Why Does Anyone Open a Restaurant? w/ Ravneet Gill Taiano

Today’s episode is a conversation with Ravneet Gill Taiano who you will either know as a judge from Junior Bake Off, the founder of hospitality recruitment platform Countertalk, the author of Pastry Chefs Guide. Or, if you’ve been paying attention during the last 12 months, you’ll have seen that Rav, together with her partner Mattie, opened Gina Restaurant in Chingford in June.

One of the things that has always marked Rav apart from her peers is that she’s made an effort to promote transparency in hospitality, seeking to shed light on an industry that is often shrouded in mystery or embellished by PR – to pull back the curtain and give a true insight into what’s actually going on with workers, customers and finances. She’s remained faithful to that approach with Gina, publicly disclosing that it cost more than £500,000 to open the restaurant and we wanted to know more about the parts of that sum. And to ask – when knowing all she does about the many challenges facing restaurateurs and chefs in the current economic climate – why she would open her own restaurant?

Elsewhere in the episode, we cover how Rav and Mattie ended up opening in Chingford, her food backstory in Southampton and Leyton, dream customers, nightmare customers, her mentors and the ‘pastry idol’ who taught her that you should never work for your heroes.

Finally, we discuss the beauty of the invert puff pastry that she used in the two galettes she brought for us to taste at the recording.

We hope you enjoy it.

Credits

The Vittles Podcast is presented by Vittles Restaurants editor Adam Coghlan.

Ravneet Gill Taiano is the author of Pastry Chef's Guide, a judge on Junior Bake Off, founder of hospitality platform Countertalk and the owner of restaurant Gina in Chingford.

Lucy Dearlove is an audio producer, sound designer and writer originally from North East England, now based in St Leonards-on-Sea. Her food podcast, Lecker, is a two-time winner of the Fortnum & Mason Podcast of the Year Award.

The full Vittles masthead can be found here.