Gordon Ramsay has a new tv show out called Ramsay’s Best Restaurant. I wish all the participants all the best and hope you too will enjoy the experience like I have done.
Its an amazing opportunity to cook with Gordon Ramsay and watching this new show has made me reminisce about my experience exactly a year ago. The pressure tests we were put through were the hardest, toughest, back-breaking, shooting-through-the-roof blood pressure experience in my culinary career. Cooking a three course meal for the 50 diners was a live competition – there was no cut, edit, paste. It was live, it was furious, it was hard. I know I cook for sittings of 65 guests every night but Gordon Ramsay and his guests were a different kettle of fish and with Gordon Ramsay standing there watching over my shoulder it really stretched me to the limit. I’m thankful that we achieved 82 out of 100 and I dedicate this success to my mum – whose recipe, the Mabel’s Claypot Chicken helped us to rocket to the top of the leaderboard.
Although it was exactly a year ago, I remember vividly that evening when we received the news that we had made it to the Final of the F Word’s Best Chinese Restaurant Competition and we were estatic (Watch us battle it out here). Thanks to our wonderful customers who nominated us, we were on the map a la Gordon. However, before Gordon, we were and still are are the third generation of women restaurateurs and have always had great families follow us generation after generation. Their gran knew our gran (who set up her restaurant before Chinatown was established), their mum knows our mum and now the third generation visit Sweet Mandarin.
Nothing had quite sunk in even when a black car picked us up at our home to drive us to the studios in London. Having not slept the night before didn’t help when we were faced with 50 chicken breasts and about 100 pieces of squid to cut in the F Word kitchen – and we had an hour’s prep time to get through the mountains of ingredients.
I was cutting away in my own little world when suddenly this voice said ‘Hello Lisa!’ It was Gordon Ramsay. He was so tall and I was so shocked that it was the man himself that I nearly cut my hand. It was at that moment that it finally sunk – I was in the competition headed up by Gordon Ramsay to find the UK’s Best Local Chinese Restaurant and after three generations who have endured rollercoaster after rollercoaster it was a chance for me to restore the family name. Then I got nervous. I finally realised that this competition was real and was shocked that Gordon knew my name. I’ve seen him on the TV, but for him to know and praise me was a chef’s dream come true. It was a true honour to cook with him and a huge accolade to get 82/100 mark for the Mabel’s Claypot Chicken. When we won the Best Local Chinese Restaurant Award 2009-2010 I had tears in my eyes. To my dear customers and to all of Manchester, this trophy is for you.
If you want to pop over for my mum’s claypot chicken, please book a table here
Read the interview with Sweet Mandarin’s head chef, Lisa Tse, and second chef, Helen Tse…
How did you feel when you found out you’d made it through the F Word?
Helen: Amazing! Speechless. Nearly wanted to faint! Jean Baptiste came to see us to try our Mabel’s Clay Pot Chicken. Just himself, very low key – and then he left. Suddenly I got this phone call at lunch time and it went, ‘Hi it’s Gordon’ and he said, ‘I’ve got some real bad news for you; you’ve got to come down to London on Thursday’. And we found out on Tuesday! So we had to re-jig everything to get down here but it’s worth it. We haven’t quite come down yet!
Why do you think your restaurant was nominated as one of the best Chinese restaurants?
Helen: We have the best customers. It’s thanks to them.
Lisa: I guess they must really like our food, they always rave about the food and the ambiance of the restaurant. And also the location is quite special. It’s in an area called the Northern Quarter and there’s a lot of regenerated business and it’s quite cool and funky round there and we blend into that, I guess.
Helen: We do a lot of work with the community as well. We open up the restaurant for free for events. Lisa here is a manic Twitterer and we always hold ‘Tweet ups’ every month, and they really appreciate that. And we do Flickr meetings as well, so people who are crazy about photography come along. We also do events called ‘Meet My Neighbour’ where we invite blocks of residents to our restaurant and they get to meet their neighbours. Where we are there are loads of flats, these people have been living there for years and they don’t even know who their neighbour is. They don’t even know who lives in their block, that’s how dangerous it could be. So we thought we’d introduce them to each other. We feel safe in the neighbourhood because we know who’s there.
Lisa: We feel safe in the neighbourhood, and also when they walk past after work we can give them a wave now.
What about the food?
Lisa: We serve modern Chinese cuisine and exotic cocktails. When we first set up the concept it was a casual dining restaurant. So you could come in for a bite to eat up to the full blown banquet. We do traditional sweet and sour and black bean for example, but we also do recipes that have been passed down from our mother and grandmother. Like Lily Kwok’s Chicken Curry, Mabel’s Clay Pot and we also cater for vegetarians as well. Not only that but we have a Taste of China menu as well. So you can get regional dishes from China that you can taste in our restaurant, which is quite unique. I think when people go to a Chinese they’re scared to try things they not used to, so we try to introduce them slowly to spicier stuff or savoury dishes.
Helen: The dish that we’re cooking tonight for the competition is called Mabel’s Clay Pot Chicken, and lots of our dishes have a story behind it. And Mabel is our mum and she came to England when she was about 8, and she was separated from her mum for a few years because our grandmother came over first. And you know if you ever have distance from a friend or a family member there’s always an awkward time when they meet up again. And that also happened with mother and daughter. My mum hated England initially when she came here because she couldn’t speak the language, didn’t like the rain, didn’t like meat and two veg – she was used to rice every day. And this chicken was her favourite dish growing up, so my grandmother would cook it for her and it was through this dish that they bonded again as mother and daughter – and that’s why we’re cooking it again today. We’ve got this very strong belief; there’s many things in the world that divide us but the one thing that unites us is food.
And what is in the Clay Pot Chicken dish?
Lisa: It’s got chicken in, it’s actually got quite a lot of ying-yang elements in. So it’s got ginger which is yang, which is warming for the body, it’s got spring onion which complements it very well. And another thing that is very seasonal, which is Chinese cabbage and some onions as well. It’s really the sauce; what makes the sauce quite special is the Chinese sausage, called lapchang, so it’s a bit like your salami, and also the Chinese mushrooms as well. It’s very rustic.
How do you feel about cooking for the F Word diners alongside Gordon?
Lisa: I think once we’ve been in the kitchen and seen it we’ll be a bit calmer.
Helen: We’re going to have to cook quite quick it looks like and also tweak a few techniques to make sure you get it out within the time frame.
What would it mean to the pair of you if you were to win the competition overall?
Lisa: To get this far is just surreal, to meet Gordon Ramsay was pretty cool as he’s just amazing.
Helen: It’s a big thanks to our customers and would show that all the hard work’s paid off – and that whatever we’re doing we’re doing it right. Because sometimes in business you don’t know what’s the right decision or the wrong decision and you just keep going and hope for the best sometimes. Especially in the restaurant business; it’s so competitive, you always have to innovate and watch your competitors and hopefully we’ll do that for the diners.
