FOOD
Capital G AINS
The fact that The Capital is owned by David Levin and managed by David’s daughter Kate is also a big factor. Nathan thinks of his team as family. In fact, some of them are – his wife Rachel is the company’s finance manager and his mum Sharon is his PA. So he felt that The Capital and his restaurant group would work well together. “This is what attracted me to come here,” he says. “The first thing you get when you come into The Capital is that sense of family, there’s a family feeling to the hotel, which fits in very well with what we do. And there’s this welcome. “I said that I don’t want to do a fine dining [restaurant] but what I’d like to do is bring the simple approach of seafood cookery to London, because I think there’s a big gap for it.” Nathan’s passion for cooking may be down to family too – he was introduced to kitchens from an early age by his father, also a chef. “I’ve always wanted to be a chef,” he says. “From the age of eight I was going into kitchens on a Saturday morning. I would just do putting the toast on for breakfast, or it might be just buttering bread. I loved the buzz of the kitchen.”
As Nathan grew up and went to work in kitchens professionally, he realised he had a talent for fish. Even now, he says he finds preparing fish therapeutic.
“Whenever I was working in a kitchen, I always went towards the fish section,” he says. “I seemed to be good at it and it was always a passion.” These days, he is a renowned fish specialist. He appears on television and released a book, Nathan Outlaw’s British Seafood, earlier this year. He’s confident but self-effacing. “The two things more important than me are the staff and the customers, far more. Without either of them, I can’t do what I want to do anyway,” he says. Pete Biggs, who was the head chef at Outlaw’s Seafood & Grill Restaurant in Cornwall, will be running the kitchen at The Capital, with Nathan visiting every week.
“Pete created, with me, that same restaurant four years ago in Cornwall,” says Nathan. “It’s as much his restaurant as it is mine in Cornwall. So it means that we have that consistency.” “It’s really exciting,” says Pete. “I like Cornwall but I’m ready for a new challenge.”
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