][1]Toni Carbajosa is that latest subject of our Chewin’ the Fat series of interviews with Scottish chefs and restaurateurs.
Along with Kevin Campbell and Patrick Collins, Toni has opened La Rotunda Italian restaurant in the old B-listed North Rotunda building by the SECC.
It’s a fascinating location. The building started life as the entrance to tunnels which ran under the Clyde but, over the last three decades, it has instead housed various restaurants.
By coincidence, Toni’s father, Jose Carbajosa, managed the original Italian restaurant which opened in the North Rotunda way back in 1987. There are some details about it here.
The current directors of the business are all steeped in the hospitality trade. As well as working as a chef director at La Rotunda, Toni is in partnership with Kevin Campbell at Athena in Finniestoun while Patrick Collins was owner and general manager at Sartis for ten years.
Toni’s CV includes stints at Sartis, Bouzy Rouge and The Candy Bar as well as a spell in Dubai.
In this interview, Toni explains how, for him, La Rotunda has come full circle. He also tells how his Scots Spanish upbringing influenced his cooking and gives us the recipe for a disgusting but effective hangover cure
You can check out La Rotunda’s 5pm offers here.
Yen Oriental restaurant continues to thrive on the upper floor.
Q: Your father worked in the Rotunda when it first opened as a restaurant. Do you remember it?
TC: I remember coming in to visit my Dad when I was very young and, when I was a little older, coming in to the restaurant to help out with bits and pieces. Or at least I thought I was helping but, obviously, I was just getting in his way. He would give things to do to keep me out of the way but those were among my earliest memories of La Rotunda.
Q: Is that what made you want a career in the restaurant trade?
TC: Absolutely. It was my father that inspired me to get into restaurants. I started off pottering around in his shadow and, more than 20 years later, I’m still involved with restaurants. I suppose that I started working properly in kitchens when I was fourteen and I’m 28 now.
][7]Q: Any other influences?
TC: My Mum has been the biggest influence on the way I cook. She is fantastic and so passionate. She will take hours making a dish from scratch. Gordon Ramsay is probably my favourite TV chef. I like his passion. Danny O’Donnell at Sartis was my biggest mentor. He is now the executive chef at Tony Macaroni.
Italian food is very important to me but in actual fact, a big part of my upbringing was eating Spanish food. My Dad is Spanish and my Mum is Scottish. My tastes lie in between Italian and Spanish; they’re very similar, that Mediterranean style of cooking.
Q: What made you think the North Rotunda needed to have an Italian restaurant again?
TC: I’d long had this idea to change it back to an Italian. I’d always liked the history of the Rotunda and it’s a beautiful building. We wanted to take it back to what it was like when Mr Romano opened it in the Eighties. The refurbishment took a bit longer than we might have hoped but we opened at the end of August.
Q: These are tough times for many restaurateurs. What’s your formula for surviving?
TC: Offering good value is key. If you offer carefully selected, seasonal produce, freshly cooked with care at a reasonable price then I think there is always demand for that. There are always people who want to eat out and I think that if you offer them quality and value then, as a restaurateur, you will be OK. We’ve been busy since opening and I think that’s down to a good product and good value.
Q: What has changed about eating out in Glasgow since you started in the business?
TC: Even in the last five to eight years things have changed. People have become a lot more knowledgeable about food and they are also more sensitive to value. Also that knowledge extends to more countries than it used to. If it was mostly Italian, French, Indian and Chinese in my Dad’s day then now it’s also Spanish and lots of other places from around the world.
][9]Q: what’s the best seller at La Rotunda?
TC: The seafood spaghetti is very popular. It looks great – lots of fresh, vibrant colours so as soon as people see it coming out of the kitchen they ask what it is and order it. We also sell a lot of the pizza di Parma. It is dressed with Parmesan shavings and rocket which gives it a lot of height so again people notice it coming out of the kitchen. It’s an old adage but people do eat with their eyes.
Q: You have a night off. What’s cooking?
TC: Nights off are few and far between at the moment but if I’m cooking at home then I like to do any form of seafood. If I’m eating out then I’m very pernickety so I like to eat at places where the cooking is how I might do it myself. One of my favourite places to eat out in Glasgow is Gamba. I’m also very keen to go to restaurants that I haven’t been to before to see what our potential competition is doing.
Q: Is there anything you don’t like cooking or eating?
TC: I like to cook from fresh. I don’t like cooking with powders and stuff out of packets. There isn’t much I wouldn’t eat and that’s partly down to the Spanish upbringing. In Spain, there is no part of an animal that isn’t eaten.
Q: What was your most memorable meal?
TC: That’s difficult. My family are very passionate about food so there have been lots of memorable meals. Good food and wine were always part of family life. It’s not one meal that is most memorable but more a general memory of my grandmother cooking paella every Sunday in Spain. It is a very traditional thing to do. All my uncles and cousins and the rest of my family gather and chat. Gran would be cooking the paella from ten in the morning and there was lots of hustle and bustle.
Q: As a chef, what gets you out of your bed every morning?
TC: It’s the pressure. I thrive on that and, in a weird way, it’s enjoyable. The flip side of that is that sometime there can be too much pressure.
The bottom line is that I love cooking. It’s what I’ve always wanted to do. You give pleasure to people. It’s a big thing when people come to us for their anniversary or birthday or leaving do – you want to make it enjoyable for them. There’s a lot of choice in Glasgow and it’s good when they trust us to host their meal.
Q: Obviously, no chefs ever report for work at La Rotunda with hangover but, if that happened, do you have a cure?
TC: It doesn’t need to happen too often, thankfully, but we take a pint of lemonade and boil it down until it’s about the volume of a spirits measure. When it’s a syrup, we put ginger and lemon in it and then down it. It’s disgusting but it works. It’s like a huge sugar dose but it does the job. It’s like Calpol for chefs.
Q: What has been your daftest customer complaint?
TC: I did have someone order carbonara but they wanted chips instead of pasta. They wanted chips carbonara.