Luke, Nat & Theo Selby: Our Career in Five Dishes
The brothers behind the newly Michelin-starred Evelyn’s Table wear their influences on their sleeves, but their career-defining dishes are the product of close connection as much as their shared experience
Published: Tuesday 12th July 2022
It’s fair to say it’s been a big year for Luke, Nat and Theo Selby.
The brothers took the helm of Evelyn’s Table – the tiny chef’s table-style restaurant in the basement of the Palomar Group’s Blue Posts pub in Soho – in October 2020, before closing for lockdown in November and finally reopening in May 2021. The 12 months have brought numerous glowing reviews, sellout bookings and, most importantly, their first Michelin star, awarded to the venue just seven months after its reopening.
But when you take a closer look at their career path, this rapid success may feel like less of a surprise. It began at Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, the two-Michelin-starred restaurant and hotel helmed by Raymond Blanc. Luke, the oldest of the three, left home aged 18 to train with Blanc, and around three years later, youngest brother Theo joined him. Nat headed to university to study illustration, but was inevitably drawn into the fold as well. “We’ve pretty much alway worked together,” says Luke. “We were all at Le Manoir at the same time, then went our separate ways for a bit.”
They reconvened at Hide, Ollie Dabbous’s Piccadilly temple to British fine dining. Kicking off your career at two different kinds of iconic restaurant is no small feat, but it didn’t seem to put any of the brothers off – quite the opposite, in fact. “I was obviously into food, but I never thought I’d be working as a chef,” Nat tells me. “But I did some part-time jobs in restaurants and then after uni I decided to do it professionally.” He had a short stint at a restaurant close to where they grew up before joining Luke and Theo at Le Manoir.“I just wanted to keep my head down and learn as much as I could.” The plan had always been to open a restaurant together, and when the space at The Blue Posts opened up, it was too good to turn down.
The restaurant being small has its challenges, but being in such an intimate space and working together as a family is special
“Coming back from my time on the Roux Scholarship in Japan, and training out there, I wanted to create something similar,” Luke says. “An intimate dining experience that showcased the food that we do and the produce that we’re using. The restaurant being small has its own challenges, but being in such an intimate space and working together as a family is really quite special.”
For many people, working for hours on end in a confined space with your siblings would be a recipe for disaster. Not for the Selbys. In many ways, being family seems to bolster the way they do thing. “We just work well together,” says Theo. “Now that it’s just us three, everything is really streamlined, we understand each other.” “Yes, we’re brothers, but we’ve also spent a long time working in various environments together, under different pressures,” adds Luke. “We’ve formed a special bond, which I think is evident in the way that we cook.” The five dishes pictured below – all served at Evelyn’s Table, but all in a way adapted from their previous restaurants – speak to a deep connection that’s utterly unique in the world of food.
Orkney scallop sashimi
Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons
Luke Selby: “This scallop dish is about buying the best ingredient we can afford and letting it shine and be the star of the plate. We have an amazing tomato essence which is something we all learned at Le Manoir with Raymond Blanc. We get the best quality scallops – these amazing, hand-dived extra large scallops from Orkney in Scotland – and we open them as the guests sit down so they’re super fresh and alive. And because they’re just opened you get an amazing natural sweetness in the meat that just pairs and balances really well with the olive oil and the tomato essence. It’s only like three elements on the dish, really.”
Theo Selby: “The tomato essence is a method we learned working with Raymond. He used to make this tomato essence risotto. So basically using these cherry tomatoes from Isle of Wight which are amazing and in season at the moment, and really nice and sweet. We split them all in half, marinate them with basil, garlic, fennel and shallots for six hours and then pulse it lightly and hang the juice through a coffee filter. It’s super pure and clear. The purest form of tomato, essentially.”
LS: “Raymond is very famous for tomato essence, it’s his recipe, so this is a homage to him and the time we spent working for him.”
