Styling: Andie Redman. Photograph: Pål Hansen/The Observer
Poppadoms or bread? The secret ingredient. The Great Benito. The genie waiter. If any of that makes sense to you, then you might be responsible for one of the 120m downloads of the megahit food-comedy podcast Off Menu. For the past five years, comedians James Acaster and Ed Gamble have invited celebrity guests, including Florence Pugh, Jamie Oliver, Paul Mescal, Yotam Ottolenghi, Lily Allen and Miriam Margolyes, to visit their imaginary dream restaurant, where they discuss and then choose their all-time favourite starter, main, dessert, drinks and sundries. It is Desert Island Discs for dining, with a side serving of surreal humour.
“The first time we did a live episode, [comedian] Isy Suttie chose Thai red curry for her main, and there was a round of applause,” says Gamble, fresh from tucking into the meatballs for OFM’s photoshoot riffing on the Lady and the Tramp spaghetti scene. “So weird. If you didn’t know what this was, and you were just strolling past the Southbank Centre, and you heard someone go, ‘Thai red curry’, and everyone starts clapping …”
Acaster got the audience involved in a Thai green curry v Thai red curry cheer-off. “Green was the favourite. But the Thai red curry people were just very happy that it got a shout-out, because it never does.” Off Menu’s fans love its catchphrases, such as when Acaster randomly picks a moment to shout at a guest to choose poppadoms or bread. “When I shout, ‘poppadoms or bread?’, they’ll applaud it. If Ed starts pushing things towards cheese and biscuits, they love that stuff. Notoriously with standup, I can throw my toys out of the pram if the audience aren’t what I want them to be, and with the podcast, you just don’t really get that.”
Off Menu is about to go live again on its first tour, a sellout, 15-date run that includes two nights at the Royal Albert Hall. Both comedians have seen their stars rising over the past few years, from Live at the Apollo to the Netflix/Prime TV specials to Taskmaster (Gamble won, Acaster didn’t), and both are TV regulars now, though the less said about Acaster’s stint on The Great Stand Up To Cancer Bake Off, the better.
As a duo, though, their warmth and offbeat rapport powers Off Menu, which began in December 2018 – rapper Scroobius Pip was the first guest. Acaster and Gamble have been friends since 2010 or 2011, depending who you ask, when they were both newish standups making their way around the comedy circuit. Gamble says they met at a club in London, though Acaster thinks it was in Cardiff. “That was a gig called Hahaha at the Hawaiian,” recalls Gamble, “and it was a Hawaiian-themed bar in Cardiff. It was £2 for a ticket and as part of the ticket price, you got an all you can eat Chinese buffet.”
How did friendship blossom? “Gradually,” says Acaster. “By 2013, I was living in your house.”
“So, quickly,” quips Gamble. “The opposite of what James said.”
“Ed and Nish Kumar went to university together, and my memory of becoming friends with you guys is that you decided it would be funny to pretend to be my friend before we really got to know each other very well,” says Acaster. “So, I would turn up at things, and they would call me their best friend and sing songs about being best friends together. And I would respond very grumpily, half for a joke and half because I was like, ‘fuck these guys’. And it just became a thing eventually, where I thought, I guess I am their best friend now.”
The realisation that they shared an interest in food came later. Gamble has a book out soon called Glutton: The Multi-Course Life of a Very Greedy Boy – and has always enjoyed eating well, but Acaster, who regularly riffs on his love of sweet desserts, says it took him longer to start to think about it at all. “When I say I think about what I eat, I don’t mean healthy food, I mean actually thinking, I’ve got to eat today, and that might as well be something that I like, rather than just going ‘fuck it’, and getting a meal deal.”
Whenever he visits somewhere new, Gamble plans where he’s going to eat after heavy research, and he inspired Acaster to do the same when he was on tour or working away from home. “It became a favourite subject to talk about, like, I’m working in Newcastle, what do you eat when you’re here?” says Acaster. Gamble says they’re both quite obsessive by nature. “If we decide we like something, we tend to hyper focus on it, and we both happened to do that with food at the same time,” he says.
They took their personal chats about the best gelato they’d ever had, for example, and realised it might make a good podcast. “We like a bit of music, enjoy lists, greatest of all time stuff, so with food, it wasn’t too difficult for it to evolve into this dream meal idea,” says Acaster. Gamble texted Acaster to suggest the food podcast. “And James immediately texted back saying, we could call it Off Menu and then sent through the full concept.”
Listening back to the first episode, it’s remarkable how little has changed. Everything is there, from the secret ingredient, an item Acaster and Gamble choose but which the guest must avoid mentioning – even though they don’t know what it is – or else they’re thrown out, to the genie waiter, a role Acaster assumes, though in the surreal world of the dream restaurant, nothing is fixed in place.
“We both came up with ideas for concepts and different things to add on,” says Acaster.
“Well, some of the things, you just added on in the first recording without asking,” says Gamble.
“Some I didn’t know were going to happen. Some were accidental.”
“The genie?”
“I asked about that! I did ask.”
“During the recording.”
“Beforehand, but you and the Great Benito [how they refer to producer Ben, a regular presence on the pod, though a silent one] said it could get confusing. I said, just let me try it for the first one.”
“To be fair, you say it at the beginning and it always gets completely dropped throughout the episode …”
For a while, Ainsley Harriot and Kathy Burke were top of their most-wanted guest wishlist, but as both have done it, who do they want now?
“Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson is currently number one,” says Acaster. Why? “He’s just the greatest. I did not love wrestling as a teenager but The Rock is genuinely one of my biggest inspirations in terms of comedy persona. I’ve never met anyone who’s like, ‘I hate The Rock’. Pretty much everyone likes him, so I think it would be an exciting episode for everybody. We could ask him about, not just wrestling, but Moana.” How are negotiations going? “I’m not sure they exist,” laughs Gamble.
Sometimes the interviews reveal more about the person than you might expect from your standard celebrity chat. Darjeeling Express chef/owner Asma Khan talked at length about India, Britain, patriarchy, identity and family (“She does these amazing long speeches and then there’s a little pause and you hear one of us go, ‘Right, so, main course?’” says Gamble). Some guests have talked about eating disorders.
Why is food such a revealing conversation subject? “It’s the ultimate universal topic,” says Gamble. “But people in the public eye rarely talk about it. Often, you’ll be eating something that you think is completely normal, and then you’ll speak to someone else, and they’ll go, ‘What are you talking about? That’s absolutely insane.’ It’s so intertwined with personalities. Also, some people have just got ridiculous views on food.”
Who surprised them? “I just think way more people are mad than you give them credit for. When we were speaking to Serge [Pizzorno, singer] from Kasabian, it emerged that when he was a kid, he couldn’t eat if there was a magician on the telly. Things like that are complete left turns and when something like that happens, I love it,” Gamble continues.
Acaster and Gamble thought they had 10 episodes of Off Menu in them, but the podcast is still going strong, even though both are considerably busier than they were. Gamble is touring, has written his memoir (“Memoir’s a very big word for it, it’s more weighted towards the food than the memoir”) and is a judge on Great British Menu. Acaster is also touring, releasing music with the collaborations project Temps, and for a brief moment,he was rumoured to be replacing Matt Lucas as the host of The Great British Bake Off. “For no reason!” he says. “There had been no conversations, nor should there have been. It was just people going, who’s associated with Bake Off already? That guy who was really bad at baking,” he says. (He did not win star baker on his celebrity episode.) He is also in the next Ghostbusters movie, which he is now filming, though he swears he can’t tell me anything about it. “They’re very, very strict about it. I’m scared. I’m the least experienced one on set, I can’t be the one who spills the beans,” he says. Gambles teases him: “I really had you down as the guy who would slip up and give away details,” he says.
Recording Off Menu is restricted to the rare days every month when the two of them and the Great Benito are free. Sometimes they’ll record multiple episodes in a day. “It means that if we’ve only got two days in a month where we can both do it, we miss out on some massive guests,” says Gamble, but he won’t say who they’ve turned down, “because we might have them on eventually.”
Each date on the tour will be a normal episode, with a new guest, only in front of a live audience. On the regular podcast, the secret ingredient has only been chosen once, when comedian Jayde Adams mentioned hundreds and thousands, though it was during the pandemic and on Zoom, so technically, they couldn’t throw her out. “She would have smashed our heads together,” says Gamble. What if it happens at a live show? “I guess we’ll replace them with an audience member,” shrugs Acaster. “Or, if it’s a theatre with a trap door in the middle of the stage: ‘stand there’,” says Gamble.
When we meet, they’re preparing to record their 200th episode. For the 100th, Claudia Winkleman took over as host, while Acaster and Gamble chose their dream menus. For the bicentenary, which was released in August, they did the same, with Rylan as the guest. They’ve eaten at so many restaurants that they were well equipped to make their choices all over again.
Off Menu can be a powerful force when it comes to restaurants, and establishments that come up often report increased custom afterwards. (Acaster: “Second series, we started getting invited to restaurants, because we’d mentioned places in the first series that then saw more people turn up.”) On the show’s website, there’s a map of all the places mentioned, and who mentioned them, a handy list for anyone looking to eat anywhere in the world, from Birmingham to Mumbai.
Gamble says they’re protective of what they’ve achieved so far. “What can happen in these situationsis that someone has something really good in a podcast, and then they think they should level up, so a TV show or something like that … and it can often just destroy what you’ve built.”
Has there been talk of a TV show? “I think we can reach more people with the podcast than we can with a TV show, and we can do it completely on our own terms. It has that free-flowing, slightly raggedy thing throughout it, and they don’t really do that on TV. You have to plan it,” says Gamble. “We’d be tearing our hair out, wishing we hadn’t said ‘yes’. Because we would have gone from something that’s completely free, we can do whatever we like, to doing something with someone else, who then starts saying, ‘How about this bit, but … you’re on a bouncy castle?’” says Acaster.
A few dishes get picked on Off Menu frequently; they are what My Way is to Desert Island Discs. People often name prawn cocktail as their starter, or trifle as their dessert. Acaster says they have planned responses, so they don’t have to think up something new every time. “We’re always able to ask them: here are all the other people on the podcast who chose trifle. If you were all layered up like a trifle, what order would it be in?”
“In America, people chose iced tea a lot. So we started saying: ‘have you ever met Ice-T’? And every time, they had,” says Gamble.
“Everyone had met Ice-T,” says Acaster.
“Everyone had a story about meeting Ice-T.”
“A bunch of different stories. Couldn’t believe it.”
Have either of you met Ice-T?
“No,” says Acaster. “Seems unfair.”
“But happy to have him on the pod,” says Gamble.
Off Menu tours the UK and Ireland from 8 Oct. For tickets to Ed Gamble’s 2024 tour Hot Diggity Dog, visit edgamble.co.uk. James Acaster’s Hecklers Welcome tour continues until next summer, visit jamesacaster.com
