This week we’re joined by Harneet Baweja: restaurateur, operator, and the man behind some of London’s most-loved restaurants. Over the last decade he’s built an absurdly good line-up: Gunpowder, Empire Empire, Moi et Toi, Fortune Fried Chicken, and the recently opened Master Jackie back in his hometown of Kolkata.

It’s a 10-year anniversary conversation with proper bite. Harneet talks about celebrating Gunpowder’s first decade by doing something borderline outrageous: rolling back the menu to 2015 prices, with some dishes down around 70%. It’s not a stunt. It’s a clear-eyed look at what restaurants are up against right now, and what it takes to pull off something generous without collapsing, from suppliers pitching in to the team simply trying to keep the wheels turning.

You also get the origin story that explains everything: the tiny Spitalfields site, the chaos of opening, doing everything yourself, and the scrappy early days that shaped how he runs a business now. Harneet unpacks what it was like trying to convince London that Indian food could sit outside the old stereotypes, and how a community of regulars, critics, and champions helped put Gunpowder on the map. He’s funny, blunt, and refreshingly unpolished about the luck, the grind, and the moments that could have gone either way.

Harneet also runs through his actual go-to orders and favourite spots, the drinks he really wants (whiskey, barely any water), his love for Old Monk rum, and the ultimate nibbles he’d put out for friends, from the rasam bomb to those famous lamb chops. There’s Kolkata food intel, Chinatown history, late-night favourites, nightmare service stories, and a whole lot of heart underneath the swagger.

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Ben Benton is usually the man behind the mic, but this week the Go-To Food Podcast flips the script. In a special episode, Ben steps into the hot seat as the guest to celebrate something properly massive: his debut book, All You Can Eat: The Search for a New British Menu.

Before food took over his life, Ben had already lived a few careers. He started out in the City during the financial crash, walked away from it, then poured everything into launching a clothing brand, only for it to collapse and leave him bankrupt. That brutal reset sent him into kitchens, where he cut his teeth at Margot Henderson’s Rochelle Canteen and went on to work for Stevie Parle at The Dock Kitchen, learning the reality of food from the inside out.

Since then, he’s cooked, written, tested and built menus for some of the most influential names in modern food, from Meera Sodha to Max Halley, stacking up years of chaos, graft, disasters and hard-won knowledge along the way. Now all of that experience feeds into a mad, funny, addictive road trip around Britain, chasing what people actually eat when you are not filtering it through hype or press releases.

All of that lived experience pours directly into All You Can Eat: The Search for a New British Menu, a book that is less about best restaurants and more about what Britain actually eats. Ben drives the length of the country in a car, deliberately avoiding the obvious destinations and big-name kitchens, stopping instead at markets, roadside cafés, seaside towns, village shops and places you would normally drive straight past. Along the way he eats seafood pulled straight from cold water, jollof rice served far from any food trend, kebabs, curries, faggots and peas, smoked fish, market sandwiches and meals that are brilliant, baffling, occasionally awful and often unexpectedly moving. The result is a funny, honest and sharply observed portrait of modern Britain, told through food, where regional habits, migration, class, comfort and taste collide. It is a travelogue, a memoir and a food book rolled into one, capturing the chaos, boredom, joy and small moments of connection that come from eating your way through a country without a plan.

PRE ORDER IT NOW - https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1805221523?psc=1&smid=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&ref_=chk_typ_imgToDp

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This week on The Go-To Food Podcast, we are joined by Neil Rankin, the chef behind some of London’s most talked-about restaurants: Pitt Cue, John Salt, Smokehouse, Bad Egg and, of course, Temper. We trace the slightly unconventional route that took him from a sandwich business and a proper career wobble into Michelin kitchens, then on to finding his true groove via BBQ, fire-cooking and big, bold flavours.

Neil Rankin speaks candidly about the darker realities of the industry. Bullying versus brutality, kitchens that nearly broke him, and the moments where power, ego and silence caused lasting damage. There are stories here that are genuinely shocking, including one workplace experience he describes as the worst of his life, and others that reveal how close he came to walking away altogether.

We also get into the headlines. Neil talks about publicly calling out Gordon Ramsay and Marco Pierre White, what prompted it, and why he still stands by the wider point, even if the internet reaction was slightly more chaotic than intended. It is candid, funny in places, and full of the kind of context you only get from someone who has been in the middle of it.

Neil is brilliant on what it actually takes to build hit restaurants, and what people never see. The reality of learning fast, long shifts, the difference between hard kitchens and outright bullying, and how a good head chef can change everything.

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