Dominic Auger – Food for Thought
Under the clanging gong of the overground lies a brasserie and wine bar in a repurposed warehouse on Dalston Lane, Hackney. Unassumingly tucked away under the railway arches of Hackney Downs, Hackney Coterie is a true gem. The exposed bricks, large wooden tables, dimly-lit pendants, and Basquiat-inspired artworks may feel like a familiar sight in E8 but here, it feels wondrously intimate and the low-waste menu, skilfully crafted.
At the helm of the Hackney Coterie is the flame-haired chef Dominic Auger, who rose to notability after working in restaurants such as HIDE under Ollie Dabbous and as a sous chef at Scully St James’s. It was never Auger’s intention to pursue gastronomy as a career path. In fact, he studied medical engineering at Durham University and planned on joining the army and going to Sandhurst, but a knee injury put these plans on ice.
To keep busy, Auger got a job at his local pub near Windsor before working at The Oxford Blue, a gastropub nearby. Under the stewardship of chef-patron Steven Ellis – a protégé of Gordon Ramsay and Clare Smyth – he spent two years working across different sections of the gastropub, learning how to perfect the art of British cooking that Ellis was renowned for.
Soon enough, Dominic Auger began to clock the similarities between army training and working in a professional kitchen, even more so when he took up a post as sous chef at Ramael Scully’s Asian-Fusion restaurant in St James’. “It was a massive change in tone and a totally different working environment from the country to the city,” Auger says. “Working at Scully’s for those three years was very regimental, it was all about getting the job done efficiently.”
When lockdown hit, Auger and his partner retreated back to the country and he went from running a “million miles an hour” to utter stillness, leaving him chomping at the bit for stuff to do. “It’s important for chefs to be busy,” he says, “I can’t just sit around and watch television, I need to be occupied.” Auger noticed a gap in the market for deliverable fine dining in his local area and set up his company, Mirepoix, whilst operating out of his home kitchen.
“I took a lot of influence from Asian cuisine as no takeaways were doing anything interesting,” he says. “We weren’t just delivering food but high-quality ingredients prepped so that it would be interactive – we wanted to coach people the process behind it.”
During this liminal period, Auger harnessed his skills of resourcefulness and innovation to teach his students to make everything from pig head croquettes with parsnip jelly, mushrooms on toast with caramelised yoghurt and soy sauce gel, sourdough croutons cooked on a barbeque, to cured salmon with kiwi and XO sauce salad.
After a brief stint working at HIDE, Dominic Auger was approached by Ramael Scully who told him that Anthony Lyon – the owner of Lyon’s Seafood & Wine Bar – was on the hunt for a head chef. Initially, Auger rejected the offer, but spent some time mulling the proposition over and decided to accept the role as head chef at Hackney Coterie.
At the core of Auger’s menu at Hackney Coterie is an emphasis on maximum taste, minimum waste. To do so, the chef stresses he creates “menus” not “dishes”. He elaborates, “there are a lot of things that don’t interact well. For example, in a duck dish where you just use the breast and then offal, the legs will typically go in the bin. Creating dishes ends up with waste, so instead, I devise a menu where I take one dish, think about the waste or by-product of it, and connect it all together.”
Take Hackney Coterie’s vegetarian main course, a cauliflower dish, for example: “We use the two hearts to make a cauliflower steak. We then ferment the stem and smoke and dehydrate it so it can become essentially a veggie version of Benito flakes that will last forever,” Auger says. “We strip the leaves and make kimchi, and once that’s fermented we blitz it up to fold through our olives, and we dehydrate some to put on our potato skins. Then, with the trim from the cauliflower, we smoke it and use it on our duck dish as a puree. Of that whole cauliflower, the only thing that goes in the bin is a little bit of peel.”
You won’t have to look very far to see a restaurant vowing “seasonality” and “sustainability” as part of their ethos but at Hackney Coterie, it truly is; only around 10 per cent of the food bin is full by the end of a long shift, mainly consisting of scraps and leftover staff food. “The problem,” Auger tells me, “is that these words have become incredibly trendy. But I know for a fact, that some of these restaurants (who shall not be named) are chucking away kilos of food every day.”
