Photo courtesy of BBC
This Summer, we were approached by the producers of the Hairy Biker’s new BBC2 TV show, “Best of British“. The 30 part series follows the Bikers as they continue their culinary journey through time as they celebrate British Food. As part of this series, the Hairy Bikers are exploring vegetarianism, and combined this with a look at the supper club scene. The Spice Club has began to host monthly Indian Vegetarian supper club dining events over the past year and they have proven to be rather popular amongst vegetarian & non vegetarians alike! At these supper clubs, we aim to showcase the true diversity and variety that Indian vegetarian cuisine has to offer.
And so it was back in August, we were, for 18 hours (over 2 days) followed by a camera and microphone as we prepared for our 5 Course Indian Vegetarian supper club. The filming started as my Mum and I went to our local Asian grocery store to pick up some fresh ingredients before we began cooking for the feast. This created quite a stir at the store with fellow customers trying to get in view of the camera waving down the lens whilst the camera was recording. This resulted in numerous shouts of “cut!” and “action!” (I think we ended up picking 6 times the amount of vegetables we actually needed to buy due to retakes!).
The next day, it was supper club day and we started it off early in true Spice Club fashion. (All dishes are freshly prepared and cooked on the day of our events).
Getting “mic’d” up
It was very surreal cooking in the kitchen with a large camera and over-sized mic in sight, especially as we were being told by the crew to “act natural” or to “cook as if we’re not even here” but before we even knew it, time was passing quickly and it was getting ever closer to time to open our doors to our hungry guests.
Mum showing how it’s done 🙂
After all the food was prepared and ready, the table was set and before we even had time to look at the clock, the door bell rang! Our guests had arrived. I was a little apprehensive as to how our guests would take to the camera being in the dining room (mum and I had the whole day to get used to it) but they were all fantastic and really got into the swing of things!
Our fantastic guests getting acquainted with the camera crew..
Guests being asked about the vegetarian delights they’re about to tuck into..
We really enjoyed the whole experience (as bizarre as it was) and I’m now really excited to see what it looks like on the box! A big thank you to the lovely crew and our amazing guests who joined us. To watch the results of our Hairy Bikers experience, tune into BBC 2 on 16th November at 3.45pm or watch it here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJVDsp6LRj8.