Iron Chef UK Press Release

Channel 4 likes to promote its shows by putting out free interviews for newspapers to chop up and use as filler, and for Iron Chef UK it offered not one but three. Here they are in full.

Olly Smith

Olly Smith is so cheerful and enthusiastic, you’d be forgiven for thinking he was a madman. Until you realise what he does for a living. The man spends his life travelling the globe, eating the finest foods and drinking the finest wines, and occasionally delivering a piece to camera. All in all, it’s not a bad way to make a living.

This spring, Smith has a new role - presenter of Channel 4’s new daytime cookery-cum-kitchen-combat extravaganza, Iron Chef. And, true to form, he’s delighted about it…

To a lot of people, you’re known primarily as a wine expert. How did you get into that line of work? I actually won a reality show to loom for a new face of wine. It was called Wine Idol, and it was on UKTV Food, as it used to be. I think 6,000 people downloaded the application form to get into it. You had to go through various heats - writing and presenting and getting up in front of judges and blind tasting, and I managed to win that. And from there, I used it as a calling card, to knock on doors and get on various different food shows. So I started on Great Food Live, then I managed to get on Food Uncut, which I went on to guest present, got on to Taste for Sky One, and from there went on to Saturday Kitchen, Richard & Judy and now Iron Chef, which is pretty awesome.

So you’re the Joe McElderry of wine. [Laughs] Yes, you could say that. I loved wine from the age of 20. I first ran into wine at a free-tasting in Oddbins on South Clerk Street in Edinburgh. I tasted a bottle of wine that cost £3.29, and I loved it. It was explosive, invigorating, I thought “It’s not much more expensive than a couple of pints, I can share it with my girlfriend and woo her.” And it worked, because she’s now my wife.

So you just have to keep her topped up! [Laughs] She enjoys wine, she does love a glass of wine. I’m very lucky, because I have a cellar now as well. It’s small, but I have to say it’s stuffed full of fine vino. I love the stuff, it’s brilliant.

What’s the most you’ve ever paid for a bottle? In a restaurant I’ve never paid more than £100 for a bottle of wine. I just prefer to put myself in the hands of the sommelier, and I always ask “What is the greatest bargain, what’s off the beaten track?” And they usually end up finding you something from Greece or Croatia or Bulgaria, somewhere you don’t really know about. Often those are terrific bargains. If I’m going to buy really fine wine, personally I don’t tend to buy it in restaurants, because it is a lot of money. I tend to buy those things, if I’m buying them at all, en primeur, in advance, so you can buy them for a better price and then lay them down for many years and save up to drink them. I’ve never spent more than £100 in a restaurant, but in a shop? Do you know, I think I might have done, shockingly? I think I have once spent about £120 on a bottle of wine, which is shocking to admit. But it was really nice!

Before you got into this line of work, is it true that you wrote for Pingu, and Charlie and Lola and Wallace and Gromit? Yes, I did. I wrote for Pingu for three series, Charlie and Lola I did two series, and one of my episodes even won an award! And Wallace and Gromit I just worked on for a single day, just as a gag-writer, but I was honoured just to be in the mix for that, because what a great movie it turned out to be. I really enjoyed being a script-writer, it was fabulous, but my heart always wanted to be in front of camera. I wanted to present. I think being a script-writer really helped that, actually, because I learned how productions work and what’s important. Now, when I’m presenting something, it really helps that I’m able to come up with ideas and contribute something, and hopefully say things that make sense.

You ended up working on a lot of different food programmes, and with a lot of top chefs. So I’m going to put you on the spot here. Whose restaurants do you frequent? I frequent quite a lot of them. Atul Kochhar’s place, Benares, I go there a lot. I adore Theo Randall’s Italian restaurant. Chris Galvin at Windows, I really like his cooking. I’m a big fan of The Boxwood Café, Stuart Gillies is a fantastic chef. Jun Tanaka at Pearl, I recently went there and absolutely loved it. I love Adam Byatt at Trinity. Obviously Michel Roux jnr, I love Gavroche, I think it’s outstanding cooking. If I could eat the food of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall every day I would, because the man is a legend and he cooks fantastic flavours, it’s proper, proper cooking. I’ve been to Fifteen, I really like Jamie Oliver’s work. Heston Blumenthal, flipping heck, what a guy he is. Maze, Jason Atherton, I really like. And I like Nick Watt, who does Zuma and Roka. Very, very good food. And Vivek Singh as well, at The Cinnamon Club. I’m so lucky, because part of my job is matching food to wine and finding out about flavour. I’ve just written a book called Eat and Drink, and so my job was really going around keeping up with what people were doing, so I had to go to all these places. I really love that part of the job, I have a massive respect for chefs.

