Your food will be judged on its quality; you must choose your suppliers with utmost care. This chapter covers:

Finding Suppliers

Taste. Taste. Taste. If you have a good chutney at a restaurant, some excellent cheese, a smoked duck to die for, ask how to find these suppliers. Talk to restaurateurs, the generous-hearted ones only too willing to pass on good suppliers to you. And the ones to avoid.

Get price lists. Ask for samples. Bargain. Ask for wholesale prices. Consider buying by mail order. Go to as many exhibitions as possible to find the best quality food around.

I keep an eye out in delicatessens and take down the company’s name of products I wish to sample. Consult the Yellow Pages for other sources, go on the web to locate cheese companies and other specialist companies. Cross the channel to buy more cheaply if you’re in the south of England and you can spare the time. But always think quality. Always ask to taste anything before buying. It’s quite normal in France!

If you can, visit Borough Market, Borough Street, London, SE1 near London Bridge (0207 407 1002) for a short cut to finding superb produce.

Contact New Covent Garden Market in London (info@cgma. gov.uk) and other major fruit and vegetable markets in your area for suppliers.

Once you have narrowed down your suppliers and start buying from them, always check your supplies, throw anything back at them that doesn’t have quality stamped all over it (in the nicest possible way of course) and establish an excellent working rapport with them. This way they will look after you and will bend over backwards to keep your business. Always promptly query any accounting error and pay your bills on time.

Suppliers will usually call you to find out what your order is if you run a busy business. Or call them. There is usually an after-hours ordering service to leave messages for next day delivery.

Tips For Buying

• Fish is selling fast these days. Always but always have the freshest fish. Once it’s past its best, toss it. Or be prepared to lose a customer.
• Game is gaining momentum thanks to its healthy eating tag. There is wild and farmed game and do try venison and boar on your menu. Wonderful.
• Beef: demand longer hanging for your beef from your supplier. 28 days or over, nothing less. Look out for darker coloured, marbled meat.
• Vegetables: insist on the best for intense flavour. Go organic for tastier vegetables. Try different varieties. There’s more to life than carrots.
• Fruit: it is worth doing some research to find really tasty fruit, apples in particular. Woolly peaches, dull apples and strawberries abound.
• Cheese: find a good supplier, or three. Shop around for regional ones. Make sure your waiting staff can identify the cheeses when serving them.
• Smoked salmon: there is some truly awful smoked salmon out there. Be discerning.
• Chocolate: don’t just buy any chocolate. Source one with high cocoa solids.
• Coffee finishes off a good meal with character. Make sure yours is memorable. Source the best and you’ll gain extra brownie points from clients.

Sourcing Your Ingredients

When I started as chef/restaurateur of Soanes, Petworth, West Sussex, in the 1980s, local produce was unobtainable. Excellent fish, vegetables and cheeses had to come from Covent Garden or Rungis, the Paris market.

Only the local butcher and a mushroom forager offered goods I was seeking. I grew herbs and some vegetables and salads. Local wholesale suppliers could only offer second-class vegetables and fruit, dull, tasteless salads, even poorer tomatoes. The couldn’t care less attitude was deeply dispiriting, hence the long-distance sourcing.

The signs are promising. There is a stealthy trend for caterers and restaurateurs, the better ones, to offer locally – or regionally – sourced sausages, cheeses, meat, vegetables, fruit and drink to their customers. They prefer to know the provenance of their supplies. But does the quality shine, is the produce chosen with knowledge? Or is the buying of local and regional food merely paying lip service to trends?

Does the client really know or mind? Or, worse still, are they unable to tell the difference between a carrot grown with care around the corner to a mass-produced Dutch or British hothouse one? Our tastebuds, having been assaulted by over-processed food for years, could be immune to quality now that large servings of cheap food are the consumer yardstick.

There does, however, seem to be a growing band of people with heightened expectations, resulting in the raising of standards by local and regional producers. They relish the difference and vote with their feet, choosing catering companies, restaurants and pubs that source the best around without the stabilisers, additives and other ‘benefits’ of mass-produced food.