Lucas Wootten is getting ready for the third supperclub of his pop-up restaurant Lahmacun, which he runs with his wife Sophie, when we speak over the phone ahead of the big night. He is on hands free to make sure he stays on track to be ready for the three-course Middle Eastern fire feast - his speciality - on Thursday, April 6 which has sold out.
"I'm so excited," he tells me referring to the pop-up which is being held, once again, at Pontcanna's Kings Road Yard. "There's a certain level of confidence; the fact that we've gone there a couple of times before now and we just know what we're doing."
And after receiving great feedback from the first two supper clubs - which were both hosted in the same location - he says: "The feedback was amazing. I still to this day think it's nice to stay humble, it's nice to still get overwhelmed. There's a level of confidence - and I think chefs, quite often, are on the line between confidence and cockiness. And you've got to try and pull it back and remain humble all the time but have confidence in your product and to have confidence that other people will receive it well. We wouldn't be continuing in the way we are doing if we didn't have such good feedback."
Read more: The easily-missed Cardiff restaurant quietly building a major reputation
The Cardiff-born chef, who also takes Lahmacun to a variety of farmers' markets, including Roath and Riverside, is a man of many culinary skills, such as Italian cuisine, butchery, baking, and fine dining, but his passion lies in his cheffing roots of Arabic and Middle Eastern cooking - which he does over open flame. However, it seems he didn't discover his love of cooking until his late teens when he was forced to think outside the professional box after being kicked out of school for bad grades when living in Muscarat, Oman and enrolled in catering college.
"My father was military. So we moved out there for him, it was a post for his work. I didn't know what I wanted to do at the time. School didn't really sing to me. And, as with a lot of chefs, I think the academia just didn't really ring true. I was never a very good kid at school. I wasn't necessarily very well behaved, I got distracted easily and then I got to 17, I was just about to start my second year in college and the school said: 'We don't want you coming back. You're making us look bad, your grades aren't good enough', so they kicked me out of college."
As he wasn't yet 18, Lucas needed to find something else to build up his skills and was inspired by a friend in a similar situation - to go to chef school. "That was literally the only alternative. So I enrolled in chef school. I remember there were times when I would ring up my mum and say: 'How do I boil peas?' Or 'how do I cook an egg?' I had no experience of food whatsoever. My mother was a very good cook. So I needn't step inside the kitchen."
Learning the traditional styles of French cuisine as well as Middle Eastern, Lucas recalls how cooking just "grabbed" him. He says: "There was something about putting a pan on the stove and watching the chemical reaction that happens. You're manipulating it and it's almost like a science experiment. So it just grabbed me. I just took to it and just being out in the Middle East, being exposed to that cuisine really hooked me."
But it's not just his teenage years in Oman that fuelled his love for this type of cooking. His dietitian wife - who he met 14 years ago at Swansea university when they were in student housing together and tied the knot with last autumn - and her father, who hails from Damascus but resides in Swansea, are a huge inspiration for 33-year-old Lucas.
"He'll tell me how it is," he says of his father-in-law. "I count myself very lucky that he does like my food even though I've altered some of the [classic] dishes a bit. He's also a chef and had two restaurants in Swansea in the early 2000s and Sophie grew up sampling all of this Arabic food.
"Her palate, I still say to this day, is the best palate I've ever come across. I'll put any [food] in her mouth and she will just literally tell me what it needs. She's also my biggest critic. We big each other up. It just works."
But reflecting back on his career, he tells me he wanted to pursue a different creative field at first when he returned to the UK for university.
"When I came back from Oman I was desperate to pursue music. I actually have a massive passion for music. So I was in Swansea studying sound engineering and I was working part time as a chef sort of balancing both."
But cheffing took precendence when he and Sophie moved to London for several years - although he didn't dive straight into Middle Eastern restaurants. Instead, he developed his skills in other cuisines and learnt under some of the UK's best chefs, for example Angela Hartnett.
"I worked in firstly Italian restaurants. And then I worked in The Quality Chop House as well which taught me a lot about working with meat because I worked in the butchery [there] as well. So there's all these different skills playing into how my food comes out."
He added: "But I found myself always reverting back to default and coming back to Middle Eastern food."
While most chef's trajectories sees them working in one or two places for years and moving up the ladder, Lucas didn't have quite the same dream. He explains he told one of his sous chefs while working in London that "whenever I get to master of skill I want to move on and get the next [skill]. My goal in that period was to learn as much as possible".
Having become well versed in the cuisine of Italy and modern British as well as butchery, baking and pasta cuisine, he began doing fire cookery on the side with Hunter Gather Cook, adding to his many skills.
"I guess one of my main passions, aside from Arabic cuisine, is acquiring as many different things in my armoury that I can possibly can use in my food. I'm a bit addicted to acquiring new skills and techniques."
After many years, Lucas and Sophie made their way back to Wales - a "natural step back really" - to make a home, something Lucas muses he never really had as a result of his father being in the Army.
"I've felt like I've never really had a home in that sense. Not in a sad way, but just in a way of moving around, gathering different experiences, being a bit of a nomad really. We had such a good time when we were in Cardiff and from London is was the natural step back really.
"I just find Cardiff the perfect middle ground. We loved London but coming back to Cardiff had that much more of a community feel and we love our neighbours and we love the people here. I could think of no better place to start doing my food adventures."
His first supper club occurred last August and with two now under his belt, the third is sure to be a success. With an impressive range of dishes cooked over fire on the menu at Lahmacun's 'spring seasonal' evening - including butter bean hummus with fermented muhammara, Berber fire-roasted Welsh lam with sumac onions and zhoug (with a veggie option of falafel stuffed-salt baked celeriac) and apple and tahini tart with muscovado date ice cream - I ask: what's next?
More pop-ups are on the horizon (in May and for the foreseeable) and Lucas reveals: "It's only a matter of time really before we do settle on a [permanent] place. It'll have to be the right sort of place for us. Right situation and right timing. But for the time being we are fully focused on doing supper clubs and other events.
"I'd like to expand on the supper clubs a little bit - we're focusing around the seasonal supper clubs [now] but I'd like to do a few other different styles. For example, a nose to tail supper club. Hopefully there continues to be this growing appetite for what we do."
Lahmacun's supperclub is taking place at Kings Road Yard in Pontcanna on Thursday, April 6. If you've missed out this time, Lucas will be soon adding more dates so keep an eye on Lahmacun's social media for updates.
READ NEXT:
- A historic Gower pub has reopened for the first time in three years
- New 'pie and a pint' venue The Taproom to open in Mumbles
- The eight pubs named the best in Wales
- The 'best fish and chip shop in the universe' is re-opening for just one day and people are beside themselves
- New pop-up family history café to come to Cardiff