How often do you eat out, then? Oh gosh, I do eat out quite a lot. At least once-a-week, for sure. You’ve got to know what’s going on, and in the foodie world things change rapidly. Restaurants open and close, new menus come on board, some chefs hit a real sweet spot, and you’ve got to go and see what they’re doing. So I do tend to eat pout at least once-a-week to keep abreast of that, if not more. If I could eat out more I would, but it does mean I have to go to the gym for many hours every single day. But it’s a price worth paying!

What about you in the kitchen. Are you a good cook yourself? I would say I am, yes. I love cooking. For me it all stems from the idea of matching wine to flavour. Because of my job with wine I’ve spent a lot of time travelling round the world and looking at different cultures and different flavours. So I’ve been basically collecting ideas and recipes over the last five years. And I’ve also collected all the recipes from my mum, her mother, my great granny and even her mother as well, and they’ve really helped me leap out of the drinks cabinet into the kitchen.

Is it true that you keep pigs and bees? That is absolutely true. We’ve just taken delivery of our new pigs, which are Gloucester Old Spots. The bees sadly didn’t make it over the winter, but there will be more of them this year. I’m a real fan of keeping pigs.

Is that Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s influence? Completely. I’m a massive fan of Hugh. We’ve got some friends who have some land just outside the town where I live, and so we’ve done the project with them. Last year we had six or seven pigs. It was our first year of doing it, and it was one of the greatest experiences of my life. We had a fantastic year looking after them, making sure they were okay, feeding them fantastic food, knowing they had a great life, lots of space, and lots of stimulation. And I have to say the end result, the meat, was some of the best I’ve ever tasted. I had the best bacon sarnie I’ve ever had.

Are your kids okay with the idea of cosying up to the piggies one day, and then having them on their plates the next? Yeah, they’ve been amazing. They’re two lovely little girls, aged five and three, ands they were incredible about it. They knew exactly what the pigs were for, they knew they weren’t pets, and when it came time to take them to the slaughter, we went and fed them the day before, and I told the kids what was going to happen, and their first question was “When does the bacon come?” They never batted an eyelid.

A lot of the TV you’ve done is live. Do you ever get nervous? I used to - obviously everyone does when they start to do something new - but I’m used to doing a lot of big live events now, where you come out and there’s 2,500 people and you’ve got to show them a great time. To be honest, I thrive on it, I absolutely love it, it’s my favourite thing in the world. Stepping out on to a crackling TV set or a live show is just brilliant. Shooting Iron Chef as live is thrilling - there’s no time for a script, you’ve just got to get out there. It’s on the hoof, it’s exciting, it’s on the edge and I love it. No safety net required. Dive in! No swimming trunks required!

Speaking of no safety net, you appeared on Celebrity Weakest Link. To those who don’t know, explain what happened next… [Roars with laughter] I appeared on the chefs’ edition. I don’t really know how it happened, but I described Ann Robinson as being full-bodied, and she asked if this meant she had big breasts, and I said no and was quite embarrassed about the whole thing. And she basically dared me to fondle her breasts, and I initially said “No, I’m not doing it, my mother could be watching.” And she calls me out, she calls me a coward. Well, then you have to step up. It’s the moment in your life when you think “This is like Gladiator in the arena facing the emperor. I’ve got to do it, there’s loads of people watching, I can’t not. I’ll never live it down. And I’ll never forgive myself.” And I have to say, Ann Robinson - what a rack! Brilliant! The find of the decade.

