Cookeskitchen.co.uk: Join us in a cooking revolution (blog)

About us

restaurant

The Cookes Restaurant

We’re two brothers, Gary and Karl Cooke, and with surnames like that it was a monty for us to be chefs, right? We live in London and that’s where our restaurant is located as well. We own the restaurant and we have living quarters above so that means we are never away from the workplace, in a manner of speaking. One thing’s for sure, it’s easy getting to work each day.

Brotherly Love

We share duties insofar as who goes to the early morning markets to buy the fresh produce and who sleeps in a bit longer. We have that one rostered. The one who is scheduled to go to the market early in the morning gets to knock off work at midnight. The other one stays and cleans up and sees the staff off. The system works fine.

Competing for your Tummy’s Happiness

In this day and age, with the ever increasing popularity of cooking shows and the internet as a great source of recipes for everything, you have to have an edge somewhere in a restaurant. Some places opt for some silly gimmicks and some equally silly pricing. People soon discover that a meal served to you costing £3.50 is going to have some serious shortcuts. Maybe the ingredients aren’t fresh or the best class. The service might be lousy. One thing is for sure, these places don’t stay open for long or if they do, they soon have to raise their prices to something sensible.

Good Food is…

I’ve found, over years of cooking and dining that people are not looking for a low priced meal. Customers usually want good quality, fresh produce, clean and functioning kitchen and a service that makes each of them feel special without being effusive. And that’s what we offer. We do have a couple of unique specials like our Garlic Chilli Prawn dish and a dessert we picked up in Hungary that consists of layers of pancakes between which each piece is sprinkled with a walnut sugar mix. These are restaurant favourites.

Website Recipes

Karl and I have been trying to get a website going that features the restaurant but also has some different, maybe unusual, recipes on some pages. It’s rather hard competing against Jamie Oliver, Gerard Craft and Nigella Lawson. On top of these people, the web is infested with recipes from anyone and everyone. Some are good, some are not so good, some are very ordinary. There must be a space in there for another recipe site, I’m sure.

Special Soup

We had an idea of creating a soup. Something completely different like Python Soup, or Fruit Bat Broth. The first step is to find a clever base for the soup, something a little bit out there. One thing is for sure, we can advertise the final concoction as: Too many Cookes Did Not Spoil the Broth!

About Our Blog

We decided to start the blog together to spread the word about our restaurant and some of the fantastic dishes that we serve every single day. It’s grown from being a promotional platform for our restaurant and a sort of recipe book for ourselves to an all inclusive information hub for anything and everything to do with food and cooking. People land on the Cookes Kitchen blog from all over the world and over the years we’ve adapted and changed to be one of the leading sources for tips, tricks and advice on cooking, running a restaurant and building up your recipe book.

We want to keep the website as honest and open as possible and we actively encourage people to comment on our posts and get in touch with us for advice and recommendations. On the blog you’ll find a range of different topics, from the best kitchen equipment out there to how to cook certain dishes to simply good recipes.

We’re happy to have you at our table!