When you look at this picture (it is a close-up of some Lebanese turnip pickle) do you think ‘delicious’ or ‘that looks a bit dodgy — I wonder how they got that chemical-looking pink colour). Quite soon after we started Hoxton Beach we came down on the sceptical side and decided that rather than take chances we’d make our own turnip pickle — part of the formula for the classic Levantine falafel wrap.

Historically the pink colour comes from marinating the turnips with some beetroot in dilute vinegar (the brand we’ve always used has been Aspall’s Organic Cyder Vinegar, which was, as it happens, the first product ever to be endorsed by the Soil Association when this body became a certifying body in 1973. We’ve always been proud of this point of difference. In fact when we were trying to persuade Camden Council’s Markets Department a few years ago that we were different from most falafel outfits we brought samples of our turnip pickle to a meeting in the civic centre and unfortunately spilt the pink juice everywhere. At the time we thought making our own pickle was a nice extra touch. Only this week did we catch up with the news that by doing so we had been protecting our customer from a potential health hazard. In 2017 Lebanese Food Safety inspectors tested the luridly coloured pickles and found that every single sample contained ‘catastrophic’ levels of a banned substance, according to a report in the Saudi daily al-Sharq al-Awsat. Rhodamine B is a dye used for leather and plastic, but isn’t cleared for food use and is a suspected carginogen. Since then the Lebanese producers are reported to have got their act together, and the UK authorities have also also done spot check to make sure imported pickles are either coloured with beetroot or with approved E numbers. Last year we were getting a proportion of our turnips direct from a grower in Kent. This story has given us even more of an appetite for knowing the precise origin of everything we sell.

If you have a quince tree in North London you get used to people helping themselves to the fruit. They think they’re pears and they will have a disappointment when they find they don’t ripen or soften but stay hard, grainy and inedibly sour. The point of quinces is their flavour; when they’re cooking they perfume the air, they are the classic fruit in Moroccan lamb tagines and adding even a little transforms any cooked apple dish.

They arrive in greengrocers and fruiterers about now, but they are hardly affordable — as much as £2 for a big Turkish quince. For some years we have been planting trees whenever possible — from Amersham to Dalston — and the payoff is being able to use them in ways that would normally be uneconomic, from stewed in honey syrup for breakfast with muesli and sheeps yogurt to making quince jelly and jam. We would also like to make the delicious quince cheese or paste called Membrillo, but it is literally a safety hazard, exploding as it boils throwing blobs of scalding material around the kitchen like a fragmentation weapon.

There are recipes for quince jam but they mostly don’t work. The problem is that if you make it like a normal jam, combining cut up pieces of quince with water, sugar and lemon juice, the quince flesh will dissolve and produce a less good version of membrillo (you get membrillo by carrying on cooking until all the water has been driven off). Or you can make a syrup and add quince pieces to it. But you then lose control of the process; the raw quince pieces will shed liquid into the syrup and it won’t set.

Our solution is to make a syrup using the skin and cores of the quinces. Meanwhile we cook the pieces of quince till they are just soft, then put them in the boiling syrup. The quince pieces will keep their shape, being preserved in the syrup, but being already softened they won’t go rock hard. Tiptree sell a quince jam quite like ours, so they must be using a similar technique, but it doesn’t seem to appear in any written recipes.

Something you quickly learn in the hospitality business is that cooks and chefs have quite different skills. You can be a gifted cook but have no idea how to run a professional kitchen. Conversely, there are plenty of chefs who can, at best, follow an assembly instruction sheet, but don’t have a clue about real cooking.

We are very lucky to have people on our team with the sixth sense that makes dishes work. This isn’t about ‘little touches’ or far-fetched, trendy ingredients. It’s about seemingly simple things: how you cut an onion; how slowly you sweat those onions (the foundational starting point for so many cultures); making a perfect hard-boiled egg—just set and rich orange in the middle, never pale or chalky; or getting jams and preserves to set without being cloyingly sweet.

True cooks are so rare today that it has become an open secret in France that a vast number of high-street bistros no longer do any real cooking—instead buying in pre-assembled, vacuum-packed menus from industrial catering suppliers. The acid test for any kitchen today is whether, alongside standard options like a croque monsieur, they offer a genuine plat du jour made entirely from scratch.

