Founder and Exec Chef Jason Hartley outside 'HQ' with new Head Chef Ray Keisen formerly of SmallWorld

 
THE ENGLISH AD GUY TURNED POP UP CHEF WHO TOOK BRUNCH AND POP UPS TO AMSTERDAM FINALLY REALISES DREAM AND OPENS HIS OWN RESTAURANT

Three years ago Jason Hartley stepped into a kitchen for the first time and turned a passion for food and an understanding of social media into what would become a weekly 150 person sell out artisan pop up with over 2000 dedicated fans on Facebook. Now he opens his first permanent restaurant Jason Hartley’s Lovefood ‘HQ’ in Amsterdam on June 1st 2012

When in Jan 2009 Jason Hartley stood in a professional kitchen for the first time in an Amsterdam cafe, unprepared, and unaware of the journey he was starting out on, his dream was that one day he might have a chance to create a space with his own vision. 3 years, 6 venues, 24 rented bedrooms and floors, lots of blood, sweat, tears several great pop ups – and a few dodgy ones – and 2000 Facebook fans later that dream is finally becoming a reality as Jason Hartley’s Lovefood ‘HQ’ opens in late May in Amsterdam’s Koggestraat.
 
The power of good food and word of mouth
Jason’s success has been down to a passion and commitment to deliver great food and a willingness to sacrifice a comfortable life and job to follow a dream. Combining an obsessive desire to create the best simple food by hand making everything himself with an ability to leverage the power of social media to connect with his audience means despite being only an occasional pop up restaurant ‘Lovefood’ boasts more followers online than several of the more established eateries in The Netherlands. His honesty and engagement with his audience has created a passionate following especially among Amsterdam’s international community and it was through this community he found his investment partners to bring his vision to life.

Beyond brunch
As a pop up Lovefood typically sold out 150 covers for their 4 hour brunch within 30 minutes of them going online. “We’re best known for our sell out brunches,” explains founder Jason Hartley (39), “but that was because we could only get into restaurants on Sunday’s when they were quiet or closed. Lovefood has always been about celebrating and sharing all the cherished food from different cultures so I am very excited about the chance to expand our offering into evenings and weekdays. We will be complimenting our food with coffee hand roasted in Amsterdam and classic cocktails and mixed drinks from the 19th century to reinforce our belief that new isn’t always better and to offer some accessible refinement in the Amsterdam food scene. We already have relationships with great organic pork and dairy farms and are looking to expand our connections with local suppliers so I am very excited about the chance showcase some of the great local produce that exists in The Netherlands.”

The future?
“Having a fixed base will allow us to do reach more people and do more things” Hartley continues, “of course making a restaurant a success alone is a big enough challenge for now but we are working on a simple line of our hand made products. Beyond that a dream one day to take the Americans on on their own soil would be great – but hey, one dream at a time.”

Not for publication
For questions, interviews or clarification please contact Jason Hartley directly on +31(0)6 4 111 5756 or jason@jasonslovefood.com. See also www.jasonslovefood.com

Please note, a pre-requisite for every role is passion. Passion for food, passion for people, passion to learn and a passion to be the best you can be. If this isn’t you then best move on! Spoken Dutch is an advantage but is not a pre-requisite. Lovefood has always been about celebrating food from different cultures and we want our team to reflect this as well. You need to be good, beyond that everything is negotiable.

Head Chef (POSITION FILLED). Work alongside Jason and help craft and create the Lovefood. Be the engine of the kitchen. Be an artisan. Full time position.

Lunch / Junior Chef from August 1st (Closing date for applications: May 31st). Work alongside Jason and the Head Chef to create the Lovefood. You need to be able to be self sufficient and not afraid of early mornings as you will be typically opening the kitchen for breakfasts in the weeks and weekends at 8am. A wonderful opportunity to learn about all areas of food from sourcing to preparation to service (we make almost everything ourselves, from sausages to sauces, from breads to preserves). You need to be a proven worker in a professional kitchen and passionate to learn and grow. Part time position, full time considered.

Manager / Maitre’ d (POSITION FILLED). This is possibly the most important hire we will ever make. This person needs to run the floor at Lovefood educating and inspiring truly great service. This person will also help administer the business so a massive level of trust will be placed in this person. They need to be mature and a brilliant people person. They need to be able to deal with difficult situations with diplomacy and skill. This person could be a well experienced person from the food business or they could be a brilliant corporate manager looking for a change in life. Jason had never cooked professionally until 2009 so it is possible to succeed without prior experience but of course it helps. Full time position.

Bar Person / Mixologist (Closing date for applications: May 31st). Whilst we are a restaurant concept we also want to offer some of the best cocktails in Amsterdam. We are looking for an experienced cocktail bartender to work alongside one of Amsterdams most respected and knowledgeable bartenders Andrew Nicholls to learn and serve the best old school cocktails in Amsterdam, working evenings and weekends to offer the very best mixed drinks to our customers. PS we hate the word Mixologist but you get the idea.

Baristas (Closing date for applications: May 31st). In the daytimes and also for our weekend brunches we want to offer beautiful coffee. We have a lovely La Marzocca Linea 3 group machine and we will have beans hand roasted in Amsterdam so we need people who can act as a daytime host and also a barista making consistently beautiful coffee. You must be a trained barista for this position. Part time positions.

Hosts (Closing date for applications: May 31st). We are looking for a small passionate team of hosts to make the Lovefood space come to life. Great service in Amsterdam is rarer than a Phoenix with a trumpet and as a pop up even we have to admit we never nailed it. As a full time business this is a non-negotiable of our offering, we have to be fantastic in the service department. You need to be fast, attentive, dedicated to creating happy customers and ready to deal with 100+ people brunches at the weekends and occaisional early morning starts (without hangovers!)

