At Chef Andy Beynon’s Behind Restaurant, the Menu Shifts With the Sea |
Andy Beynon. Dot Dash Media
The tasting menu at Behind, a modern seafood restaurant in London’s hip Hackney neighborhood, changes almost every day. It’s why chef Andy Beynon doesn’t post the 10-course tasting menu online. It’s also why a lot of diners return to the 18-seat restaurant again and again—because you’ll never eat the exact same meal there twice.
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See all of our newsletters“We tweak it all the time,” Beynon says, speaking to Observer in mid-January. “For example, tomorrow we’re doing a Mylor prawn dish because they’ve just come into season. There are certain dishes we can adapt depending on the available seafood, but there are some dishes we completely change and that we develop through the week to put on the menu the next week.”
Beynon opened Behind, his first restaurant, in October 2020. Less than three weeks later, the eatery earned its first Michelin star. It was a transformative moment for the chef and the restaurant’s success.
“I’d never owned a restaurant before, and I was absolutely fucked for money,” he recalls. “I was borrowing and begging left, right and center. But because we won the star, we became absolutely rammed. And then I didn’t have to worry too much. So I don’t really know what it would be like to own a restaurant without one.”
Before Behind, Beynon worked in a slew of high-end British establishments, including Phil Howard’s The Square, Claude Bosi’s Hibiscus and Matt Weedon’s Lords of the Manor. Becoming a chef wasn’t a lifelong dream—he initially imagined himself as a hairdresser—but growing up in Hertfordshire, he always preferred cooking shows like Ready, Steady, Cook to children’s shows. He took a job as a dishwasher at 16 while still in school, and soon became attracted to the creativity behind cooking.
Beynon in the kitchen at Behind, his Michelin-starred restaurant in Hackney. Dot Dash Media“When I started cooking, I fell in love with it,” Beynon says. “But it wasn’t really seen as a career. A lot of people around me were like, ‘You sure you want to do........