Bread Street Kitchen

Wood Stone is on the menu

Merrill Bevan,  VP • International Sales & Team

They say one cannot live on bread alone but one can most definitely live – in high epicurean style – on Bread Street Kitchen (@breadstkitchen).  We know this to be a fact because we had a chance to dine at Gordon’s newest restaurant in London this past week.  To say it was good would be about the same degree of understatement as saying “London has a little history”.  It was fantastic.

Bread Street impressed from the moment we stepped out of our cab and on to the curb out front where you could see the Wood Stone Bistro 4343 through the floor to ceiling glass windows of the first floor.   The restaurant, which is split into a ground floor bar and main floor dining room, is in a sleek and modern new shopping development called One New Change which includes many other great restaurants including Jamie Oliver and Adam Perry Lang’s Barbecoa.

Chef Simon Gregory (@chefgregory01) greeted us royally and gave us the Chef’s tour.  He was beyond gracious with his time and his staff took that cue through the entire meal.  It was one of the friendliest dining experiences we’ve had in a long time.  In terms of design the restaurant has an industrial-chic meets electric-elegant feel that combines effectively to make if feel, surprisingly, both very vibrant and welcoming at the same time.  They take reservations to seat 120 but then offer a generous community seating side to the restaurant that Chef Gregory assured us would fill up very quickly and he was proven right by the time our appetizers arrived.  That interesting approach to the seating added, for us, a sense of casual spontaneity to the restaurant’s overall vibe.  This was a space that has many things going on at different levels.

We then got to walk the long open kitchen of the main floor dining room.  There we saw the second Wood Stone oven of the evening, a Mt. Baker 6’, just one station down from the Josper.

The delicious meal started with a couple items from the Raw Bar, the Stone Bass Fillet Carpaccio being so good we were compelled to interrupt the conversation of the slightly later arriving table next to us to tell them they just had to indulge in the same.  After they tried theirs we were invited to interrupt them at will.  Then we had a wonderful combination of items from the Josper grill and our two ovens. There was even a section of the menu simply titled “Wood Stone” of which you shouldn’t miss the starters of the Crispy Pig’s Head (wild name, great dish!), the Tamarind Chicken Wings or the main oven Roasted Lobster.  From the Josper we had a perfectly grilled Aberdeen Angus rib-eye with a beef marrowbone topping. It was delicious.

Thank to Chef Simon and the Bread Street team from Wood Stone!

Regional Sales Manager, Phil Eaton

“We are not afraid of Wood”

Those were the words that Robert and Corey Nyman countered when I asked them if they realized that the Fire Deck 9660 (WS-FD-9660) they inherited at Aperitif restaurant in Woodbury, Minnesota was entirely wood-fired.

Robert and Corey are the principals of The Nyman Group a Scottsdale, (Arizona based management – concept development – consulting agency) who inherited an unopened restaurant space in Minnesota. The restaurant came with a collection of Wood Stone solid-fuel equipment including the Fire Deck oven already mentioned and a rotisserie/ broiler.

I spent two days with them and their staff before opening night on Saturday, Jan 30th. A family atmosphere filled the entire restaurant during my time there. Robert and Corey are seasoned operators who assembled a skilled and enthusiastic staff to open a restaurant in this challenging economy. They inherited the only completely wood-fired Fire Deck 9660 that Wood Stone has ever built. Talk about intimidating. I had no idea how this piece of equipment would respond but I should have known, its a Wood Stone and an amazing piece of equipment to stand in front of.

The oven held a consistent temperature of around 575 degrees with a medium sized fire on one side of the oven. Consistent 3-4 min pizzas, artisan breads, whole Asian snapper, salt crusted bass, it was an awesome display of diversity in the oven. The chefs were excited to use the oven and their creative juices started flowing as the day went on. It was really neat to see someone be excited about cooking with wood. The restaurant was built and outfitted by another group and the Nyman group came in to get it open and operating. They inherited a lot of challenges and rose to the occasion. Check them out!

http://thenymangroup.com/

http://aperitifrestaurant.com/

Check out their video on Facebook!