Max La Manna at Carousel with Wasted Wine Club
Carousel in London's Fitzrovia plays host to an ever changing roster of talented chefs. Internet sensation Max La Manna's recent week-long residency listed Wasted Wine Club's first bottlings on the pairing alongside his 8-course set menu. His zero-waste approach to cooking made for the perfect collaboration, and our founder Angelo van Dyk caught up with Max to discuss food, wine, and all things wasted.
Angelo van Dyk: So Max, first things first. Where did your passion for food come from?
Max La Manna: I think my passion for cooking stems from two things. Firstly, working in restaurants has been a huge inspiration. I’ve done every job, from washing dishes to managing restaurants, and everything in between. Truly, there is no greater feeling than when you see the look on someone’s face when they’ve eaten some of your food, and they are nourished and happy. That right there, that is the cherry on top.
Secondly, and more importantly, I was always around food and in the kitchen as a child. I think it all kind of stems back to when I was a child growing up, and my family was always having big suppers and big dinners, with everyone sitting around the table. I grew up in a big family household. It was an Italian-French-American household, and food was obviously very important to us, and still is today. I think that being at those dinner tables as a kid really inspired me to want to invite people to my own dinner table, and to feed and share with them. I always consider anyone who ever tries my food as a part of my family. So I feel really connected to cooking for people and to showing them that this is cooked with love and I try to do that every single time I cook.
AVD: Why is cooking and eating vegan so important to you?
MLM: Some may say it’s for the planet, some may say it’s for the animals, some may say it’s for your health. That may be true, but for me, cooking vegetables has always been about the challenge for me. I’m always up for a challenge. I like to find and cook ingredients that aren’t always readily available. If you are shopping seasonally, you are always going to have different ingredients. For example, right now, butternut squash, pumpkins, and all of these root vegetables are coming into their season, and that is exciting. I always find it challenging when you come back to an old recipe and you think ‘I’m going to make that soup I made last year, because I haven’t had the chance to make that in the last 9 months because it’s been out of season.’ I find that both interesting and challenging.
I also think it’s just fundamentally important to cook more vegetables, and by default, I think it’s also important to grow vegetables. In an environmental context, the impact is massive. It costs less to cook vegetables. It’s better for the planet. It’s better for your health. And so I think it’s important to eat more plants in general.
It’s very rare that the recipes I write up will ever say ‘vegan’ in them. In the cookbook I’ve just released now, the word vegan only appears once in the whole book. For somebody who cooks vegan and plant-based, that is rare, it’s an oddity. But I do this because I think eating veg is the key here. Bringing people to the table to cook food that they have already in their household I think is more important to me than anyone trying to cook vegan.
AVD: Why is zero waste such an important theme for you?
MLM: As a country, we live in a throwaway society, particularly here in the global north. Globally, we throw away around a third of the food that we produce. There are over a billion starving people in the world. There are almost a million starving children here in the U.K. who go to school hungry every day. There is roughly £60 of food that is thrown away every month in U.K. households. That’s roughly £800 of your own hard-earned money that is thrown away. It would be better if people rather threw away their money than the actual food, because all that ends up in landfills which creates more CO2 emissions, heating up our planet. This theme and idea of using up the food that is already in your house is so important to me. I didn’t always have money, and I didn’t always have food in my fridge, but when I did, I always tried to use up as much of it as I can, and cook the food I had so I didn’t waste anything. I’m proud to say that this month it’s been 5 years that I have cooked food without any food waste.
We live in a linear economy where we take, we borrow or we use, and then we throw away. And it closes at the end. It just stops. But if we could move to a circular economy, where we can grow, take, reap, use, make and then put it back into the system to come round again, we would be in a much better position as a society, and we’d be living in a much better world. I think it’s important for people to use the food they have because it’s not just food that they are throwing away. It’s money, it’s time, it’s energy, it’s water, it’s transportation, it’s labour, it’s packaging. There is so much that goes into the process of making food that ends up on your plate that just goes to waste, so it's important to consider the food you purchase.
AVD: What in your opinion is the future of food? How do you think we’ll be cooking, eating and talking about it?
MLM: Things need to radically change to make real progress. I know that small steps every day can lead to a bigger impact. I’ve been a part of spreading this message of cooking food you have and eating locally sourced vegetables when possible, but that’s just talking to the low hanging fruit. I think we need to punch higher, and speak to the CEOs, corporate America, corporate businesses and the governments and the people that reign and rule over society, and have that conversation with them more. We should be urging them and pushing them to make radical changes.
I’d love to see more spaces made available to grow food at homes and in schools. I’d love to see more community gardens made available where people can grow the food they need. I think that history will probably repeat itself. This was happening maybe 100 years ago, when we were growing our own food for sustenance, and then we lost that. But maybe we’re moving in the direction of needing to grow our own food again in order to better understand how much effort and energy goes into the process of making food. I hope for the future we start to respect food more, where it comes from, and waste less of it. I hope we start eating more plants because we better know the damage that the meat and animal farming industry can cause. Yeah, it’s a tough one, and it’s an interesting one. It isn’t going to change overnight, but by urging people to cook more of the food that they have, and cook food that they can find and source locally, things will change.
AVD: Do you have a favourite meal to cook? Could you describe it please?
MLM: You know what, I’m going to give you a little exclusive, because I think you said you liked this dish [from the Carousel residency]. I’m going to tell you about the courgette involtini. This is something I like making at the moment. Like I said earlier, it’s about having fun with vegetables, and cooking things to mimic textures and invoke a memory. So, I use the whole courgette for this. The bottom and the top of the courgette is totally edible, and you can consume all of it. Start with peeling your courgettes with either a wide peeler or a mandolin (so that you can get nice thin strips), then grill the courgettes lightly so that you get some nice grill marks on them. Once that’s done, you are going to fill the inside of the courgette strips with almond and ricotta. This you make by simply taking almonds that have been soaked to soften (so that they are easier to blend), and blending that with your ricotta, garlic, nutritional yeast, and some miso, until it is thick. You then take that ricotta mix, and spread it down the centre of the courgette, and that is then rolled up and baked into the oven really lightly, so there is a light browning on top of the courgettes and warmed through. Serve that with a tomato sauce and some parmesan cheese on top. This is a nice, fun dish. It’s a showstopper and a crowd pleaser, so if you want to impress your friends, that’s a good one. That’s something I would love someone to make for me.
AVD: Is there a first memory that you have of wine?
MLM: I can’t believe you’re asking me this. Because actually one of the first memories I think I have of food involves wine. My mother is French, and my dad is Italian. I remember being 5 years old and my mother would walk me up the street to this guy who used to live on this dead end near our house. This old guy, I’m going to say he was 90 (he was an old, old, old Italian guy), he was growing grapes above his garage where he parked his car, and I remember the grapes hanging over it. I thought, this is interesting, you don’t see this on our street much, and I remember my mum taking me up there and collecting grapes, and coming back home and she would then tell me she was making juice. I remember my mum would put me in these containers and I would smash up these grapes with my feet. I literally watched the process of wine being made from start to finish at the age of 5, and that’s when I had my first sip of wine. She would syphon it from one barrel to another barrel, and I remember it just being such a fun process to see and witness as a kid growing up. There was wine spilling wine all over her face, and as a kid, I remember thinking that was really funny. That’s my earliest memory of wine, aged 5. I’d really love to make wine some day.
