Fill up on the most delicious recipes and outrageous writing, by me, chef and award-winning food writer Gizzi Erskine.
Well, hello there. Welcome to my Substack – Big Mouth, Bold Flavours! I’ve been meaning to get on here and start this up good and proper for ages, so welcome. After a few years hibernation, I’m so ready for this – I hope you are…
What this has meant is that I’ve been really percolating what to bring you here to make it a unique space. I am a cook, who has cheffed and owned restaurants for over 20 years. My cooking is the real deal and technique is where I really get my kicks. I think my food is a hybrid of modern classics, that are either advanced by technique, ingredients or technology with a toe deep in sustainability and agriculture – something I have a huge an active interest in, (and have written two books on – “Slow”, about the Slow Food movement and slow cooking and “Restore”, about regenerative agriculture.).
My food is stylish, its feel good, soulful and my writing is lary and honest. There will be recipes and educational pieces on food, but I didn’t want it to stop just there. I’ve been privileged enough to work with lots of fashion, beauty and lifestyle brands and I have a column in the I-Paper about food sub-culture and women’s issues. See my Substack as a magazine, where you will get an authentic and frank look through a slightly adverse lense.
If you’re new to me, let me introduce myself. My name is Gizzi Erskine, and I am a chef and food writer with over 22 year’s experience. I’d like you to think of me as the real deal. A Chef with real experience, that ended up working at one of the biggest food magazines “BBC Good Food”. I started cheffing in 2002 after a 7-year career as a body piercer, where I used to run a studio called “Cold Steel” in London’s Camden Town.
At the beginning I worked in London restaurants, before going to “Leiths school of food and wine”. Leith’s was brilliant, but it was a private school and I had self-funded where a lot of people were there for their second careers or were being funded by their parents. I really slogged my guts out there and worked at the piercing studio on weekends whilst doing Stage placements a day or two a week at some of London’s best restaurants including “the St John”, “St John Bread and wine”, “Restaurant Gordon Ramsey”, “the OXO tower” and “The Eagle”. I also launched a catering company “Saucy Tarts” with a good friend Abbey – Who I knew as she ran the wholesale side of “Cold steel” and ended up working at St John Bread and Wine with me years later.
We did a load of really fun catering jobs for the big fashion magazines. Two tattooed chicks, who were Great chefs, loved fashion, music and art and we looked cool as fuck. No one had seen anything like us in food back then. Seeing the terrain between restaurant cheffing and catering was interesting, and we saw something missing in the industry. Soon, I started doing long table dinners at an art gallery in Brick Lane. They wanted something different one Christmas to substitute warm wine and mince pie, so we created a stunning table scape, a three-course menu, decent wine and people had sit down dinners during the artist launches at the gallery. It was such a success; it was the start of my first ever pop-up restaurants. The scene was tiny in those days, but it was me, Carl Clarke, Bistroteque and Nuno Mendes who really carved out that scene in London and I am mighty proud of that.
Also, when I finished catering school, I won a prize. “The BBC Good Prize”, where I got to go and work as cookery assistant at BBC Good food for a year. Here I learnt how to write, recipe test and develop and food style. It was a privileged start.
I went on to work behind the scenes as a home economist, which led me to two things. I started writing for some of the biggest celebrity chefs in the business and then one day, on set when someone was ill, I got thrown in front of the camera to take their place and my TV career was born. I started officially with a prime-time channel 4 show called Cook Yourself Thin, then went on to make Cookery School, Drop down menu, The ones to watch, (with Idris Elba, Paloma Faith and Rankin), Cooks to market and then my favourite experience of all was making a show called Seoul Food, where I got to live in Korea for a few months. It was the best experience of all time and became an international hit.
Over the years I have been columnist for the Sunday Times magazine, Company Magazine, Instyle, American Vogue and Arena D nd written for most of the broad sheets and fashion magazines. I have opened several pop up restaurants and businesses including Mare Street Market, The Nitery at the St Martins Lane, Cuisine PLC, Filth Foods and Giz’n’Greens Pizza pies.
What’s next is me really focussing on building this Substack. I will be on here a lot and I hope to see you on here too. I am starting with a seasonal series called “Seasons Eating’s”, where I will look at the seasons and all of the produce AND events within them. So, expect great things to do with seasonal fruit and vegetables, Halloween, Bonfire night, Thanksgiving and Christmas. Then a series called “Let’s talk about”, where I look at all the products on the market and explain their culinary and sustainable credentials.
I am chomping at the bit to get cracking on this. Let’s strap in and crack on…
All my love
Gizzi x
