PASTRY BEFORE THE STARTER!?

When you dine with tiny children who are opposed to sitting still & waiting to be served – aka the restaurant experience – a bread basket buys valuable time before the starters arrive. My little terrors can dip their fingers in the butter, stick breadsticks up their noses, disembowel the insides of a bap and roll it into tiny balls leaving a trail Hansel & Gretel would applaud. Table-manners are put on pause in a bid to keep the peace. Now in this context, the bread-basket is a filler of both time and tummies. I once presumed the bread-course could never be more than a filler, tradition for tradition’s sake.

And yet something has shifted. The bread course is no longer always the polite prelude to a meal. In some dining rooms it appears mid-way through, in others it becomes a considered pairing, and increasingly it arrives in laminated form. Where once a sourdough quietly anchored the table, now a croissant or brioche might steal the scene.

Recently, one of London’s most discerning kitchens, with an outstanding 3 Michelin stars, asked Seven Seeded be a part of creating a laminated pastry as part of their bread course.

We worked on their bow-tie shaped croissant, which sits beautifully on their 8-course tasting menu.

Other laminations in different shapes followed. More and more, restaurants are taking to creating, developing and serving our laminated variations of brioche.

Is the bread basket, a fixture for millennia, actually being replaced by a Pastry!?

In the Seven Seeded HQ there are whispers of a new product.

The saloon doors swing open, and two cowboys (highly trained pastry chefs, Jose & Luke) swagger in with… THE LAMINATED PARKER HOUSE.

Oh Hell – it looks stunning. I taste it – Bullseye! That hits me right in the pleasure zone. Now we’re still refining the design. Do we want four plaits or six?

The pastry must remain a thing of beauty but also be an invitation to misbehave. We don’t want politeness, you must want to tear into it like a bear. The brief: Create a pastry that elicits wonder, without pretension, suitable for ages 1–101. Something to share with a lover, a friend, an ex. Doesn’t tearing and sharing a sweet pastry make children of us all?

And yet in a culture that quite reasonably vilifies sugar, can this ‘trend’ ever catch on? Let’s make a case for it.

People are broke, the decision to go out, rather than sit on the sofa with a pot-noodle, is a vote for joie de vivre. Starting your evening meal with a pastry, a mischievous and decadent stunt, is a celebration of the good things in life. Restaurateurs know that tasty food alone isn’t enough to ensure their survival, their food needs to photograph well. Hence they must curate the best possible photographic legacy of the meal. Is the narrative arc of Starter-Main-Sweet crying out to be disrupted? Forget chefs fuelled by creativity and ego, don’t we all want to be known as the great disrupters in our lives? Perhaps it’s time to tell a different story.

Bread is beautiful in its simplicity. It anchors. It steadies. It asks very little of us. But a pastry can surprise and delight. It showcases originality and skill. There is room to innovate with flavours and fillings; it offers abundance, variation in texture, flakiness, glaze. In short: a single pastry has the capacity to WOW.

However, who can refuse warm bread and butter? Its gift is precisely its problem. In an age when many of us are trying to moderate our carb intake, especially in the evening, the bread-basket by design does us no favours. What freak tears a baguettini in half and shares it? Who has the self-control to leave half a bread-roll on a side-plate? The more common story is bashing through three rolls early doors and being done by starters.

The Laminated Pastry Parker House’s secret power is that it is designed to share. You eat less. Sharing is caring. Guilt takes a back seat. Sit back and marvel at how damn light it is.

You may not be ready to kick warm ciabatta brushed with olive oil and balsamic vinegar out of bed (me neither), but life is short, the world is mad, and so you pull a maverick move and start your meal with something sweet.