Where the Chefs Eat asks your favourite chefs for their top restaurants in cities across the world. For this edition, we sit down for coffee with Claude Bosi.
“I do have a favourite child, but I can’t say who it is,” Claude Bosi jokes when I suggest that asking a chef to choose a favourite restaurant feels like asking them to choose their favourite baby. We are sitting in the window of Brooklands, his Michelin-starred restaurant at the top of the Peninsula in London.
“I was in Paris,” he tells me, “and I wanted to go travelling. An agency there mentioned a job in London. I didn’t speak a word of English.” Born to Lyonnaise parents with a bouchon, Claude had cooking in his blood. In England, he took a job at Overton Range in Shropshire “and, after a few months, I took the job as head chef.” Within months, the restaurant earned its first Michelin star. In 1999, Claude decided to open his own restaurant. The market town of Ludlow in Shropshire became the home to his first solo venture, Hibiscus, a restaurant that became a beacon of innovative and exciting dining. “I wasn’t scared of the idea of doing my own thing,” Claude explains. “I felt that I had nothing to lose, because my parents always said to me, ‘No matter what happens, you always have a bed at home.’ I believe if you work hard, then you can be anywhere.”
Claude’s parents had a huge impact on him. “My mum was in the kitchen, and my dad was on the floor. I think I was eight when my parents bought their first restaurant; we used to come home from school every day at lunchtime and have the plat du jour.” To this day, he is one of the few to successfully relocate a two-Michelin-star restaurant to the British capital, and after the roaring success of Hibiscus (which closed in 2016), he opened Claude Bosi at Bibendum in the iconic Michelin building on the Fulham Road. Though it closed due to lease issues, he is no less busy. Today, Claude has the aforementioned Brooklands, as well as Josephine, a Chelsea-based bistro he opened with his wife Lucy. A second opened to critical acclaim in Marylebone. The two Josephines are a clear move away from fine dining and, he feels, are tapping into what people want when they go out to eat these days.
“I love fine dining,” Claude muses. “It’s something I love doing, but people are moving more towards casual dining now. I don’t like the word ‘fine’ because it feels so old-fashioned now. The two- and three-star restaurants that are real gastronomic leaders are not old-fashioned. They are interesting and a bit different. The idea of five people waiting on you between courses while wearing gloves may be finished, but that’s only because people don’t want it. I don’t want it. It’s all about atmosphere. I really believe the atmosphere is more important than what’s going on in the kitchen. Of course, I believe in what we do in the kitchen, but people just want to be in a great restaurant.”
Claude’s most memorable meals seemed to have stemmed from specific dishes that really stood out for him, and, with that, the titan of the London food scene shares some of his five most memorable meals around the world.
