Keep it Simple: Fresh Look at Classic Cooking

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In 1995 Little opened a second eponymous restaurant off Ladbroke Grove in West London, which The Times' critic Jonathan Meades described as feeling "altogether right".

Alastair Little (25 June 1950 – 3 August 2022) was a British chef, cookbook author and restaurateur. He first became known in the 1980s for his eponymous Soho restaurant and frequent appearances on British television. His menus, which changed daily and featured seasonal produce, were influential in modern British restaurants. Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-beta-20210815 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 1.0000 Ocr_module_version 0.0.13 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-NS-2000429 Openlibrary_edition I have never been passionate about figs in their raw state and, yes, I have eaten them in Italy, perfectly ripe and straight off the tree. But roast them and combine with honey ice-cream and I am a happy convert. Take care that the honey you use is not too herbal - some of them are so heavily scented they are more suited to the bathroom than the kitchen.

The Sydney Morning Herald

We met in the winter of 1980. I had taken over the lease of what had been known as L’Escargot Bienvenu at 48 Greek Street in London’s Soho and the builders were busy on its very necessary modernisation; the basement kitchens had been condemned on 44 counts by Westminster Council.

Preparation: First, the crumble topping: sift the flour into a bowl with the brown sugar and almonds and combine them using your fingers. Add the butter and continue to work for several minutes until the ingredients are thoroughly blended in and the mixture is very crumbly. Leave to rest for about 20 minutes. The tart is characterised by the use of halved apples baked in caramel with the pastry lid becoming the base when the cooked tart is inverted to be served still warm. It is one of those dishes that sounds simple and is actually difficult to get right. On average it takes a cook in my kitchen a week of trying before he or she produces a saleable tart. In the restaurant we use a frying pan rather than a cake pan, and I prefer crisp English apples such as Worcester Pearmain or Braemar to Le Golden, which the French choose as a matter of national honour. Featuring chefs Angela Hartnett and Jeremy Lee, baker and food writer Dan Lepard, former Editor of the Good Food Guide Tom Jaine, and the chef, restaurateur and writer Jacob Kenedy. There was to be a silver lining, however. Alastair was rushed to the Royal Free Hospital, where the country’s leading ankle expert was based and which was very close to where we then lived, so I was able to visit him frequently and this repaired our friendship. In that era, when the restaurant market was much, much smaller than it is today, breaks such as the one our friendship had suffered tended to linger (both of us were men, too!). The chef also published a number of cookbooks including: Keep It Simple (1993), Food of the Sun (1995), Italian Kitchen (1996), and Soho Cooking (2000).many people the word zabaglione conjures up images of the kind of trattoria where the host greets you with overpowering bonhomie. You sit at 'your' table (inevitably 'the best in the house', just next to the kitchen service doors) and grimly contemplate the cold antipasto - with its obligatory leaden aubergine - with growing foreboding. Forget all that. Here the zabaglione is cooked into a tart of apple and prunes held in a sweet crisp crust. I got the recipe from Rowley Leigh. He, in turn, had it from Yves Thuries, the French patissier. While Little did not have the same media profile of other celebrity chefs, Jeremy Lee of Quo Vadis referred to him as: “a godfather of modern British cooking and a champion of keeping it simple” Fusion food does make its mark in this book but it would be unfair to characterise the whole work as that; some dishes may be fusion inspired but others owe clear allegiance to a particular national culinary tradition. The vast array of those national culinary traditions does point in the same direction though: British, Italian, French, Chinese, Japanese, Thai and Morrocan flavours are all here in this publication. Little, Alastair (5 January 2019). "Alastair Little's recipes for four winter soups". The Guardian . Retrieved 4 August 2022. By 2002, however, he had left the restaurant partnership. For most of the previous decade he had spent his summers running a cookery school near Orvieto in Umbria where, in 1995, he met Sharon Jacob, an Australian marketing manager whom he married in 2000.