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Hello and welcome to Table Talk, the Spectator's Food and Drink podcast. I'm Laura Prendergast.

And I'm Olivia Potts. And today we're delighted to be joined by Nuno Mendes.

Nino is a Portuguese chef who's one of the most important food pioneers of the last decade in Britain.

He is the man behind a number of London's most interesting restaurants, pop-ups and food start-ups,

and remains executive chef at the celebrity favourite Chilton Firehouse in Marlaboon.

He'll be opening a new restaurant, Liz Boetta,

on Charlotte Street in late March. Nuno, welcome to Table Talk. Hello, hi. I love it to be here.

Thank you for inviting me. Well, it's, after, what an introduction. Shit, got to deliver and all this thing.

Nuno, we're going to start where we always do at the beginning and ask you, what are your earliest memories of food?

Well, I think my earliest memories of food probably come from my grandmother, my grandmother

cooking.

And my grandmother's cooking.

When she cooked for me, she used to make me a chicken and rice

soup called Kenja, a very Portuguese. It's something that usually feed you feed to kids,

children, or sometimes when you feel a bit sick. And I used to have asthma when I was quite little.

So I think at times I was, you know, when I was struggling with asthma, she used to make

this soup for me. And it was really comforting. It was basically just, just rice that's cooked for a very

long time. She used to basically put a whole, a whole chicken. I mean, it was an organic chicken.

It was a chicken from our farm. She just put a whole chicken and rice and water and a couple of a little bit of

aromatics and she should just cook it for a very long time and then take the chicken out and

actually just shred it and add it back in and literally like almost no flavoring just a little bit

...