Now’s probably a good time to move on to Iron Chef. Explain the concept of the show. The concept is high gastronomy meets high camp, effectively. It’s set in kitchen Stadium, we have a Japanese chairman who brings his iron chefs to face challengers. Every day we have one iron chef facing four challengers. Each challenger prepares one dish, the iron chef prepares four dishes, so the pressure is really on the iron chef. We have an hour-long show, and if you imagine the excitement of The X Factor, the tempo of Gladiators and the quality cooking of your favourite show, you’re getting close. The cooking is brilliant. I don’t think the high-octane entertainment side of it would work unless the cooking was as good as it is, and that’s the thing I love about it. And you’ve got a narrative as well. So every day the challengers are teaming up trying to beat the iron chef, but they’re also trying to beat each other to make the dish of the day, and the person who wins the most dishes of the day goes forward to the Friday final and faces an iron chef head-to-head. It’s too exciting, it’s like making Torville fight Dean in a bear pit.

Were you already a fan of the Japanese and US versions of the show? I think I may have been the biggest fan, actually. It was my producer on Saturday Kitchen, James Winter, who kept saying to me “Have you seen Iron Chef?” And I looked at it on YouTube, and remember catching Captain Kirk, William Shatner, hosting it. And I thought “This can’t be right.” And then I found the Japanese version, and fell deeply in love with it. And the US version is unbelievable fun.

Rumour has it you wept when you learned you’d got the job presenting Iron Chef. I welled up, I will admit, in my office. I wouldn’t describe it as uncontrollable sobbing, by any means. I was just very, very excited ands chuffed to bits. It was an emotional moment, I was thrilled. I was completely on my own in the office, and my agent called. For me it’s a massive dream come true. I’ve loved everything I’ve done so far, all the live shows, hosting F-Word Live, Masterchef Live, Saturday Kitchen, all those things, I just think I’m the luckiest man alive. But this, when I got the call, felt like it was all my Christmases in one. Imagine you’re 11 and you get given a BMX, of course you’re going to well up, it’s brilliant. It’s like being told you’re gonna be Han Solo and pilot the Millennium Falcon. I was thrilled; it was a huge moment in my life. Yes, the man tear was there.

What’s your role in the programme? I’m the presenter, I have to link everything together. So I introduce the show, I’m the link through to the Iron Chefs, the contestants, the chairman, Nick Nairn, who’s our commentator, to the audience. And the key thing is that the audience feels that through me they’ve got a way in, they’re entertained, they’re informed, they know what’s going on at every single step of the way.

Time is at a premium for these guys, especially the iron chefs, who have to cook four dishes. But you have to interview them while they’re doing it. Do they ever get a little bit annoyed by your intrusion? Oh God, yeah, they must do. They don’t say as much, but you can read in certain moments in their eyes that they’re thinking “I’m incredibly busy and you’re asking me about Scallops - get out of my face.” But that’s part of the nature of the show - they’ve got to be completely in the zone, but I’m buzzing about going “Hello, tell me about beef.” They don’t always want to, but they always play ball. They’re all so up for it. And they’re all so different. You’ve got Martin Blunos, looks like a WWF wrestler, heart of gold. Judy Joo - fantastic precision, she’s like an artist, her dishes look sensational, you could hang them up in The Louvre, they’re awesome. Tom Aikens, the surgeon, the Robocop, the precise master of his destiny, the man is on fire. And then you’ve got Sanjay Divedi who’s a jazz wizard, the extemporiser, you never know what he’s going to do next. It’s unbelievable.

Who’s the scariest of the iron chefs? In terms of who in the most scary for their focus and determination, Aikens, definitely. It’s got to be. Seriously, he’s Robocop, he’s The Terminator. Backstage, if Tom has a good day, everybody’s happy. If things don’t go so well, maybe not. To be honest, the guy is at the top of his game, I just can’t wait for people to see what he does. He cooks so rapidly, you almost have to remind people they’re not watching in fast forward. He’s got electric fingers. But in terms of who looks the scariest, it’s got to be Blunos - he looks terrifying. He looks like a Viking about to stove your head in with a massive axe. Judy Joo is a very cool customer, she’s very collected, there’s a real energy about her. Sanjay is not very scary at all. You just don’t know what he’s going to do next.

You have this massive enthusiasm in the show. Are you like that all the time, or is it for the benefit of the cameras? My dad is probably the best person to answer that, because he gets asked that a lot by his mates. It’s true that I’m like this most of the time. I really love life, I’m really privileged in what I do, I’m very lucky I’ve got a great family, and I’m very happy in the place that I love. I am really, generally pretty up for things. I’m inquisitive, I always want to take new things on. If there’s a chance to try something, I want to be there - it doesn’t matter if it’s a TV show or keeping pigs, trying a new beer that I’ve never tried before, eating a new cheese, climbing another mountain - I love these things. Life is a very precious and invigorating thing, and I’m a very lucky man.

