Ones to watch: Kemal Demirasal
Though he was a professional windsurfer until he was 25, winning six national championships in Turkey, after a change of career Kemal Demirasal quickly became a pioneer of the country’s fine dining scene with restaurants Barbun and the acclaimed Alancha. Today, he heads up modern ocakbasi restaurant The Counter in Notting Hill, where he celebrates authentic south-eastern Anatolian cooking.
Ones to watch: Kemal Demirasal
Though he was a professional windsurfer until he was 25, winning six national championships in Turkey, after a change of career Kemal Demirasal quickly became a pioneer of the country’s fine dining scene with restaurants Barbun and the acclaimed Alancha. Today, he heads up modern ocakbasi restaurant The Counter in Notting Hill, where he celebrates authentic south-eastern Anatolian cooking.
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Ones to watchWe quite often ask chefs what they did before they found their way into a professional kitchen; after all, while some pursue cooking straight out of school, others find it later on. It’s not every day, though, that the answer is professional, six-time national champion winning windsurfing, as is the case for Kemal Demirasal. Starting at just seven, he followed in the footsteps of his sister and father, fellow national windsurfers in their native Turkey. Though his grandfather and mother were chefs, his mum running a local restaurant, he didn't see cooking as a career until he began to think more seriously about his long-term plans. ‘I was just born into windsurfing,’ he says. ‘I enjoyed it and had success, but windsurfing wasn’t really a decision, it was just something that I did. When I was twenty-five I started thinking ‘what do I want to do in life?’.’
He dabbled with design and studied economics, but soon realised the creativity of gastronomy was his calling. His mind made up, in 2007 he retired his sails. ‘With cooking, it has this design part where you are creating,’ he nods. ‘It just felt like the right decision, and it was quick.’ Though a commis chef or kitchen porter role might have seemed like an apt first step, that's not quite how things panned out. Instead, in 2009, Kemal jumped in at the deep end, opening his first restaurant Barbun in Alaçati, on the country's west coast. ‘It was bittersweet, there were ups and downs,’ he laughs. ‘It was good because the place where I lived was a very seasonal place, there were six months of nothing and six months which were busy. The first year was a learning curve. In the quiet six months I was using the restaurant more like a lab. I had lots of books and was reading loads – it was like a school where I did my own training.’ Focusing on area's fantastic seafood (the restaurant's name was taken from the Turkish word for red mullet, which is prized locally), Kemal says the cooking was less of a challenge – he'd grown up by the sea, and grilling fish on the mangal was part of his childhood. Translating that to fifty-plus people presented its obstacles, of course, but it was the difficulties of running a business that took longer to get to grips with.
At the time, the fine dining scene in Turkey was evolving and, in order to be at its forefront, Kemal embarked on a culinary pilgrimage around the world, tasting food from chefs at the top of their game. ‘I wanted to travel around the 50 best, in San Sebastian, the Nordic countries, all over Europe,’ he says. ‘I saw the scope of the service, the quality, the precision, how their teams worked and their organisation in the back of house. I was just trying to understand what they were doing, and I started to implement that quality as my philosophy.’ He realised that laid-back Barbun wasn’t the right restaurant to take to the next level and in 2013 opened Alancha in Istanbul, an avant-garde restaurant celebrating Anatolian cuisine (though the region focuses on Turkey, and Istanbul in particular, it also includes parts of Syria, Greece, Armenia, Georgia, Bulgaria, Iran and Iraq), which won praise from the likes of World’s 50 Best Discovery Series, the New York Times and Financial Times. ‘We could start serving a tasting menu, implement what I had learned and do what I really wanted to do,’ he says. ‘There are seven regions in Anatolia, and our tasting menu celebrated those.’ It was, Kemal says, a busy time. He also launched restaurant ceramics business YEK Design (his wife is a ceramics artist, and they hope to expand into the UK soon), created restaurant industry talks platform PeakTalks and presented Çirak, a 13-episode gastronomy documentary on Turkish national TV, becoming a familiar face around the country.
But five years ago, with unrest in Turkey making life unsettled, he moved his young family to London, taking on a consultant role and working out of a test kitchen in Shoreditch to launch restaurant concepts (including the Aegean YEK in London), before pivoting to offer a catering service during Covid. As the country emerged from the pandemic, work began on ocakbasi restaurant The Counter, which opened in Notting Hill last summer. Having been left unimpressed by some of the south-eastern Anatolian cooking in London, his goal was to serve the region's food as it should be. His specific sourcing sees many of his ingredients imported directly from suppliers in Turkey's south-east. ‘When I came to London, there were restaurants doing south-eastern Turkish food but they were not doing it the way it was meant to be done,’ he says. ‘It was a pile of meat on a rice bed, and it felt like it was more about quantity than quality. We want to show south-eastern Turkish cuisine how it should be done, served in a modest and humble way.' Starters and small plates at The Counter include kibbeh which are poached rather than fried, vine leaves salad and white chocolate babaganoush, while larger dishes include charcoal grilled beef skewers and lamb chops. Ultimately, Kemal hopes to take kebabs back to their source and give them, he laughs, a bit of sex appeal.
It's early days, and Kemal is happy bedding in The Counter before looking to what's next. But his ambitious spirit shines through, and he knows that one restaurant isn't enough – whether he hopes to one day have two or three restaurants, or five or ten, he doesn't know. Maybe, he says, he'll open the west Turkey answer to his London debut and go back to his roots (The Counter By the Sea, perhaps, he smiles). Whatever comes next, we’re confident Kemal Demirasal will one day deservedly be as much of a household name here as he is in Turkey.
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