At 6 pm, the builders were still painting. Then, at 6.30, the chairs and the tables were put into place and it looked like this:

I felt a joy when we started. I have always wanted to do this. It was a bit chaotic at times. We are understaffed in the kitchen and I have no clue were to find things since I have not had time to involve myself in putting the cooking the cookware and utensils in place. I screwed up the cooking of some beef that we had to redo. And well some of the sea bass was undercooked because I have not yet quite made friends with the combi-steamer. The fish was of stunning quality. If I can continue to get fish of that quality, I will be very happy.

Tonight we are going to do a short a la carte menu. First courses will be gazpacho with dill seed ice cream,  scallops with seaweed butter, scallops sashimi-style and slow cooked duck egg with banyuls emulsion and leaves. Main courses will be turbot, beef and pork. Not sure what there will be as garnishes. Will try now to see if the potatoes we have will make good fries. Desserts will be cinnamon ice cream with raspberries and horseradish cream, apricot clafoutis with tonka bean ice cream and a chocolate preparation. I hope it will be quiet. I am absolutely knackered after taking over this place.

Menu for tomorrow is coming together. Much to the frustration of the wait and kitchen staff, the menu is still in my head. It looks like it will be featuring scallops, beef, pork, duck eggs, tomatoes, lobster, raspberries, peas e t c. I am worried about the fish. I have fish coming from two sources, but somehow I doubt they understand how picky I am with fish. Fingers crossed that the fish will be good. I have asked for sea bass and turbot. Turbot because it is a fish that better withstands bad handling after catch to delivery at the restaurant. Sea bass because it is a good time for it, but I have yet to see anything coming to London even remotely as good as a line caught sea bass from Mediterranean at this time of the year and that has not been put on ice. I would love to get line caught pollack (lieu jaune in French) as it can be an incredibly good fish. Line caught pollack has nothing in common with the pollack most of the time encountered in restaurants which should be avoided. It is annoying that I won’t know what the fish will be like until tomorrow morning when I open the boxes.

Soft opening will be on Friday the 1 of July this year, which is in only a few days time. I can’t wait to get started. We are a bit short staffed in the kitchen and the pastry chef arrives on Saturday, so it will have to be a half-fixed menu a la Viajante, SaQuaNa, Chateaubriand e t c. I am not sure yet what we will serve. Tomorrow or Thursday at latest, it should be clear what I will serve the first two nights.

The suppliers I will work with in the beginning are starting to come together. I want to use as much English produce as possible, but there are constraints with this approach since supply of exceptional produce is very limited. To be able to use great produce, the menu has to be somewhat limited and has to change according to what is available on a weekly basis. I have for instance found great beef, but it will not be available all the time. The same for pork. The English pork we tried last weekend was amazing, actually better than the much more expensive Iberico pork we tried before that, but I don’t know how often I can get it. I have explained to my suppliers that I want to get what is great at every moment and then adjust the preparations accordingly. They all like this. Getting consistent supply of great fish (other than shell fish and crustaceans) is however going to be a problem. I want fish that has not passed rigor mortis buried in ice. This seems like an unrealistic requirement.

The bread is coming along well. The sour dough starter thrives in West London and I have found a great flour. I am proud of the bread. But it is thanks to the flour.

Then there is BT. I wonder if it was this difficult in the former Soviet Union to sort out phone lines. One of my employees who would know tells me it wasn’t.

The name of the restaurant will be Hedone. It is from Greek mythology and means pleasure. It is the word that hedonistic comes from. I like it. Those interested can follow us on twitter @HedoneLondon. There is a Facebook page too, but I am not sure when we will have time to work with it.

The website is here: www.hedonerestaurant.com Obviously it needs a bit of work.

Everyone is asking me for menus. How could I know what we will be cooking? I haven’t had time to think about food the last five weeks. I haven’t been cooking in weeks. On top of this, my iPhone with all the dishes and recipes was stolen two weeks ago. There should be a backup somewhere.

Everyday we eat fast food from the street. Yesterday, I found myself walking from fast food vendor to fast food vendor not being able to find anything I wanted to eat again. It is a good way to oppress hunger.

It is full with flavour and a has a nice acidity.

Since I can’t get Alex’s bread in London, and since I haven’t been able to find anything remotely close to it, I will have to make it myself, even if it will only be a faint shadow of Alex’s bread.

So what is the point with not using commercial yeast? Most types of flour contain a number of pretty nasty agents, such as lectins, gluten and phytic acid, that from an evolutionary point of view, it could be argued we are not supposed to eat. Sourdough fermenting breaks down these agents to a greater or lesser extent.  Sourdough fermenting also results in deeper flavours. Generally (and very very simplistically) speaking, a starter contains two types of leavening agents, (natural) yeasts and lacto bacteria. It is the lacto bacteria that is responsible for breaking down these agents and for causing an tangy note to the bread. In France, a pain au levain francais, is supposed to have a minimum content of acetic acid and a pH of not more than 4. Commercial yeast thrive when pH is between 4-6, so bread that is done with commercial yeast will rarely have the nice acidity of a true sourdough bread. A lot of bread sold as sourdough bread have had commercial yeast added to them to speed up the bread making and to achieve a consistent result.

