






Shaffa started from a market idea: spices out of the east, bread from our own oven, and a wood fire in the middle of it all. The room is open on every side under a timber roof, with a chandelier over the tables and copper hoods above the stove.
Behind the fire there is a kitchen that takes its time. Tomatoes are fermented until you can spread them like jam, beef is aged in the house, and the chef starts from the plainest thing on the shelf and turns it into something you would not recognise. Mornings are their own affair: bread and croissants baked the same day, and coffee people drive up here for. Plates land in the middle of the table and get passed around.
As long as I can create, I am alive. The point is never the recipe; it is what you can make of the plainest thing on the shelf.The head chef











