Making food an art form

Nov 13 2007 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

Making food an art form

Laura Davis meets the head chef exhibiting his cooking for artists

MUMS and dads – the next time you are carrying out your early evening routine of juggling plates of fishfingers and beans, spare a thought for Nicolas Kelly.

It doesn’t matter how rowdy and demanding a two-year-olds gets, no child will ever make it into the same league as a successful artist.

Either wearing their creativity like a hair shirt or knocking back the alcopops like a ladette, artists are known for being temperamental and fussy.

So imagine having to cook for them on a regular basis, for the opening of their latest exhibitions.

Actually, confesses Nicholas, it’s quite a lot of fun. And the artists are much less intimidating than they may seem.

The 38-year-old head chef works at Tate Liverpool, running the Tate Cafe and overseeing the catering at large events. That includes the opening of Peter Blake: A Retrospective, last summer’s major exhibition of work by the man who designed the Sergeant Pepper album cover, and the upcoming Turner Prize announcement.

“We try and create the dishes to suit the art,” explains Nicholas. “For Blake we tried to theme the colours around his colour schemes from Pop Art.

“I’m a big Beatles fan so to meet him was great. He was absolutely made up with the catering. It was his daughter’s birthday on the night of the private view so he was especially pleased that we made a cake for her.”

Food for the Turner Prize will, he says, have a traditional English theme.

“It’s not going to be a big sit down dinner but it’ll be a soiree for all the artists and all their guests so we’ll have confit of salmon, apple and shallot salad with black pudding, white bean and truffle soup in a little shot glass to warm you up as you come in the door.

“With the dessert side it’s traditional egg custards and trifles, but all done with a modern take.”

Nicholas’ arrival at Tate Liverpool earlier this year happened almost by accident. After growing up in the Penny Lane area, he moved to London at the age of 24 to train as a chef. He worked at Mezzo and the legendary Coq D’Argent, but was between jobs when a friend asked him to help out the Tate events team.

He ended up staying three years before moving back to Liverpool to take up his new post.

“When I left I don’t think there really was a good cooking scene in Liverpool. There were a couple of good restaurants but nothing to shout from the rooftops about. Now I think there are some really good places and it’s become a good place for chefs to start working,” he says.

“There are a lot of chefs who went down to London to learn their trade and now they’ve come home. They’ve brought back all this knowledge and they’re passing it on to the next generation.”

Menus at Tate Cafe include a lot of locally-sourced ingredients, such as slow cooked pork belly with smoked Bury black pudding and peach chutney and Lancashire air dried ham and Mrs Kirkham’s Lancashire cheese with piccalilli.

“At the moment we’re building up a trade around the dock for people who do come just for the cafe and the restaurant... and then they’ll go to the gallery. Whereas it used to just be people who came to the gallery and thought ‘oh, there’s a cafe here, we’ll have something to eat.’ It’s been a long journey and we’re trying to increase the offer all the time.”

lauradavis@dailypost.co.uk