With that positive attitude, how would you get on cooking against an iron chef? Would you be up for it? Of course it would be a great pantomime, and I’d love to do it, but I’d be slaughtered. I’m a home cook. I’m not a trained professional chef. I love flavour, and I match wine to it. That’s my world. My world is not the intense, high-pressure environment of the professional kitchen. The iron chefs would cut me into small pieces of mincemeat and chew on my jellies. They’re just too good.

Tom Aikens

Tom Aikens is one of the rising stars of the British culinary scene. He's also one of the star turns on Channel 4's new daytime cookery series Iron Chef UK, based on the smash hit show that has taken both Japan and the USA by storm. Here, he reveals why, after years of avoiding TV, he decided to take part in the series, and what it was like to compete against both the clock and a team of four other chefs.

You've not really done TV before. Why have you decided to do Iron Chef UK? The main reason was that it wasn't like all the other programmes, where you're given a box of ingredients and you have to create something. What attracted me to this was that you can do practically whatever you wanted. Obviously you have to keep within the time restrictions, and you have to cook using the day's main ingredient, but the real excitement of it is that they're the only two limitations that you have. So you can create anything that you want - but you need to remember that you're making it all absolutely from scratch. You can be as inventive and creative as you would be in a restaurant, and it's very realistic in the sense that you have a time restriction, which you're dealing with all the time when you're working in a professional kitchen. You're always up against the clock and timings, watching the seconds go down and getting the right moment when something's going to be perfect. So I was attracted because it's not a completely formatted show - everything's exactly as it would be in a kitchen. For a viewer watching it's very exciting, because everything is done while you're watching. It's very intense, and it will help people understand what it's like in a professional kitchen.

You have to cook four dishes, while your four competitors have to cook only one each. That sounds a bit unfair. Well, to a degree, yes and no. I had two guys working with me. You have 70 minutes cooking time in total - after 40 minutes you put your two starters up, and two of the contestants put up their starters. And the guys doing the main courses both have a full 70 minutes each to do their one dish. The most important factor for me is the first 40 minutes, getting absolutely everything pretty much done. Because you're not only thinking about one dish, you're thinking about all four in the first 40 minutes, because there may be some things that you need to get on that you're not going to use in a starter, like a stock or a braised dish or a casserole or whatever. You need to get that on in the first few minutes, so you've really got to think about exactly the timings of what you're going to do next, what's going to be first and what you can leave until you've done the starters. You have to be really careful, because the timing thing is the crucial part of it.

Then you have a couple of sous chefs working with you. Do you bring them along with you? One you can bring yourself, the other is provided by the production company.

Would you say that all the chefs involved have very different styles? Yes definitely. Martin Blunos is Scandinavian [sic], his style is very Scandinavian. Judy Joo is Chinese [sic], so she was more sort of Asian. I was more French, and then Sanjay Dwivedi was more Indian.

Every day has a special ingredient. What were the toughest ones you were given? The most difficult was probably the minced beef. Trying to be creative with that was difficult - but that was the challenge of it. You had to be creative with what you were given, that added to the whole challenge.

Each dish that you create is then critiqued in front of you by the judges. Do you find it difficult to take that sort of criticism? No, not really. Every time a customer comes in to one of your restaurants they're going to critique you to some degree. Some of the judges' opinions can be a bit off the mark, shall we say. But on the whole, they're there to do a job, and they're the judges at the end of the day. It is obviously different because they're standing there telling you to your face if your food is good or not, but they have the final say.

Are you quite competitive? Do you have a real determination to win? Am I competitive? Yes, I'm very competitive, I would say. I don't like losing, but I suppose you can't always win.

Have you been impressed by the standard of opponent you've come up against in the series? Yeah, they were all good. Very, very good. I was definitely impressed.

Judy Joo

This spring, a smash hit Japanese cookery competition is reinvented for a UK audience when Iron Chef UK hits the screens. Based on a successful Japanese format, which has already become a smash hit series in America, Iron Chef pits four celebrity chefs against each other, and against a team of professional chefs, every week, in a pressure-cooker atmosphere and against the clock.

