It takes two ingredients for the average Londoner to have heard of Fallow: a love of food and an Instagram account. Occupying a large, swanky premises in St James’s, one of the busiest restaurants in the capital is the culmination of a 10-year working relationship between Chef-Directors Jack Croft and Will Murray. Meeting in the kitchens of Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, Jack and Will quickly hit it off and their own operation is now a huge success in both the real and virtual realms, winning over swathes of diners. So, what’s the secret?
Cod’s heads. That’s one of the secrets anyway. The team estimate that they’ve sold tens of thousands of the things over the years – and in that often-overlooked ingredient you can find the beating heart of what makes Fallow the place it is. For starters, not many restaurants serve cod’s heads. They’re usually thrown away, wasting a potentially delicious product. At Fallow, they’re having none of that. The whole thing comes grilled and slathered in bright orange sriracha butter.
It’s a Fallow signature for a reason, because it typifies the restaurant's overarching ethos. The team bake their sourdough in-house using leftover potato peelings and make the sriracha which covers that lovely cod’s head themselves. They even grow their mushrooms on-site so that, as Jack says, “our chefs maintain an attachment to growing produce” despite their city centre location. “Even if you don’t consider the sustainability of whole animal use, nowadays restaurant margins are so tight, especially when it comes to the protein you're using, that it just makes economic sense,” he suggests.
“When creating our menus, we’re often driven to explore products that are wasted at the source. So rather than getting rid of all the bins in the kitchen and ensuring nothing we use is wasted, we try and go a step further, working with suppliers to find products that would be wasted at the source. The cod’s head for example was being thrown away on a massive industrial scale – something we’ve been able to put a dent in.”
Besides being a perfect, quite literally in-your-face illustrator of a whole-animal ethos, the cod’s head is also one of many dishes that have caught people’s attention on social media. Just take a look at the comments any time they share a picture of it: a mixture of those turning their noses up at the thought of swallowing an eye, and those salivating at the prospect. A similar thing happened when Jack, Will and guest chef Pierre Koffman started serving a chicken pie with the head sticking out at their spin-off operation Fowl.
Such eye-catching dishes – whilst only making up a fraction of the extensive and wide-ranging Fallow menu that also includes steaks, burgers and a good vegetarian offering – are a brilliant way of attracting an audience. An audience which, in Fallow’s case, has been getting bigger and bigger. It’s not the heads and whatnot that are the real key to the team’s social media strategy of course, but their decision to let you, the viewer, into the kitchen. The Fallow Instagram is full of videos showing you how the chefs make their signatures, from the breakfast royales to the Sunday roasts, while on their YouTube channel you can find extended videos giving you a first-hand view of what it’s like in a professional kitchen.
“We stumbled on the ‘inside the kitchen idea’ when playing around with a GoPro one day,” Will says. “I think people really connect with it because a key pillar of social media is access and it allows people, particularly those who might aspire to be a chef or have ever dreamt of being in the industry, to step into the position of Head Chef. You get to spend a shift on the pass of a busy restaurant without needing any formal training.”
That Fallow’s name has grown in both recognition and stature as a result of their savvy social output is a telling sign of what it means to be a modern restaurant. Growing your audience online will, inevitably, result in more bums on seats – which is something every restaurant wants. “A lot of people focus on our social media, which is great; after all, we’ve put a lot of time into it,” Will tells us. “When people ask me about the impact of social media though, I think the important thing to remember is how hard it is to create a culture and environment where your team are genuinely happy and therefore happy to appear on the company’s social media. The other thing is you have to be constantly creating new content, so new dishes, new ideas etc. Sometimes social media is the easiest part; creating innovative new dishes and a happy team is the hard part.”
Not content with the overwhelming success of Fallow, Jack, Will and their business partner James Robson are – like all successful restaurateurs – constantly evolving. Which brings us to Roe, their cavernous new restaurant in Canary Wharf. “A lot of people comment on the size,” Jack admits. “But for us it just gives us the space to grow. We’ve signed a 15-year lease, so it’s very much a slow and steady project and until we feel the team is ready, we won’t push the covers. After all, Fallow took us nearly four years to get to where it is. We have two private dining rooms and a chef’s table downstairs at Roe, but these are projects we will slowly introduce once we feel the main dining room is perfect and the team are happy.”
The careful, considered approach has certainly paid off, with the Inspectors adding Roe to The Guide after being impressed by the assured cooking across the wide-ranging, something-for-everyone menu. It’s a breath of fresh air for Canary Wharf, too, where Roe is located overlooking South Dock. “Where else in Central London do you get access to the water like that?” Jack says. “We felt it was unique to the offering in London, compared to places like Borough Yards, Mayfair etc. and an exciting area that was really beginning to grow.”
‘Exciting’ is the right word. Roe is just the next chapter in Jack and Will’s continually exciting 10-year tale – which has already seen them meet, open their own restaurant, move to a bigger premises, crack that social media thing and become the epitome of the modern London restaurant. And all while saving cod’s heads from the bin.
Hero Image: © Fallow/Steven Joyce
