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We spoke to Jean Delport, Executive Chef at Michelin Green Star Restaurant Interlude, about seasonal cooking and responsible sourcing.
Restaurant Interlude strikes a confident balance between modern dining and genuine hospitality. With a clear focus on seasonal ingredients and precise execution, the kitchen delivers dishes that are thoughtfully composed, flavour-led and consistently well judged. Interludes Michelin green star recognition reflects a clear and credible commitment to responsible sourcing, low-waste practices and a more considered approach to modern dining. Find out more behind Interlude's story in a quick bite interview with Executive Chef, Jean Delport below!
Getting into the kitchens was a bit of a chance, my mum had quite a bad back when I was growing up and I did a lot of cooking at home, I started taking a lot more responsibility in cooking dinner every time I got home from school. I started enjoying it, and then I started looking at baking, pastries and just keeping myself busy. At 16, I decided I wanted to purse cooking, and essentially I just jumped straight into it. It's been a hard slog getting through, but it's been enjoyable and very rewarding at times.
Cooking has really evolved, even in my short career, it has come a really long way. When you are young, you absorb the places that you submerse yourself in, so thats really key. I worked under an English chef called Dan Evans, and he worked in the middle of London during the 70's and 80's, with a Michelin Star background, he showcased to me how amazing seasonal produce is, how important it is to keep things fresh, changing and just proper cooking techniques, having everything in from scratch and producing everything yourself, and creating just ultimately tasty food. That was my first introduction and where I really fell in love with the English style of cooking. Thats had a massive influence for me, because since then I have always looked up to the UK and the rest of Europe and really studied the whole food scene.
Yeah so describing my cooking style is quite tricky I guess, as we have picked up a lot of different things! Essentially, for me, it's humble, modern, but still using my heritage as much as I can, with just utilising what's around us from a farming, foraging aspect.
I think one of the proudest moments I've had is when we won our star, I think for me, that was my lifelong dream, and we were able to achieve that within 10 months. That was a big bucket list moment, and it gave me that confidence to know that we are doing the right thing.
What I like about Woods from my side, besides it being a super system that economical, friendly to use, really fast, the service behind the scenes is extremely friendly, it's very transparent, and we can get things done quickly, which is obviously essential in my everyday life. Very rarely is there any mistakes, and if there is any issues, Woods are very quick to rectify.
Sustainability for myself and for Interlude is a bigger scale thing, we've got Leonardslee Gardens which is 240 acres, so we really want to embrace that, so essentially, we need to be able to make this whole land work for ourselves, and sustainability was one of the main factors for that, so working with what we have, alongside new practices and putting them into Interlude was one of the things that we really wanted to drive back home onto this estate back in 2018. Its taken a long time and we've kind of grown into our concept, but it stays extremely important for us.