If it all sounds pretty stressful, that's because it is. Not that that's a problem for Judy Joo. The Korean-American chef, whose career has taken more twists than fusilli pasta, is more than used to working under pressure…

You've had something of a circuitous journey into the kitchen, haven't you? I have. It's been a little bit random. I took a less than direct route. I went to University of Columbia in New York really thinking I was going to be the next Marie Curie. I decided to go into Engineering and Applied Science, and from that decided I didn't want to be an engineer. From that I used the quantitative skills I had gained in my studies to leverage a career in finance. I worked at Morgan Stanley for about five years, and had a number of different roles, most recently Fixed Income Derivatives salesperson. I was just kind of getting tired of it, I have to say - I was always travelling, it's a lot of work, it's a lot of pressure physically mentally and emotionally. The thing about these City jobs and Wall Street jobs is that they do pay you quite handsomely, but they do really require you to put your blood, sweat and tears into the job, and you end up having no life as well.

Um… So you decided to go into the really relaxing environment of the professional kitchen! [Laughs] Exactly! I decided to follow my dream and my passion, and to actually do something that I rally, really loved. So I quit Wall Street and the whole rat race and enrolled in cooking school full-time.

So you'd always had that passion for cooking? Yes, I've always loved food, loved eating out, loved wine. Being in New York city I was just surrounded by so many different ethnic enclaves. You can go to Little Poland and go to Little Russia and go to Little Italy and Chinatown and Koreatown, so I was always exploring all the gastronomic delights right on my doorstep. So that was a culinary education in itself as well. And I got a formal education at the French Culinary Institute in New York, where I got my Grand Diplome. I graduated the top of my class! So from there I went into food media, and worked at Saveur magazine, which is a magazine in the States, both in their test kitchen and on the editorial side. And I also worked at a non-profit organisation called Slow Food, where I started their first inner city Slow Food in Schools project in Harlem, teaching children about where their food comes from, and how to cook and eat more healthily, and garden-to-table type eating. And then my husband got transferred to London for his job, and I was just eating at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, and Gordon was there, and he was working the tables chit-chatting, and I mentioned I was a chef, and he said "When are you going to come and work for me?" So I arranged to go in for a tour of the kitchen, and the head chef was there and we set up a stage, a sort of interview where you work and they see if you're in any way competent, and I ended up working there for about two-and-a-half years.

What was Gordon Ramsay like to work with? I didn't work that closely with him, but he's always been very nice when I've seen him. But his chefs in the group were great. Clare Smyth is the one behind the pass there, she's been fantastic. Simone Zanoni is the one that actually hired me, and he was really inspirational. And I was working with Jason Atherton as well, who's a creative genius. So I've met and got to know some really fantastic and talented chefs through the restaurant group.

Both the kitchen and the trading floor are very macho environments. How do you cope with that? I actually thrive in that kind of environment. I went to an all-girls school when I was young, and have been taught at a very young age that you always speak your mind and stand your own ground. I was practically the only girl at engineering school, then went into the trading floor which was an extremely male dominated, and then into the kitchen, so it's an environment that I'm really used to, and I don’t think twice about it. I like the competitiveness of it and the sink-or-swim type of environment. That's why I think I'm able to hold my own with the boys on Iron Chef UK.

Which job is more stressful, cooking or trading? They're really different, but I think ultimately trading has to be a bit more stressful, because the repercussions don't end in that room. If somebody has a bad meal, it'll kind of end there. But you could collapse the economy and cause worldwide repercussions that could last for years.

You didn't work for Lehman Brothers did you? Exactly - you hear these stories that there is one rogue trader whose risk wasn't being watched, and who has accumulated all these bad trades, and it can happen, as we've all seen. You always have that feeling that if you make a mistake, you could lose, or have someone else lose, an incredible amount of money. People can lose their jobs and go bankrupt and so on, whereas in the kitchen, you always want to keep the quality up there, and reputation is important, but it's not going to cause the collapse of the global economy.

Does your scientific background come in handy with cooking? Extremely. I think a lot of my skills have come in rally, really handy in the food industry. Just coming from a science background where I've worked in chemical laboratories doing experiments - the kitchen is a laboratory to some extent, and you have controls, you have variables, you have hypotheses, and if something doesn’t work out, you make it again, and you have to be able to analyse why the texture wasn't quite right. Maybe I'm using the wrong kind of fat. Why do I cook something low and slow versus over a high heat? It's all science, and fruits and vegetables and meats are all organic things that have to be treated properly, and science is part of that.

