Liz
Liz is chef patron and owner of HOME restaurant in Leeds.
Her friend Joshua died in 2022.
“Joshua just walked into the restaurant one day and wanted to put some art on the walls.
I wasn’t there but he left his details. I rang him up and we clicked. We were soulmates. It was as simple as that.
We talked a lot about the downsides of being a creative. How disappointing and heartbreaking it can be. You’re always going to have some angst; you have to live with it, expect it. We’d be super-bolshy - like, “Fuck you, we’re going to do what we want!”
To be honest though, I’d always held back a bit.
When I got the Masterchef phone call, my mum had just died. It was an unusual set of circumstances and coincidences and I made it significant.
But in 2020, we were on a bit of a hamster wheel. The restaurant had become more design-led rather than artistically-led. I was worried about putting my entire creative self out into the world.
After Joshua died, I had to express what I felt. I didn’t filter, didn’t edit, didn’t worry.
The whole team was so invested. We all knew what it was going to mean to put on this culinary exhibition.
He was always saying, ‘I just want to inspire one person to be themselves.’ I was definitely that one person. He transformed my whole way of being.
There’s part of me that thinks - if I ever get to a point where I can deal with it, does that mean I don’t love him any more?
I’d close my eyes and think of him and all the light he brought to my life. And then I’d open my eyes and everything was cold and dark and desolate.
It felt like I was stuck somewhere between the love and the loss.
So that last menu of the year - Stuck Somewhere Between - was about contrasts.
Putting opposites together side by side in one dish. Food that emphasised the yin and yang in so many situations. Painful and joyful.
“I needed to do it.
And it transformed the way I feel about what I want to do in future.”
I was camping on a beach. I had a fire going and I was thinking about Joshua. He always felt better by the sea. I was eating stroopwafels and the smokiness of the fire infused the stroopwafel.
It inspired a dish that reminded me of him. I used black cherry and molasses sorbet and kofi-infused caramel and coal oil and black sesame.
There are thousands of chefs turning out food that looks pretty on a plate. There’s nothing wrong with that. But put them side by side and you wouldn’t be able to tell who cooked what.
I’d never intended to do a year of food dedicated to Joshua. Home isn’t a tribute restaurant. But I’d accidentally started creating things that looked like no one else’s food.
There’s so much identity in these dishes.
In fine dining, we’ll always get criticism from people saying it’s pretentious and ridiculous. So to have a menu based on this as well as all the other pretentious stuff…well.
But I honestly didn’t care. It was the most true representation of what I wanted to communicate. And I did it with power. With total honesty. With love.
Quite frankly, I couldn’t give a flying fuck what anyone else thought. It meant the world to me to be able to commemorate the life of someone who was so special.
I needed to do it. And it transformed the way I feel about what I want to do in future.
If we were to delete the things that make us sad, we wouldn’t be the people we are.
I think there’s something beautiful about being broken.”