A restaurant is like sailing from Cork to New York. Every now and then you’ve got to check the compass and make sure you’re not heading for Newfoundland,” Conor Gadd tells me at Burro.
It’s the latest restaurant from the chef who is best known as a key figure at Trullo, one of London’s most revered Italian restaurants. Gadd maintains a healthy scepticism of the way chefs and cooking are mythologised – his restaurants are ingredient-led without the tagline. “I hate the word ‘simplicity’ when people apply it to Italian food because it’s not simple. It requires knowledge to have restraint,” he says.
Trullo opened in 2010, the brainchild of owners Tim Siadatan and Jordan Frieda, with Gadd joining shortly after as head chef from Terroirs. “I read an interview with Tim and Jordan where they said the best meal they’d eaten that year had been at Terroirs, and that was my in to knock on their door.”
Growing up in Troubles-afflicted Belfast, Gadd’s entry into food was atypical of the era. “My mum worked in the political sphere, and I was raised by these two ladies, Kathleen and Betty, who were brilliant cooks. While lots of people were having microwave meals or Goodfella’s pizzas, they were cooking ham hock and barley soup, and breaded pork chops,” he says.
A few early stints in kitchens sold him on the lifestyle – particularly at Paul Rankin’s Roscoff. “What I loved was the mix of people. It was a really diverse group in the kitchen, all chasing a common goal. Kitchens are meritocracies. There’s no bullshit. And if there is, you’ll get found out astoundingly quickly.”
Gadd was trained in classical French cooking in his early days in kitchens and at Ballymaloe Cookery School, the fabled Cork institution founded by Darina Allen. But it was the – don’t say it – simplicity of Italian cooking that drew him in. “French chefs cook a carrot five ways to have it taste like a carrot again. Italians just cook the carrot.”
There is also the fact that, as he bluntly puts it, “Italian food is just class”. In the early days of Trullo, running a restaurant was a new experience for all three of them, but they kept each other in check. The River Café, with its £40-a-head set menu, was an inspiration.
‘The customer is always right’ is an imperfect cliché, but at the heart of Trullo was an acceptance that, ultimately, the restaurant was for the customers, not for the chefs. I ask how his cooking has changed over the years, and he surprises me by saying it’s got more conservative. “In the early days Tim and I would rebel against that, but as we got older, we realised the requirement was to cook for the customer,” he says.
Gadd took an ownership stake in Trullo in 2022, after which opening a second restaurant started to become a possibility. Trullo had reached a point where it had started to almost run itself. “We had a great general manager, a great head chef leading a great young team. I had the bandwidth to start looking outside.”
Burro is very much an extension of the Trullo brand; great food at an affordable price. But it is, technically, the first restaurant that is solely his. How does he define it? “What did my PR firm say?” he asks, half-jokingly. “Italian food, Irish hospitality. That all-encompassing hospitality you get at an Irish country house, where it’s not overly formalised, but there’s a genuine attitude of going above and beyond for the customer.” Just over four months after opening,
Burro has been a success, but opening a new restaurant comes with a different set of challenges to tackle. “The brand capital of Trullo means that customers instinctively trust it. They can look at a menu and think ‘maybe I will try the ox heart today’. We’re only a few months old; we’re probably better off just serving a carpaccio for now. Hopefully we’re still here in six or seven years, and we can branch out – or else I’ll say ‘carpaccio is paying the bills, let’s keep it on the menu’”.
I recognise and empathise with the borderline compulsive Irish refusal to believe your own hype, but as anyone who has eaten at Trullo before will agree, it will probably be doing both.
