When Rob Roy Cameron opens Alta in Kingly Court in London in September, with the newly formed Mad restaurant group, it’ll be the first time the chef has headed up a restaurant since leaving the short-lived Gazelle in Mayfair in 2019.
That restaurant bit the dust in under a year due to internal disagreements and a muted response from a dining public that perhaps wasn’t ready for Cameron’s Modernist creations (born in Botswana, Cameron has spent much of his career working in Spain with the Adrià brothers at elBulli and Tickets, among others).
In contrast, Alta will offer a Basque-leaning, simpler take on the food of Northern Spain, with an emphasis on live-fire cooking, using almost exclusively British ingredients.
“We're using Spain more as a starting point, sort of an anchor,” says Cameron, who spent the intervening years after Gazelle folded consulting and as part of the development team at the Gordon Ramsay group. “I don't want it to be 100% Spanish, or people come in expecting bravas or something off a tapas bar menu in Benidorm.”
They’ll be a strong focus on whole animal butchery, utilising different cuts throughout the menu. Pork will feature in a terrine of trotter, tongue and tripe, a chicharrón of puffed skin (pictured top) and then chops later on, for example. Cod, cured in house, will be used in a play on a traditional Catalan esqueixada, with the head and collar served as a main, and duck will be served as a ham with cherries that are being preserved now, with the legs confit and served with clams as a separate dish.
Drinks will include predominantly European, low-intervention wines from small producers, culinary cocktails and of course, being Basque-leaning, a selection of ciders (from UK producers).
Cameron will be building the menu around the suppliers and what they have, so don’t expect prawns if he can’t get the right local fresh product, and classic preparations will be amended to fit what’s available in the UK – like a romesco made with pumpkin seeds instead of almonds.
“I want to develop our own style and our own identity,” he says.
While “simple doesn’t mean boring,” according to Cameron, he does have plans to enrich the offer at Alta in the future.
“When we started Tickets, we were doing patatas bravas and white anchovies. It was literally like a tapas bar. It was good, but it was very entry level,” he says. Tickets, in Barcelona, was, when it eventually closed in 2020, far from a simple tapas bar, presenting a haute version of Spanish small plates with many of the Adriàs’ molecular tricks, like spherification, on display. It frequently made the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. Benidorm it was not.
"I'm not going to say I want us to be like Tickets,” clarifies Cameron, "I would like some of the dishes to be a bit exciting, a bit challenging, but interesting for the diners. I'd hope that it would still be fun, somewhere where people will go to get interesting, tasty food, [that’s] high quality in a relaxed environment [with] high quality service.”
Alta, which will have over 100 covers and be open seven days a week, will tap into Londoners’ current obsession with Basque food and live fire cooking. Following the success of Brat and Mountain, new Basque-leaning restaurants have sprung up all over the city, like Ibai in the City and more recently The Prince Arthur in Belgravia and Pintxito in Covent Garden.
If you’d like to try your hand at recreating the flavours of Northern Spain at home, Cameron has given us an exclusive recipe for his courgettes with pumpkin seed romesco, which will be served at the restaurant. See the steps below.
