Guerrilla kitchens: Cooking in London's underground

Feb 11, 2010, 12:35 GMT

London - The restaurant guests take their seats at the table. Among the titbits of information they discovered upon arrival was where the chef sleeps, what his bathroom looks like, what kind of books he has by his bedside and that he has a luminous plastic Madonna beside his toilet. These guests are in a London underground restaurant where private individuals cook meals for complete strangers.

Underground restaurants are secret, ignore most of the laws on restaurant ownership and are very 'in' at the moment. The British capital has over 10 of these pop-up restaurants as they are also known and that number is steadily growing.

One of these underground chefs is Arno Maasdorp. The 40-year-old turns his Brixton apartment twice a week into a restaurant and each time he cooks a five-course meal for 16 guests in his tiny kitchen.

The menu does not list anything like Spaghetti Bolognese but items like homemade bread, gnocchi with chilli mushrooms, sea bass in mussel stock, and pear and semolina cake with salt caramel. 'Many restaurants in London are expensive and bad. I wanted to share my passion for cooking with others,' says Maasdorp who also works as a food stylist.

The starting price for a menu in 'Saltoun Supper Club' is 25 pounds or about 40 dollars. Rarely will you find a restaurant meal at that price for that quality elsewhere in London.

The idea is not quite legal and to get around that problem Maasdorp calls his restaurant a club, payments are classified as 'donations' and guests bring their own alcohol. The idea is also not a new one and bears resemblance to what are known as Paladares in Cuba, which are private restaurants that are not state owned.

Pop-up restaurants are spreading further afield in Europe and the German capital Berlin has also seen the phenomenon. The recent global economic crisis also provided fresh drive for underground restaurants in cash-strapped London.

A price for dinner in a guerrilla restaurant can be anything between 20 and 100 pounds such as that charged in a restaurant run by a chef who used to work in a major Spanish restaurant.

There are other alternative forms of hospitality to be found in the district of Vauxhall in a former squat where a new hobby chef goes behind the cooker to show what he can do.

It appears the pop-up restaurant concept is gaining fans everywhere. 'Especially in difficult economic times like these, people don't have enough money to eat in expensive restaurants. Everything is more intimate here than in a sterile restaurant chain,' says Carrie-Anne Brackstone who is sitting with three friends in Saltoun Supper Club.

The only disadvantage to the idea is that it is often difficult to get a seat in an underground restaurant and you often need to book months in advance.

Internet: Saltoun Supper Club: www.eatwithyoureyes.net.