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Two chefs lift the lid on the expensive business of creating menus they love

Asparagus, smoked emulsion, watercress, sourdough (starter, above) at Apricity , London W1

“It’s easy to assume vegetable dishes should be cheaper than meat,” says chef-patron Chantelle Nicholson . “Vegetables usually are, but vegetable dishes are more labour-intensive. It’s simple to slap a steak on the grill, but you can’t just plate up a carrot.

“This dish is interesting, because asparagus can actually be more expensive than some proteins. It costs between £15 and £20 a kilo (it was £9/kg not so long ago), mainly because it’s harvested by hand and the cost of labour has risen. It’s expensive even before you start the prep, then we clean them and chop off their woody ends to lacto-ferment, so we can use them elsewhere. We blanch and quickly cool the stalks, then make the smoked emulsion, fried breadcrumbs (using the sourdough we bake inhouse) and watercress puree. The emulsion is made from the aquafaba left over from pressure cooking chickpeas, and is blended with smoked rapeseed oil from Duchy farm. The cost of rapeseed oil has gone up because of the war in Ukraine, but because ours is British, it has remained more stable.

“Overall, the ingredients for this dish are around £3, but the labour, energy and everything else comes to £56 – which, of course, we divide across the whole menu.

“There are so many random costs that nobody sees: things like having our extraction chimney cleaned twice a year, which is tall because we’re in central London, so we need to rent a cherry picker. This makes our annual extraction cleaning bill about £4,000. Add fire alarm maintenance, fire suppression systems and testing, and that’s £8,000. Simply putting tables and chairs outside my restaurant means paying £700 a year to the council. We try to ensure value for money, and use only the utilities we need, but when bills go up in people’s homes, as they have, ours go up exponentially higher.”