Chef bought a restaurant - then learned to cook

Mar 11 2008 by Emma Pinch, Liverpool Daily Post

Emma Pinch talks to the man who discovered a talent for cooking because he wanted to impress women

FOR A bloke who got into the cookery business just to impress women, Simon Rimmer is doing amazingly well; having his cake and eating it, you might say.

The Wallasey-born chef’s TV show and award-winning vegetarian restaurant in Cheshire have proved runaway successes – Greens turns away up to 600 customers a week – and the recipes from his programme, Something for the Weekend, have proved so popular with viewers that a book of them is set to hit the shelves.

Lazy Brunch fills a gap in the market highlighted by the fact that their recipes, and in particular those for that in-between meal beloved of Americans, have garnered the largest share of hits than any other on the BBC’s sprawling website.

“We don’t do brunch very well here,” says Simon. “It doesn’t have a traditional structure like a roast or meat and two veg, it sits outside that. It’s what you eat with a fork in one hand and the papers in the other; I put myself in the viewers’ shoes. If you’ve had a few bevvies on Saturday and you are hung over on Sunday and need a lie-in – although it’s been a long time since I have because I’m up at 6.30am – it’s what I’d like to eat. It’s comfort food that you would have at a cafe.”

The book features Scotch eggs and pork pie, Simon’s motorway pitstop favourites, chilli tacos, huevos rachero, spicy noodles, blueberry pancakes and other substantial snacks designed for sharing in mind.

The recipes are deliberately diverse and not too fussy, containing generally little more than six or seven ingredients.

“I have very diverse desires when it comes to food,” confesses Simon. “Today it was fish fingers with salad cream.

“If I’m honest, I’m cooking for myself, what I’d like to go home and eat, and people like me. It’s blokey food rather than girly food. For the man who wants something slightly show-offy and not particularly healthy, but full of flavour.

“We deliberately tried wherever possible to create recipes where, if you didn’t have everything in your store cupboard, you would find it in your local Somerfield and wouldn’t have to trawl round Waitrose or a specialist deli.”

Each page features tips for the ham-fisted chef, such as how to scoop bits of shell out of your cracked egg – use a large piece of the broken shell (“it just works somehow,” says Simon) – written in the friendly style that made viewers warm to him in TV shows ranging from This Morning to Xchange on CBBC.

Simon’s broad-minded approach to food is partly thanks to his unorthodox entry into the industry 17 years ago, when he was a textile designer and plunged into the purchase of a vegetarian cafe in Hale, Cheshire.

“If I’m honest, I bought the restaur-ant to chat girls up,” he says. “I wasn’t going to cook, I was going to be front of house, swan around and try to impress the girls. But we didn’t have any money to employ anybody. The only way was to learn to cook and I found out what I’m good at.

“I haven’t been classically trained so I didn’t know what the rules were, and I went completely by instinct. Everything was brown and heavy and made you think of rubbish.

“But we didn’t disguise that we didn’t know what we were doing and we took the customers along with us. We would say, we’re trying this today, have a taste.”

Two years later, the Guardian desc- ribed Greens in Didsbury as one of the most exciting new restaurants in UK, and it has gone on to win several awards, including The Big Issue's Rest- aurant of the Year, and most recently North-West Restaurant of the Year.

The secret to good veggie food, he says, is plundering the national cuisines where vegetarian recipes are classic dishes in their own right.

“The mistake people make is trying to replicate meat and two veg, but veg and two veg doesn’t work,” he explains. “So we looked at cuisines that do very good vegetarian food, like stand-alone pasta dishes, South East Asian and Moroccan specialities, all food with great flavours which don’t need any meat in them at all.

“Some people think with vegetarian food you can’t use rich sauces and they all have to be tomato based. Just because it’s vegetarian doesn’t mean it has to be ultra-healthy, you can still use lots of cream and butter and heavy, reduced stock–based sauces.

“My advice is to have a range of herbs and spices. Aubergines are a key ingredients, they are very versatile and used a lot in Asian cuisine.”

He’s recently started a new venture, Earle’s in Hale, a cross between a brasserie and a New York-style restaurant.

Despite the books, the restaurants and TV shows he managed to get the girl as well – Alison, his wife of 12 years and the mother of his two children. They were going to go to London, but one of his children has just started school so they’re staying close to home where he is impressed with what is on offer for foodies.

He says: “We might go to the London Carriage Works, in Hope Street, or the Old Hawkers Arms, in Chester, which is very simple food and a really good modern pub. We are spoiled for choice here in the North West at the moment.”

* LAZY Brunch is published by Quadrille Publishing, and costs £14.99.

emma.pinch@dailypost.co.uk