We are proud to pass that test every day.

Being in London, we draw on a rich tapestry of nationalities to work with cooks who know intuitively what a Provençal daube, a Moroccan tagine, or a Southeast Asian laksa should actually taste like. It is reminiscent of Robert Carrier’s grand 1960s vision in Great Dishes of the World—only made with lived heritage and memory rather than pulled from a recipe book.

Follow our Instagram (@hoxtonbeach) for daily updates on seasonal menus, daily hot specials, and stories from our larder.

We are slowly beginning to roll out something new everywhere we sell falafel: an Iraqi-Jewish egg/hummus/fried aubergine sandwich served not in our own flatbreads but a kind of Pita called Taboon. We don’t make this ourselves, but buy in from one of two Jewish bakeries in North London.

It has not one, not two, but three special sauces. First tahina, which everyone knows from falafel — the thing we insist on here is that the acidity isn’t chemical but is real lemon juice. Second, pomegranate molasses — kind of the Turkish equivalent of balsamic vinegar. Thirdly Amba, the green mango sauce Iraqis go crazy for, which has traditionally been made by Indians for export. The word Amba means ‘mango’ in Marathi, the regional language of Mumbia.

We first heard of Amba from the Syrian owner of a hardware shop near Whitecross Street market, where we’d gone to buy propane. He asked if we did Amba with falafel, and we immediately decided we had to. For years we made it ourselves using green mangoes when they appeared in the wholesale markets. But they were very expense — at least £20 a box, and were only sporadically available. DEFRA officials had a habit of impounding shipments when they arrived at Heathrow claiming they had spiders or other insect infestations.

The obvious route was to buy directly in a mango-growing country. We got some way talking to possible suppliers in Uganda and Pakistan before meeting Kriti Kumar (above left) on a visit to London to visit her trainee doctor sister,just across the road from the Highgate wood café. Her firm MM Poonjiaji has had a pivotal role in sending condiments to this country ; they developed the original Major Grey chutney under their ‘Sun’ brand before selling the recipe that’s essential with English-style Kedgeree and everything in and old fashioned curry restaurant.

It’s possible Poonjiaji’s also pioneered Amba with their Ship brand which together with Camel are the iconic representatives of this pickle, with its strong fenugreek flavour, bright yellow colour and a strong hit of acidity from the vinegar in which the mangoes were historically preserved on their sea crossing of the Indian ocean. So why come in and ask this venerable house to reinvent the wheel?

The reason is that working on recipes in Willesden Junction, we came up with a style that everyone raves about — even Iraqis who aren’t sure it is close enough in style to Ship and Camel to quality as real Amba. It’s just that the classic style is something of an acquired taste, and by using the natural acidity in the fruit and vacuum packing, we can take liberties that those who created Amba couldn’t risk for fear of spoilage.

It’s an enormous privileged to have followed in the foodsteps of the original Major Grey — real person, according to the Kumars with as much of a genuine back story as Colonel Saunders — and to have visited the actual building in Marine Lines in which he would have worked with Chef Bushan’s predecessor to create sweet Mango chutney.

Please try our product with falafel or sabih on one of the market stalls and as soon as possible we’ll add a ‘buy here’ tag so you can order it at home.

We usually buy all our wines from a small group of growers in the north of Burgundy — in particular customers can’t get enough of our sparkling wines from Florent Masson Epineuil and Céline Côté nearby in Molosmes. However Florent won’t have any sparkling wine to sell us till the autumn so we’ve gone to the local co-operative. The Caves de Bailly-Lapierre have established a place in history by putting a new wine — Crémant de Bourgogne — on the map in 1975. It is literally the nearest thing to Champagne: if they were just 30 miles to the north-east some of their vineyards would have an extra cachet which could enable them to at least double their price. The co-operative have kindly agreed to sell us a hundred six bottle cases of their lovely sparkling wines which we will be offering at *very* good prices in our cafés. Their only condition is that we don’t sell them online — but if you are interested in home delivery send an email to hoxtonhome@gmail.com and we will send out a price list.