fat and
bones for stock. And every Chinese celebration seems to call for a
suckling pig. I took our supplier (whose brand is, incidentally,
called Porky Avila) to one Chinese restaurant last week which had just
ordered thirty pigs and he was so thrilled.”
The pleasure that acting as suppliers to British chefs has given the
Sayell family is obvious from their enthusiasm not just for what they
are currently offering but for the new range of unsmoked Jamón Ibérico,
to be grilled or roasted like beef or lamb, which has impressed the
chefs they have shown it to and will be appearing on British menus in
the autumn.
Wendy Sayell’s cool, dark Victorian warehouse is a long way from the
initial sun-drenched beach café in Torremolinos where her passion for
food began. But anyone who appreciates the strong, distinctive flavours
of Spanish ingredients, whether on restaurant or gastro-pub menus,
should be grateful she made the move.
Sayell Foods, 71 Fanshaw Street, London N1, 020-7256 1080, www.sayellfoods.co.uk
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