“A massive shift is needed and the driving force is the consumer. Consumers are almost groomed to think that the stuff on the menu is the only stuff available, they need to realise that having a fillet of beef is not a sustainable choice. From just one cow, there are two fillets. I do appreciate the restaurants who use the whole of that animal as it’s important to cycle through the cuts but there are tons that don’t despite saying they do.”
The low-waste menu at the Hackney Coterie is a revolving door of flavour. Guests choose a six-course tasting menu with complementary wines, and it can be meat-led, fish-led or vegetarian. Upon arrival to the trendy bolthole, my guest and I opted for the Pescatarian menu and whetted our appetites with hefty chunks of their charred barbequed sourdough, lathering it in miso butter in an eruption of umami.
This was followed by the scale-speckled fish crackling with a smoked tofu dip, a Jenga-like stack of thousand-layered Szechuan potatoes with black tea mayo, delicately thin slithers of charred leeks with horseradish and garlic mutter milk, spiced mangal monkfish with dashi custard. To finish, a fermented celeriac barbara with malted cream, and smoked porter syrup. It was a masterful execution of innovation, seasonality and ingenuity.
For Auger, the stand-out dish on the current menu is the fish skins. “They have been eaten by people for thousands of centuries in southeast Asia,” he says. “These skins would have otherwise gone in the bin but if you want to be sustainable, you need to clean up your production line. It comes down to using these obscure cuts and finding out what people are throwing in the bin and working around that.”
For Dominic Auger’s last ever supper, he picks a menu of “carbs on carbs”, starting with dressed crab on an English muffin, a main of a Cornish pastie, and a dessert of syrup pudding. To drink, “a lot of IPA.”
What does he want guests to feel when leaving Hackney Coterie? “I want them to have left trying something they thought they wouldn’t have typically liked,” says Auger. “It’s about people going in with no concept of zero-waste and who walk away, saying either the vegetables were the best part of it or that it turns out they can eat cuts like fish skins. I want the consumers to start asking the butchers or fishmongers for these dodgy cuts because if we all start thinking like this, we can start a cultural shift.”
Dominic Auger’s recipe for Aged salmon tails, with sambal salad and burnt lime
Ingredients
1 salmon tail (400g (approx), or a couple of Salmon steaks on the bone)
½ a Lime
Marinade
20g soy sauce
15g fish sauce
1g salt
4g sugar
2g white ground pepper
Sambal Salad
1 shallot thinly sliced into ice water
4 spring onions thinly sliced into ice water
1 red chilli deseeded and thinly sliced on an angle
6 mint leave finely cut
Method
The day before you wish to cook the salmon, you’ll need to make the marinade and prep the fish. Begin by checking the fish for any scales. Remove any by scraping the fish with a small knife, taking care not to damage the skin.
Mix all the ingredients for the marinade in a bowl. Amend quantities if needed according to your taste. Place the fish into the marinade and coat it well. Then transfer the fish and marinade in an airtight container and leave in the fridge for at least 8 hours, but ideally overnight.
On the day of cooking, remove the salmon from the marinade and transfer onto a plate or rack. Leave the salmon in the fridge and leave it to dry uncovered in the fridge for at least 6 hours.
Before cooking the fish, make the sambal by taking the ingredients out of the ice water and patting dry with a kitchen towel. Mix all the ingredients together.
Before cooking the tail, remove it from the fridge and allow it to come up to room temperature. This should take roughly 40 minutes depending on the temperature of your kitchen.
To cook the fish, place the tail onto a very hot bbq or heavy based pan with a little oil. Sear on both sides until the skin becomes crispy and starts to detach from the flesh (roughly 4 minutes on each side).
Remove from the heat and place into a warm oven to rest (max 60C) for 15 minutes max.
While the fish is resting, place the lime half onto the BBQ or pan and char its front.
Check your salmon by inserting a metal skewer, or cake tester into the centre of the fish. Remove and feel the temperature. It should be hot to touch but bearable. We are aiming for a fish that is crispy and cooked on the outside but slightly pink and still falls off the bone in the centre.
Once cooked, remove and place into the middle of a large sharing plate. Add your sambal salad and your lime half.
Serve in the middle of the table, squeeze over the lime and enjoy!