THE ALLOTMENT Vegan restaurant is Chef Matthew Nutter’s first permanent project.
The restaurant creates amazing dishes using fresh and locally sourced products, promising to use the best of the season’s local harvest, bringing an entirely new plant-based experience to the table.
After the success of his restaurant, 2017 brought Nutter the achievement of being awarded the title of Chef of the Year, at this year’s Food and Drink Festival.
“Winning Chef of the year was incredible. I was with my partner and two of my chefs and then she read it out and I didn’t fully believe it, but then when they said my name it was just wow! It was huge! It took me about a week for it to fully settle in and it didn’t really feel real for quite a while and then this news article came out and it became real. It’s crazy that! I was up against such big chefs! It wasn’t just local talent, it was some really high-end chefs. For them to choose us we are doing something right.”
The Allotment aims to demonstrate how incredible vegan food is when it is done well and the
newly one title only proves so.
“It has changed my life a little bit, but when the title first came out, it was something that I wanted for a really long time, for about 5 years.
“It’s an amazing achievement, fingers crossed it’s changing something without me realising. It has certainly helped the bookings, we are now fully booked for nearly a month, we have so many more emails, it seems like within a week we might be fully booked till the end of the year, so in that respect it has definitely helped”, says Nutter.
The dishes the Allotment offers are gluten and sugar free, yet still full of flavour. The restaurant specialises in taster menus, giving the customer the full experience of what they spend so long trying to achieve,
“Food has always been my passion, I fell back into professional cooking at 19 and I’ve never stopped since, so still a little bit late for a lot of chefs, but still younger than quite a lot that I have recently met.
“I remember the first dish I have ever made was a fried breakfast. I was reminiscing about that recently and it’s quite a complex dish when it comes down to it. A fried breakfast sounds pretty simple, but you need to have your timings correct and everything, and not burn anything. Trying to cook your bacon perfectly at the same time as not burning your sausages and then making sure your egg is still runny at the same time, your toast not going black, it takes some skill.
“Cooking is a craft more than it is an art”, says Nutter.
The restaurant, where visitors can expect an incredible ambiance, is based near Stockport Market.
But before achieving all that he has, Matthew Nutter has encountered a lot of hurdles on his way to success.
“In my career as a chef I have encountered loads and loads of moments when I wanted to give up.
“After my first year as a chef, I was only young, I was still into going out and partying and stuff. I was sick of seeing people enjoying themselves at night while I was working and that was it. I was done.
“I left and then a couple of days later I got an offer to go and work in France, so I went there and then after that I went through the same thing, still young, still wanting to enjoy myself so I wanted to sack it in then I came back to a nice chef job and I finished at 3 o’clock every day, but then I got a job as a high end chef and my schedule made me so unhealthy”, explains Nutter.
The hardships that brought him to where he is now have simply proved to him that this is his one true passion:
“Food has always been my passion, I fell back into professional cooking at 19 and I’ve never
stopped since”
Listen to the Chef of the Year talking about whom he wishes to cook for in this exclusive interview for Quays News:
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