Running Niche for all these years has taught us an enormous amount. Some of the decisions we make today are different from those we made when we first opened, because we've spent years listening, learning, asking questions and occasionally changing our minds.
We aren't trying to be difficult. Quite the opposite. Most of the things we do differently are designed to make life less difficult for the people who eat with us.
Working with coeliac disease and food allergies brings responsibilities that go considerably beyond putting a few gluten-free dishes on a menu. We need to understand not only what's in the food we make, but what's in every ingredient that goes into it, how it was produced, how it is labelled, how it is stored and what happens to it before it eventually reaches your plate.
The more we've learned, the more particular we've become. We prefer particular to difficult.
Gluten-free oats are absolutely fine for many people with coeliac disease and gluten intolerance. If you can eat them and enjoy them, that's great. We're certainly not campaigning against porridge.
But not everybody can tolerate them.
Oats contain a protein called avenin, and a small proportion of people with coeliac disease can react to even uncontaminated gluten-free oats. Coeliac UK recognises this too.
For us, it isn't only something we've read about. Marc reacts to oats himself, and over the years many customers with coeliac disease or gluten intolerance have told us first-hand that they experience problems with them too.
So we eventually asked ourselves a very Niche sort of question: do we actually need them?
The answer was no.
There are plenty of other wonderful ingredients for us to cook with. By leaving oats out altogether, another group of people can sit down, look at the menu and not have to start asking questions.
If you can eat oats, wonderful. We just don't think you'll miss them while you're here.
This is one of the areas where our own approach is deliberately more cautious than the minimum required for something to be described as gluten-free.
In the UK, food containing no more than 20 parts per million of gluten can legally be labelled gluten-free. Coeliac UK supports that internationally recognised threshold, including appropriately produced products using gluten-free wheat starch.
We respect that position. We have simply made a different choice for Niche.
We don't use deglutenised wheat or deglutenised wheat-based flour blends because, quite frankly, we don't need to.
We've spent years learning how to make great bread, pastry, cakes, sauces and everything else without them. Starting with ingredients that don't require gluten to be removed in the first place makes our approach easier for our customers to understand and allows more people to eat what we make.
It isn't about telling somebody else that their gluten-free product isn't gluten-free. It is simply about deciding what we're comfortable using at Niche.
Beer presents a similar question.
Some gluten-free beers begin life using gluten-containing cereals and are subsequently processed to reduce the gluten sufficiently to meet the legal gluten-free threshold. Other beers are brewed using naturally gluten-free ingredients.
We've chosen the latter.
Part of the reason is simplicity, but there's another important distinction. Coeliac disease and wheat allergy are not the same thing. Reducing gluten to the required level doesn't magically make the original cereal disappear as an allergen where it remains present.
There are now some really good beers available that fit the way we've chosen to operate, so we'd rather serve those.
Again, we're not trying to start a beer war. We recognise the 20ppm standard and Coeliac UK's position on it. We've simply decided that where we can remove another layer of uncertainty without compromising what we offer, we will.
Then all that's left to argue about is whether you want another one.
This was a much bigger decision because these were ingredients we actually used and loved.
In fact, one of our best-selling desserts was once our Peanut Butter Blondie. Taking peanuts out of the restaurant meant saying goodbye to it, which wasn't a particularly popular prospect.
But as Niche evolved, we were welcoming more and more guests living with multiple food allergies as well as coeliac disease. We listened to them, and particularly to families living with severe allergies, and began to understand just how complicated something as ordinary as going to a restaurant could become.
Eventually we asked ourselves another simple question: are peanuts, tree nuts and sesame so essential to what we do that we are prepared to exclude people in order to keep them?
They weren't.
So we removed them.
That didn't mean accepting worse food. It meant going back into the kitchen and finding another way. Our Peanut Butter Blondie eventually became a Sunflower & White Chocolate Blondie.
And, slightly inconveniently for the argument that free-from food always involves compromise, we think it's even better.
That's really what Niche has always been about. Taking something away should make us work harder at the food, not give us an excuse for it to be less delicious.
We've learned from an extraordinary community over the years: people living with coeliac disease and food allergies, parents of children with life-threatening allergies, campaigners, charities, scientists, food producers, chefs, writers, bloggers and advocates.
Marc's work judging food and hospitality awards over many years has also provided an opportunity to see an enormous amount of innovation, meet some incredibly knowledgeable people and, occasionally, taste things that prove the free-from world still has a little work to do.
But perhaps our greatest teachers have been our customers.
They ask questions. Lots of questions.
And that's a good thing.
They've told us what they react to, what frightens them about eating out, what other restaurants get wrong and what allows them finally to relax. They've asked exactly what's in something, where it came from and how it was made.
Sometimes those conversations have resulted in tiny changes. Others have fundamentally changed Niche.
We don't know everything and we've never pretended that we do. What we have become pretty good at over the years is listening.
This is perhaps one of the least visible differences at Niche, but one of the most important.
The romantic image of a chef is somebody who wanders into the kitchen, opens the fridge, grabs whatever looks good and instinctively creates something delicious.
We love that kind of creativity.
Unfortunately, at Niche, you can't just rummage around in the cupboard and hope for the best.
Our recipes and specifications aren't simply there to make sure Tuesday's sauce tastes like Monday's. They form part of our food-safety system.
Every ingredient matters. Who manufactured it matters. Its allergen declaration matters. Precautionary allergen labelling matters. The quantity used matters. And if something changes, that matters too.
We don't accept ingredients carrying precautionary “may contain” labelling for the allergens we exclude. So if a chef runs out of something, they can't simply reach for another brand because it looks roughly the same.
If we change an ingredient, we check it. If we change a recipe, we record it. If we create something new, we document it. And once a dish has been approved, we expect it to be made to its specification.
We've learned over the years that this isn't necessarily a natural way of working for every chef. Traditionally, chefs have been encouraged to rely heavily on instinct and experience. Those things still matter enormously, but the modern chef also needs precision, consistency and an understanding of allergens, nutrition, provenance and cost.
You can still be creative. You can still experiment. You can still get terribly excited about a sauce.
You just have to write down what you put in it.
Accurately.
None of these decisions has been made because we enjoy making our lives more complicated. Removing ingredients, scrutinising suppliers, maintaining recipes and specifications and saying no to products we might otherwise like to use actually creates quite a lot more work behind the scenes.
We do it because of what happens on the other side of the kitchen door.
Someone who is used to studying allergen folders can simply order dinner. A parent can concentrate on their family rather than worrying about what might be on their child's plate. A group of friends with completely different dietary needs can share the same table. Someone can look at a menu and realise they have a choice rather than an option.
That's worth a bit of extra work.
Niche today is quite different from the restaurant we first opened, and our customers have played an enormous part in shaping what it has become. We expect we'll continue learning, questioning things and occasionally changing our minds.
Because doing things differently isn't really the point.
Doing them better is.
