Daniel Clifford
Ask any serious gastronome to name Cambridge’s finest restaurant, and their answer will invariably be the same: it has to be Midsummer House.
Sitting peacefully by the river on the shoulder of Midsummer Common, the elegant establishment is run by chef patron Daniel Clifford, whose wonderfully inventive menus have seen it win two Michelin stars – an honour shared by just 20 other restaurants in the UK. Could a third star be on the cards?
“It’s an amazing accolade,” admits the 44-year-old, sipping tea from an oversized Darth Vader mug. “We want three, I’m not going to lie. I got one, I wasn’t content; I think I got two because I was so scared of losing my first. Then you say to yourself ‘What can we do to get three?’ And it gives you that passion to drive and drive.
“In a way, my biggest fear is getting three stars – because what do you push for then?”
Just four UK restaurants currently boast the maximum three Michelin stars, but if anyone can join them, it’s Midsummer House. Clifford is famed for his culinary creativity, and has a special kitchen on site where new dishes are conjured up; his current project is an intriguing-sounding pud inspired by a trip to a Thai restaurant in Ely.
“It wasn’t a brilliant restaurant, but you taste these flavours and something triggers in your head, and you say to yourself ‘Why don’t we make that into a dessert instead of making it savoury?’ Hence a new creation involving chocolate and. . . coriander. “People either love or hate coriander,” he grins. “My restaurant manager hates it. Hates it! But if I can get him to eat it and enjoy it, then I’ve achieved something. That’s what we set out to do here.”
Inspiration, it seems, strikes him in the strangest of places. “One of the best dishes we ever did came from me going to the cinema with my wife. She had nachos and I had popcorn, and we were sharing, and I thought ‘Woah, the chilli with the popcorn really works!’ We ended up making a sweetcorn ice cream, a ham hock ravioli, a popcorn parfait, a chilli jam – it all came together, purely inspired by a Star Wars film’.”
But, he insists, the restaurant’s appeal isn’t just the food. “I want people to come here and be blown away by it. I want people to walk away from Midsummer and say ‘That was an amazing experience’. Not just an amazing meal, but an amazing experience that comes with the service, the location, the crockery, the interior. It’s a package, and you’re constantly trying to evolve that.”
Growing up in Canterbury, Clifford was 13 and off school with a broken leg when his stepmum introduced him to cooking. For the dyslexic schoolboy who struggled in the classroom, it was a revelation.
“I hated school with a passion,” he says. “If someone can’t read and write it doesn’t mean they’re stupid, it means they have other skills. But school compresses you. What I found in the kitchen was creativity. You don’t need to be able to read and write, you just need your hands, and your brain, and to look at things in a different way.”
After catering college he took a job at the city’s best hotel, but just two years later the head chef admitted that there was nothing more he could teach his young protegé. “I was a sponge. I was absolutely obsessed with it,” he shrugs. “Cooking for me was like being in an orchestra. For two or three hours of the evening, this was the happiest place you could ever be.”
He went on to work for some of the best chefs in the business, both in the UK and France, before taking over Midsummer House in 1998. His first Michelin star was awarded in 2002, the second six years later.
Inevitably, TV beckoned. Clifford was a winner in BBC Two’s Great British Menu in both 2012 and 2013, and he’s been invited to be a judge every year since. But he’s candid about his motives: “You do the TV so you can put bums on seats here, so that you can make money and invest it back into the business so you can move it forward.”
He’s currently working on a book to mark his 20 years at Midsummer House next year: part life story, part recipe book, it features chapters guest-written by some of his former staff, including Mark Poynton, chef patron of Michelin-starred Alimentum in Hills Road. “We’ve created more Michelin-starred chefs out of this kitchen than any other restaurant in the country,” says Clifford, proudly. “Seven of them.
“You’ve got to embrace your staff, because at the end of the day they are the future of this industry. This is a family to me, that’s why I love it.”
So after nearly two decades at the helm, is he considering hanging up his whites? “No. I can’t imagine not coming here in the morning and lighting the stove. I don’t know what else I’d do now. I’ve had offers to move, but I love Cambridge, I love being here. I’ve got everything I want.
“It’s cost me a lot,” he admits. “I have three kids with my ex-wife, I’ve got another partner I’m not with that I’ve got two kids with; I’m still here every single day, from half past eight in the morning until 11 o’clock at night. I’m still obsessed with it.
“But I have this vision of where I want this restaurant to be. I want my kids to be able to turn around and understand why I wasn’t at home. I want them to understand why I’m proud that I’m leaving a legacy for them.
“I don’t see this as a job. This is what I love to do. This is my life.”
The stellar process
In 1900, French tyre manufacturer Michelin began producing a guide for motorists, including ideas about where to eat. By 1926 they were awarding stars to particularly good restaurants.
Michelin stars are awarded for the food alone, by reviewers who eat there anonymously.
One star indicates a very good restaurant, worth stopping off from your journey to visit. Two stars suggest it’s worth a detour, offering skilfully-prepared dishes of outstanding quality. And three stars? An exceptional restaurant, worthy of a special journey.
In the 2017 edition, Great Britain and Ireland feature 147 one-star restaurants, 21 with two stars and just four with three stars.
An edited version of this feature appeared in Cambridge Magazine in November 2017. (c) Cambridge News