The article can be seen by clicking on the image below, I’ve put an English transcription at the end.

The thing is to pull Lovefood together like we do takes a lot from me, which is obviously fine, but it does likewise ask a lot from our hosts. After 3 days prepping the food for these one offs at home I then have to gradually move all of the food and our plates, the bloody mary bar etc (about 18 crates) into the venue the day before and the morning of Lovefood, stacking up their fridges and freezer and space. The day itself then starts at 8:30am and if we stop sending food out of the kitchen at 3pm it’s at least 4pm before its clean ready to hand back over for the evening service.

This can work if the host venue is quiet but it’s not only Lovefood that has seen a step forward in the last year. Brasserie Vlaming has in that time developed a momentum via the TripAdvisor website and now stands proudly as the number 1 recommended restaurant in Amsterdam. This has seen their custom increase dramatically to the point now they are open 7 days a week and have anything from 45 – 70 diners a night. A wonderful upturn in fortunes.

The flip side of this for Lovefood is that the venue needs far more food in stock and also more time to prepare the food for service which means there isn’t the space for Lovefood supplies the day before and their isn’t enough time after Lovefood service to prep for the evening (which really winds their cooks up, as it would me).

There is also the factor that I am a bit of a perfectionist so am always pushing to make things better for Lovefood which means I may not always be the easiest person to work with . To a restaurant in need of help that is a manageable evil, to one doing well, maybe an unnecessary one!

All of this together means that, even after trying a shorter service last month, the logistics are just not working for Vlaming and Lovefood isn’t getting the chance to serve enough people so it’s time for us to move on.

It’s no secret that I am working hard to open the first physical permanent Lovefood location in Amsterdam, this takes time however and, if I can pull it off, is still a few months away.

I want to say a massive thank you to everyone at Vlaming. The family have become friends over the last year and whilst in a perfect world I would love to have stayed with them until Lovefood proper opened that wasn’t meant to be but I have nothing but love and respect for them. To see how hard they work and the stress involved when things aren’t going as you want means there are no better circumstances to leave than now, due to them succeeding and earning a return on all that hard work. This last year will always be a pivotal one in Lovefoods story and Frans and Bob have played a massive role in that. I’d like to think we have left a little of us there as well with the knowledge of the power of the internet and also some different cooking techniques and approaches.

I know you as customers have also enjoyed the Vlaming venue, I hope you join with me in thanking them and stick with me on the journey

So, come down on Sept 25th and buy Frans a drink and give him a hug.

What next? Well as I write this I have just agreed a new venue for us for October and maybe beyond. Something VERY different and I think so cool I could pop (up). Lovefood is going into hiding

Thanks for your ongoing love and support guys. It fuels my passion.

Reserve your spot now! Call 773.334.7168

So in December 2010 I was contacted by two chefs from Chicago, Chrissy Camba and her boyfriend Ashlee Aubin. Chrissy had and Ashlee does work at Grant Achatz’s famed Alinea (rated number 1 in North America and number 6 in the world by The San Pelligrino Top 50) and Chrissy now works at Dutch inspired Restaurant Vincent. They had heard about Lovefood via popular food blog DutchGrub.com and wanted to know if there was one they could attend, sadly not but I love getting the chance to meet new people so we arranged to meet up for a wander around Amsterdam. A lovely day, some food gluhwein and beers later we had jokingly discussed Lovefood happening at Vincent and a Chicago trip in the future.

Well, now it’s actually happening. Chrissy and the guys at Vincent have kindly offered to host a special Lovefood Brunch on Sunday July 3rd and then if that wasn’t enough that evening we are going to Alinea to show me how it’s really done.

I am so excited I could pop. To make the brunch special we need all the help we can get spreading the word, tweet, share, scream… let’s make it a great day together, and get Oprah to know!

You can email me jason@jasonslovefood.com with any suggestions, questions or otherwise about the day.

I hope you can join us.

Jason.

Welcome to a new look lovefood. Not a change, just an evolution. Basically it was time for lovefood to grow up.

Why the change?
So we can grow. Lovefood is a brand and a business and the intention is to grow. It’s been a lot of hard work to establish Lovefood in the food scene in Amsterdam and only recently have we felt we have reached a level of consistency in terms of food and service and this was always the most important thing to establish before we got ahead of ourselves. Now we want to do more with the business we needed to have a more professional accurate representation of what lovefood is all about.

What were the influences on the change?
To reflect quality. A lot of time, energy and effort goes into creating the food and the experience at lovefood. The original logo was friendly and accessible but it didn’t have a quality feel to really show off the detail and quality that goes into lovefood. [Note from Jason: This i because I designed it and am not a designer. The new one is done by a professional]

To show a little bit more there is heritage and stories behind the food. We wanted to give people a cue that there was a little history to the food.

To not forget where we came from and not move too far from what lovefood was. It would have been easy to completely redesign the look and feel but it was important to us to evolve not change and we think we have done that. All the people that have been to lovefood and supported us are the most important part of what we do and our intention was not alienate them/you and to remember where we started and the support we have needed as we grew and learned from our mistakes.

Practical legal things. “lovefood” as a word is not ownable. We had hoped that as a single word it might be but no. So we had to do something. Changing the name wasn’t an option, and playing with the spelling looked odd. By changing to Jason Hartley’s Lovefood we have something that is unique and ownable in association with a our new logo. [Note from Jason: I never wanted my name in there, bit egotistical, but this was the best solution to protect what we already had, bit of a cock up by the brand strategist on day 1 really - that would be me!]

We know that you can never appeal to everyone in these things, but we hope whatever you think you will still love us for the food most of all!