The yeasts and lacto bacteria can be of different kinds resulting in different flavors. It is all quite fascinating.

Making true sourdough bread without addition of yeast is quite complicated. It is basically about finding the right mix of lactic bacteria and wild yeasts. Too much lacto bacteria and the texture of the bread will be too dense and the flavor too acid. It is great fun to work with a living starter.

I put my old starter back to life earlier this week. It was put to rest some time ago. Usually it takes a bit of time before it is ready to be used for baking. It has to be fed constantly and I take it out for a walk in the park now and then. Just kidding. I am a little surprised that it has started to come along quite nicely. Maybe it likes West London.

When the starter is ready for baking we will try different flours. I have found a few interesting English flours that I hope will turn out to be good enough.

Everyone was praising induction, but failed to tell me the cost for three-phase wiring. Bloody hell!!  The only thing that has gone almost according to plan the last week was the flooring in the dining room and the stairs to the basement. It looks gorgeous. It looks a lot more expensive than it was. I like things that do. Vice verse is no good. The dust is slowly settling. Can’t wait to try the new kitchen equipment next week if the rest do arrive. The sour dough has been put to life the other day. It seems to thrive in West London.  Will get back to this.

No shaving and no haircut for a while has made me look like a caveman.

We finally decided what would go on the walls in the dining room. It will look really cool.

So much left to do. Hopefully not so long before opening.

All this comes at price, which is quite high. I can see that an opening like Pollen Street Social has to take out the whole brass band, considering that they have a £500,000.00 annual cost for rent and rates. Must feel like walking around in shoes of concrete and lead.

I have asked myself what I wanted to achieve with hiring a PR consultant. What was obvious to me was that I did not want to have the press marching in the first four weeks. It will simply not be as good as it will be later for a large number of reasons, including that I will not have a kitchen brigade that have been glued together. I will not have my produce sourcing in place. It will take a while before I am even remotely happy with what I am doing. I think that I will find chefs who claim they are firing on all cylinders after a few weeks from opening are simply full of bollocks.

I asked one PR consultant if I could hire them to stop the critics from coming the first two months. They looked at me as if I was joking. I wasn’t.

What about farmed food that contains much too high levels of omega 6, an oil we already consume way too much of in the Western world? Should not this too be avoided?

Then there is the issue of only using sustainable produce. This is a pretty complicated issue since defining what is sustainable is pretty delicate.

What about using cooking methods that are “sustainable” in that they do not result in waste that is not degradable. One thing comes to mind, namely sous vide cooking. Even if I do not believe there is any danger in using the proper plastic bags at not too high temperatures, it can be argued that the use of plastic is questionable from a pollution point of view.

There are many other similar considerations.

Going natural with the wine list may be seen as hypocrisy unless everything else is is made with a “natural” approach.  Doing this would be a fun challenge, but it is a step I am not prepared to take yet. At least not until I have figured out where to draw the line. So for now there will also be some “chemical” wines on the wine list.

The process of opening a restaurant has made me think of totally different aspects of the dining experience. It is great fun. When I decided to embark on this, well actually even after I decided to go for the premises in question, I thought I would not use an interior designer. Actually I thought I did not need one. Simply because I don’t really care much for the design and interior in restaurants when I eat out. I also thought that most restaurants (especially in London) are overly designed. Somehow I felt that by just applying some common sense I could create a space that would fit what I wanted to do, namely serve good food based on excellent ingredients in a fun and informal environment. Well, we got stuck. Hiring an established interior designer, who would cost a fortune, was not really an option. I have done it before and afterwards I said to myself, never ever again. I argued with my front of the house manager to be about whether we really needed help with this or not. I thought we didn’t. We found an interior designer who has worked with restaurant design and who wants to open his own business and needs reference projects. I was a bit skeptical at first. Not about that he could not do the job, but mainly for the reason that it would take so much time to make him understand what it was I wanted to do and if he would really come up with something useful. I was wrong. Not about the time it has taken to explain what I want to do, because that has consumed a lot of time. No, I was wrong about the usefulness of a designer. It is a must. Not only because the designer comes up with a lot of ideas, both good and bad, but because it has made me question what I want to do and why. For sure this process has been time consuming, but it has made us come closer to what I had in mind from the beginning. It will not be perfect. The size of the space, budget and time are important constraints that has resulted in compromises and shortcuts. It is still a building site and we have just done the plumbing for the new kitchen, but somehow I can feel what it will look like. I like it. Hopefully our guests will too.

Why is it so difficult? There has to be a reasonably good .com address available. The name should not be used by someone else in Greater London, should be relatively easy to pronounce and should not give wrong associations. This means that names like Smoking Pot are not possible, even if there would be no objections from the English authorities, which in itself is highly unlikely.

But now we have a name.