Since opening in 2016, Quayside restaurant Dobson & Parnell has earned an excellent reputation for its innovative food, attention to detail and general excellence, and has the awards to prove it. It joined Hinnies and Blackfriars in Andy Hook’s Hooked On group and was a collaboration with impressive, innovative young chef Troy Terrington, one of the best-regarded chefs in the region, who moved from Blackfriars to this new venture.
Dobson & Parnell Head Chef Troy Terrington
The emphasis is on local, seasonal produce so the menu is in constant flux, and the kitchen also specialises in a series of often not widely-used preservation techniques. While there is a daily set menu and they offer a formidable Sunday lunch, it’s the tasting menus that are at the forefront of what Dobson & Parnell does - five or seven course journeys into flavour that can take three hours to enjoy.
We spoke to Troy, a man whose love for what he does is evident throughout, about the ethos behind the restaurant and how things work behind the scenes. We started by asking if there was a key idea behind the launch of Dobson & Parnell.
“Firstly, we just wanted to offer good food!”, Troy explains, “but also when we started we really wanted to really focus on how the wine worked with the food as well, so we set out with the intention of having quite a comprehensive wine list. We’ve since adapted that and moved on to tasting menus with wine pairings. So it still follows that initial idea but it suits the style of food we offer more.”
While a lot of restaurants offer tasting menus that claim to tell a story or have a theme, Troy explains that for Dobson & Parnell, it’s simply all about the seasons. “It loosely follows the seasons rather than a storytelling kind of thing. We’re quite an open-minded kitchen in the sense that we’re not afraid to try flavours that are outside what you’d call modern British cuisine, so we’ll quite happily pick and steal techniques from Asia or Scandinavia or Africa to fit our menu and do it in a style that is representative of the local produce. We’re more of a melting pot of ideas and flavours and we tailor it to what we can source locally.”
Troy’s kitchen employs a range of preservation techniques - such as curing, smoking, salting, brining and fermenting - and it seems these are again all about the seasons. “We use them to stretch the seasons as much as we can, really. It enables us to use things that are typically not in season with other things that are. For instance, any amount of fermented onions or tomatoes or carrots, their flavour can lend itself well to things that aren’t in season. So we’ll get tomatoes at the end of summer going into autumn, we’ll get a good crop and then we’ll try and do as much we can to preserve that flavour throughout the autumn and stretch it into winter, it can really lighten dishes up that are typically quite heavy around the colder months.”
The tasting menu – which can include everything from salt aged beef tartare, pine, shallot and smoked cod’s roe gougère to salt baked celeriac – varies as produce becomes available. “We don’t go for a wholesale change. We change dishes as and when the season starts to drop out. So if you break a season down into a quarter of a year, a dish would generally have a month or so on the menu and we’ll just cycle them in and out, it works well like that. And the set menu changes every month.”
Troy is quite self-deprecating when it comes to the numerous awards and excellent reviews the restaurant has accrued in its lifetime. “I’m not too sure what we’re doing right - I think we’re very fortunate that we have a good position in terms of how people perceive our restaurant. We do seem to come quite highly recommended, which definitely helps. And I guess not tying ourselves down to any particular thing and simply cooking what myself and my chefs in the kitchen enjoy to eat keeps it interesting…”
Like most hospitality businesses, the last few years have been tough so at the moment, Dobson & Parnell is focussed on consolidating what they do well. "For the meantime – and I’m sure a lot of restaurants are in the same boat at the moment – we’re just happy to keep the doors open and the lights on, and have 20 odd staff gainfully employed.” Troy explains. “But we do want to push ourselves as much as we can, and certainly I have a young ambitious team who are hungry for challenges. So it puts me in a nice position because it’s not just me that drives the food side of things, they want to push and challenge as well. It’s good, and I’m open to that.”
It's traditional when we speak to chefs to ask what the one dish is that any new diner should try, so we asked Troy what on the current menu best represents what Dobson & Parnell is all about. “Presently I would say the scallop dish on the tasting menu. It showcases the absolutely fantastic hand-dived Orkney scallops for one, an amazing fresh produce. They’re paired with a Singapore chili crab sauce done in the style of a bisque, so it mixes French technique with the flavours you’d get from Singapore chili crab. It shows our preservation techniques, so it mixes quite a lot of things that I’m pleased we do here - pinching other countries’ flavours and mixing them with our own, basically! But it’s quite representative of the way we view food on our tasting menu.“
Dobson & Parnell is open from Wednesday to Saturday for dinner and from Thursday to Sunday for lunch. Find out more on their website here.