Raw beef, wild nettle tempura, wasabi
Hide
LS: “I was heavily involved with Ollie Dabbous on the opening menu at Hide and we did something that was a tuna tartare served in a wasabi leaf. But it was just presentation – you never ate the wasabi leaf. I think this evolved from us doing that dish at Hide, and then when we were doing the opening menu at Evelyn’s, we were playing around with different ideas. Nat goes foraging a lot and picks wild nettles, so this was born from the evolution of the dish at Hide and the wasabi – we get the root from Japan, but we use super fresh leaves and the stem that come from a grower in the UK, and pair those elements with the wild nettle leaves.”
TS: “Our mum is a massive forager, and when we were really young she’d always be growing things in the garden. So from a really young age she was forcing us to pick all the apples and peel them all and we’d be eating crumble for months.”
Nat Selby: “She’d forage for blackberries, mussels, all this stuff. She really had an influence on us in terms of respect for nature, foraging and things like that.”
LS: “Even last week she picked loads of the wild garlic capers that are on our lamb dish. She loves picking stuff for us and knowing that it’s being used in the restaurant.”
Cornish cuttlefish, raw peas, kaffir lime
Nihonryori Ryugin (Tokyo, Japan)
LS: “This dish is very Japanese. Dashi was something we’d make every single day with various dishes at Ryugin in Tokyo. We used to infuse the katsuobushi [dried tuna flakes] with loads of different seaweeds, and see how the quality of the seaweed would impact the flavour of the katsuobushi. It was crazy how light and aromatic it was. Dashi is such a cornerstone of Japanese cuisine, and I wanted to do a fish dish that was almost an homage to the dashi. We always have some kind of dashi on the menu, and this iteration is made with mineral water, katsuobushi and kambi seaweed from Hokkaido in Japan, and then we finish it with smashed lemongrass, kaffir lime leaf, kaffir lime zest, and because it’s spring we serve it with raw french peas, asparagus and cuttlefish. It’s super spring-like and aromatic and it just goes really well with the cuttlefish. The technique we use of scoring it really fine and then cooking it quickly means it stays really tender. You actually don’t see cuttlefish that often on menus – it’s something there’s an abundance of in the UK, it’s very underrated, but it takes a lot of work to bring the best out of it and make sure it’s tender.”
Roasted Herdwick lamb rack, wild garlic
Restaurant Gordon Ramsay
NS: “This dish is quite classical. We’ve tried to forage things like wild garlic and we managed to pick up loads a few weeks ago, so it’s about using really seasonal, high quality produce like the lamb, which comes from a producer in the Lake District. The farm is just amazing quality. And then we stuff the lamb with a farce made from the sweetbreads. It’s all about using classic techniques and showcasing skill.”
LS: “It’s probably the most classic dish on the menu. It’s underpinned by all our training at Le Manoir, and it also reminds me of when I was cooking the meat at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay. You’d butcher the lamb rack and tie it and then it would just be cooked all the way on the stove, roasting it in hot oil and basting it in butter till you hit cuisson, and then resting it. So I think it’s a lot of classical techniques that underpin that dish, even though it’s quite simple. I think the addition of the fresh goat curd is probably a little influence from Ollie Dabbous. He always used to like yoghurt and lactic tastes that would balance the flavours in a dish, and if something was quite heavy like this, which is quite rich, then having something like yoghurt or goats curd – which here we infuse with some garlic and lemon – can really help with balance.”
Gariguette strawberry, sake, lemon verbena
Evelyn's Table
LS: “Nat’s very patient, very methodical, and he’s really taken the pastry section under his wing.”
NS: “This dessert utilises Asian flavours but quite classical techniques – especially in terms of the savarin, which is quite a classic thing – and then we soak it in sweet sake. Then we use gariguettes, which are just fantastic, really high-quality strawberries, probably the best we can get. We get the sake kasu [the lees leftover from sake production] from a brewery in South London, and we use that in the ice cream.”
LS: “I think it was a good idea to base the ice cream around the sake kasu. We ripple it with a strawberry sorbet as well. And now it’s just trying to use that natural product and quality ingredients. There are a lot of classic influences in there from our time in different classic kitchens, but with a twist of those Asian flavours, like sake.”