You talked about the different ethnicities of food - what's you're favourite type of cuisine? I have a couple. I love Italy, I have a love affair with Italia food. I love their culture and how they're so in love with their food as well. You can get the most amazing tomato, and it's just been kissed by the sun, and it has the deepest, richest flavour, and it's just a tomato. With a bit of the freshest olive oil, and just a hint of salt. I just think that their cuisine is absolutely beautiful. And I really love Asian food as well - Japanese, Korean, Thai food. I think there are so many hidden treasures in Asian food that people haven't quite explored yet. Because of cheap Chinese takeaways, a lot of the food gets a bad rap for being greasy, but if you actually travel to these countries, and you see taste what the cuisine is meant to be, they're really, really exquisite and gastronomic. A lot of them are very difficult to replicate outside the country they're indigenous to.

Does your Korean heritage influence your cooking? Definitely. I make a lot of different dishes that are inspired by Korean recipes. I think that Korean food is one of the undiscovered treasures of Asia - it's really flavourful, extremely delicious and really healthy. People just don’t know about it, so I love showing people Korean food and having them taste it and watching their surprised faces as they try these new flavours that are unlike the other flavours in Asia.

Iron Chef UK is your new TV venture on Channel 4. Were you already familiar with the show from your time in America? I am extremely familiar with it. I actually watched the Iron Chef Japan episodes while they were playing in the States way back when. They would show them with dubbing, and they were fantastic. They created such a cult following that Iron Chef America was born out of Iron Chef Japan. I think Iron Chef America is in its fourth or fifth year now, extremely popular, cult status, everybody loves the theatrics of it, the drama, the suspense. It really is a very different kind of cooking show, and I'm thrilled to be part of Iron Chef in this country. It's so dramatic and full or surprises, it's extremely entertaining, there's a real element of suspense, and you've got some great chefs on there cooking amazing food. It's got all the components of a very successful format, I think people will really enjoy it.

You're taking on opponents every week. Are you quite competitive? Do you get swept away by the desire to win? I am a competitive person, but I wouldn't say that it takes over me. I would say that I have a healthy competitive streak.

You appear alongside three other chefs in the series. Have you all been chosen because you have different styles and approaches to food? I think so. I think that we each have different styles of food, different approaches, different techniques, different ingredients, places of inspiration. I think that's one of the things that's going to make the show so interesting, the diversity of the chefs on so many different levels. You have Sanjay, who's classic trained French, but is also Indian, and has been living in London forever, so he has that going on. Then you have Martin Blunas, who has a Latvian, Eastern European twist on his modern British cuisine. And Tom Aikens is one of the young guns, is extremely successful and pulls inspiration from all over the place. And then you have me, who's this French-trained Korean-American Londoner. So there are a lot of influences going on, it's going to be quite a surprising show. I think the food will look stunning, and the personalities will definitely be a big part of it as well.

Each episode has a different special ingredient. What would be your ideal one to cook with? I'd probably say something with seafood - I love seafood. Can I name two? I think probably oysters would be a lot of fun. And trying to do four savoury courses out of a typical sweet ingredient like chocolate would be extremely challenging and a lot of fun.

What would be your nightmare ingredient? I already had it on the show - calves' liver. Oh God!

We've talked about the stresses of working in a kitchen, and the stresses of trading. Where does taking part in Iron Chef UK rate on the stress-o-meter? That was right up there. Totally up there. just because there are so many different elements in play - you're trying to cook, but then you're being interviewed on TV at the same time, you're trying to manage your sous chefs and then you're trying to keep track of the time, and all the equipment's a bit unfamiliar. It's like being in a fish tank where everybody's watching everything you do, and you have to try and forget that. It was stressful on many different levels - probably one of the most stressful things I've ever done in my whole life.

Talking of your sous chefs, what kind of a leader are you in the kitchen? Are you a shouter, or are you a little more gentle? I wouldn’t say that I'm a shouter. I'd say I'm very diplomatic. Anybody that's on my team, I'm going to listen to what they have to say, it's definitely a team effo9rt and we work together. So I'm not going to rip apart my sous chef or anything like that.

Interviews by Benjie Goodhart - free for reproduction in full or in part.