The Gate Restaurant serves up a unique brand of vegetarian food, combining ingredients from all over the world to create highly flavoured dishes that look and taste good enough to grace any dinner party table. In this book, the Gate's chef-proprietors Adrian and Michael Daniel introduce their simplest recipes, each one being made using just a few accessible ingredients. For instance, there are Italian polenta chips, Eastern European blinis, Middle Eastern tabbouleh, Indian bhel poori, and Asian rice paper spring rolls. There are lots of fusion dishes too, such as grilled aubergine with lemon grass salsa, flatbread pizzas, and butternut squash and cauliflower samosas. The influences are mainly Mediterranean, Pacific Rim, and international ethnic, but none are stronger than the Indo-Iraqi Jewish traditions of the brothers' own grandmother.
On Adrian's 18th birthday, a few months after he turned vegetarian, we spent a beautiful day on London's Hampstead Heath with friends. As a birthday treat, they took us to a well-known vegetarian establishment. Eating in restaurants was not part of our upbringing, so it was an experience that we anticipated with great excitement. It was early evening, yet the restaurant was already packed with diners. We didn't recognize anything on the menu and happily abdicated responsibility to our equally famished friends, who ordered a selection of dishes for all of us to share. Upon the arrival of the food, which tasted as insipid as it looked, something happened inside us.
Although The Gate was not to be opened for at least another six years, we still feel that this was its moment of conception. We left that restaurant with one thought: that food, especially in restaurants, should be about pleasure and indulging the senses, rather than just sustenance for the body.
It was from this point that we really began cooking and concocting recipes, drawing on the wonderful food that we had grown up with and attempting to translate this into vegetarian cuisine. In 1987 we opened a catering company in north-west London, where many of the ideas and principles that now underpin The Gate began to evolve. The first and most important was that although vegetarians don't eat meat, neither do they desire a diet of indigestible wholefoods. Vegetarians seemed to be in a process of compensation, having omitted so many "unhealthy" aspects from their diet, and we felt the vegetarian cook should feel liberated to use butter and cream and generally encourage a sense of indulgence. Other golden rules began to take shape as well. Each vegetable has an optimum way of being prepared, be it roasting, grilling, or pan-frying, and the simple alchemy of how water is taken out of a vegetable will often determine its true flavour. It was also during this period, the final years of our grandmother's life, that we got to spend quality time in the kitchen with her, learning some of the wonderful recipes that she brought from India.
In December 1989, we opened The Gate at Hammersmith with a simple mission statement: "We have coffee, we have food, and we have love", an expression that Michael overheard in a Bohemian café in Tel Aviv. The menu in the early days was limited but as we developed and grew the menus became increasingly sophisticated and the restaurant more popular. In 1993 we were thrilled to be awarded the Time Out Best Vegetarian Meal Award. This was a watershed for us! Our quiet little place had finally grown up. It was no longer the hidden hang-out of trainee doctors from Charing Cross Hospital enjoying late-night lock-ins, and neither was there time to pick up buskers from the subway and invite them to play for dinner and a bottle of wine.
In spite of the commercial realities of running a "proper", busy restaurant, we have tried to preserve something of that spirit through our wonderful customers, many of whom have been eating at The Gate for more than 16 years. We hope that you will enjoy cooking the recipes from this book. They reflect the origins of The Gate and the simpe home cooking that was its inspiration.
