Ali Borer - Late Nights Cooking With Guy Ritchie, Burning Out At Smoking Goat & Opening London’s Hottest New Restaurant - Appalachia
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Davidson, give it up please!
Well ladies and gentlemen boys and girls, welcome back to Meet Some Players brought to you by Blink, which is the greatest PO assistant in the world. And today we're joined by beautiful head chef Ali Bora and he's a gorgeous man. And also in the corner we've got a genius, a restauranteur, a hospitalitarian, once the greatest bomb in the world, Ryan Sheehan. Yeah. And he's just he's he's lurking and he's ready. He's got a beautiful accent. Want you to know he's over your shoulder with a golden mic. I know. And he he looks good. He's never looked better. So best behaviour. Um Ali, congratulations. It's been a real fucking exciting opening. Yeah. Great reviews everywhere. Apart from one horrible lady called Camilla.
But I'm you know, I'm allowed to say that. Yeah, you can, I can't. No, you can't
Uh talk us through the offering here to start off with. I mean So I mean, obviously what we've done is we've relaunched the restaurant. And then the concept is we're using the influences of the Appalachian mountain range, which kind of span thirteen states in the USA, you know. And it all it also goes all the way up to like uh Labrador and Newfoundland in Canada and even goes into Quebec.
Well.
So like it's a massive, massive range. Um and the idea was once we kind of got that in, was to kind of be, all right, cool. Let's look at what they kind of do, how they do it, and then kind of realizing the influences there are very similar to kind of old school Dishes that you'd kind of get in Wales, Scotland, Ireland, you know, as they immigrated over into that range to do mining, to build, you know, just kind of do whatever they wanted over there. It's like the way that I look at cornbread, it's the American version of soda bread. It's pretty much exactly the same ingredients. The only thing that's different is that you're using corn instead of using flour. uh but everything else is kind of the same.
But yeah, the concept behind it is we're doing I don't want to use the world small plates. I want s I like, you know, plates that people can share. Um, something that's tasty, delicious. We are looking at flavors rather than making a Beautiful and having to go through different amounts of processes to get something onto the plate. Yes, there are a few things that we take some time doing, like we've got this skewer on that taste, you know, it's a three day process. But it's delicious. You know, it's not like we're having to dip it in chemicals or anything. What's that skewer? So it's um it's pig's head and ox tongue skewer. And essentially we we do a twelve hour cook on the pig's head, break that down, we boil the tongue in
Like Scotch bonnet, ginger, black peppercorn, uh, and then once that's done, peel it, slice it, and then we layer it like a terrine all the way up, and then we press it, and then we basically pit it on the solid top so it goes nice and crispy on the outside. But then we keep the liquor from the beef, and then we reduce that down, and we just finish that with oyster sauce.
What dishes define the new Appalachian‑inspired menu at Appalachia?
So you get this really nice beefy kind of flavour, but with a sweetness to the bottom. This is like an
animal pharma orgy. Yeah.
In your mouth. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You know, and that was one of the things I took from looking at the the way that they the whole animal gets used. You know, there's lots of foraging, lots of hunting, and obviously big cold winters, so lots of preserving. Um so yeah, I think there's I think I don't know, like s five or six of my dishes all have awful in it. So you know, we've got duck hearts on, there's chicken hearts go with the um the sauce that goes with our brine chicken. We've got the head and we've got the tongue. Um and even in our burger that we use, in order for us to do a decent sized patty and serve it at a decent price. I do seventy five percent of it's chuck and the other twenty five percent I use Oxha as well.
You know, so then you get this really meaty flavor coming through. Any excess beef trim that we have, that all goes through it as well. You know, everything gets used.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:03–2:47
2
What dishes define the new Appalachian‑inspired menu at Appalachia?
2:47–7:45
3
How did Ali develop the three‑day pig’s head and ox tongue skewer?
7:45–8:55
4
Why does Ali prioritize using every part of an animal on the menu?
8:55–23:48
5
How did the wave of three major reviews in one week affect the restaurant?
23:48–49:27
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