Castellano’s

Thursday 24th July 2008

Fishponds is now home to Castellano’s, a delicatessen specialising in charcuterie and sausages. Mark Taylor popped in to talk to owner and former executive chef Vincent Castellano about his move away from the restaurant scene.

The sound of knives being sharpened greets me when I arrive at Castellano’s, a brand new shop on Fishponds Road.

“Sorry, can you give me a couple of minutes,” grins owner Vincent Castellano, peering around the corner of the preparation kitchen behind the counter. “I’ve got a couple of pigs’ heads to deal with.”

With his blue and white apron and white chef’s jacket, Vincent looks the part – that of butcher-cum-chef.

Less than a week old, his shop is packed with customers. A young man in his 20s is buying burgundy- coloured Serrano ham, which is being gently carved off the bone.

Next to him, a middle-aged couple are weighing up their options for tonight’s supper with the selection of homemade ready meals in the fridge: “What do you think, chicken basquaise or meatballs in tomato and basil sauce?”

A man in a suit is sitting at one of the tables on the pavement enjoying a coffee and the plat du jour (dish of the day), which today is homemade lasagne.

Looking around the shop, I spot seven different types of sausage, from the traditional Gloucester Old Spot breakfast sausage to the fiery chilli and garlic variety.

There is a small selection of local pork loin and medallions of fillet, free-range chicken from Cherry Lodge farm in Iron Acton, half a dozen types of salami from Italy, dishes of paté, duck leg confit and 10 types of cheese, most of it from the West Country.

On the shelves, there are the usual deli staples – pasta, sauces, biscuits, tea and coffee – but also tins of duck foie gras, French mustards and vinegars and jars of venison terrine.

Judging from the number of people queuing at the counter and browsing, it looks like Castellano’s has arrived in Fishponds at the right time.

“Yes, I could see there was a gap in the market,” Vincent tells me over coffee after the pigs’ heads have been dealt with.

“People around here were looking for something like this. One lady came in and said she was pleased we had opened because it meant she didn’t have to go to Clifton to get her sausages and salamis.”

Fishponds, like other pockets of the city, is a place on the up. More and more young professionals and young families are moving into the area and looking for better quality food shops.

Vincent is responding to their needs by offering restaurant-quality food at affordable prices. The next phase for the ready meals, he tells me, will include an “entertaining” range of dishes – venison casseroles, boeuf bourguignon, coq au vin and so on – which people will be able to pre-order when they are entertaining a large group of friends at the weekend.

Of course, with the current economic climate, opening any new business is a gamble, but Vincent is quietly confident.

“There’s never a good or bad time to open a business, but you’ve got to have the confidence to do it.

“In the last recession, I was working as a chef and restaurants really suffered but takeaways were thriving. I think people will still treat themselves, but they want restaurant quality food at home. You can eat well here for around a tenner for two people.”

Born to Sicilian parents, who moved to the South of France when he was a toddler, Vincent had one of those classic Mediterranean upbringings.

His mum was a housewife, bringing up the four children. Dad was a builder bringing in the wage.

All the cooking was done by his mum, using produce grown or reared on their allotment. They weren’t rich, but they still ate like kings.

“There wasn’t meat on the table every day, but my mother was an excellent cook, like so many Italian mothers are, and we ate very well.

“We kept chickens on our allotment and Sunday lunch was usually rabbit, which we had also reared.

“I still remember my father taking me to the allotment on the Friday evening, grabbing the rabbit and telling me that I had to kill it if I wanted to eat it. That was my initiation.

“We grew all of our own vegetables and mum made all the fresh pasta, but we would eat meat once a week. It was a real luxury but we knew where it came from.”

It was growing up in France in the Sixties when Vincent first came across charcutieres – pork butchers who specialise in making hams, sausages, terrines and salamis – although at the time, he had set his sights on becoming a musician.

“I played the bugle and trumpet and I wanted to go to music school, but my father told me I had to get a ‘proper’ job.

“My parents couldn’t afford to send me to music school so when I was 14 I found a summer job washing dishes in a local delicatessen and traiteur selling restaurant-quality food to take away.

“I signed a two-year apprenticeship and worked with a butcher who was slaughtering his own pigs, making terrines, patés, sausages and hams. That’s where I learned how to butcher whole animals, which is what I’m doing now.

“I buy in the whole Gloucester Old Spot pigs from farms in the South West and break them down to make all these products.

“It’s a lot of work and you’ve got to have a passion for it and look at it as a way of life. As long as it pays the mortgage and makes a bit of money, then I’m happy.”

Vincent has been a familiar face on the Bristol restaurant scene for the past 25 years.

He arrived in England in 1983 after he met his wife-to-be, Natasha, who came from Nailsea.

One of his first jobs was working as a chef at the Berkeley Brasserie in Clifton, a French- style restaurant that went on to get favourable mentions in the Good Food Guide.

In 1986, he was asked to be the first head chef at the Glassboat, where he stayed until 1994, and then for the next six years ran his own restaurant, Genepi, on The Triangle.

He then returned to work for the Glassboat team, where he was executive chef, also looking after Byzantium and Spyglass.

Although he says he still misses the buzz of cooking in a restaurant, he’s enjoying the more sociable hours of running a traiteur and it has come at the right time in his life.

“I had a heart attack last year so that made me rethink everything. I realised that late nights don’t suit me any more so I had to change my lifestyle.

“I didn’t enjoy being an executive chef much because you end up managing people rather than cooking, and I like being hands-on.

“The restaurant scene was changing and perhaps I was seen as being old-fashioned.

“What I don’t like is young people managing young chefs who think they’re head chefs at the age of 25 when they don’t really have a clue.

“When I see young guys becoming executive chefs or consultant chefs at 28, I think ‘no, you’re not’. These guys don’t have the experience behind them.

“I wouldn’t say it was about being old-fashioned, but about having values, standards and recognising quality. That’s what I hope people appreciate when they buy my food at Castellano’s.”

It’s Vincent’s sausages which have gained something of a cult following in Bristol. Last weekend at the Love Food festival at Paintworks in Brislington, where Vincent had a stall, people were raving about them.

Earlier this week, I cooked some of Vincent’s Toulouse sausages. Packed with garlic and prime pork, they were exceptional. So, what’s the secret of producing such brilliant bangers?

“You’ve got to start with really good quality pork,” says Vincent. “I use the shoulder, belly and leg for sausages and the head and jowl meat, which is sweeter, for the terrines.

“My sausages are 71 per cent meat and made to traditional recipes. Some people may think that 71 per cent isn’t as high as the meat content is in other sausages but I’ve tasted the sausages from supermarkets that claim to be 80 per cent meat or higher and to me they taste like bread, so I really don’t know how they work out those percentages.”

Vincent has deliberately avoided the term “delicatessen” when describing Castellano’s. He wants people to see it as a traiteur.

“I’ve introduced the word traiteur because I think the term deli has been overused and abused over the years.

“When I mentioned charcuterie to people 20 years ago they looked blank, but now they understand it and the people coming to the shop really know their stuff. In a way, I’ve gone back to my roots because I was doing this before I came to England to work as a chef.

“Making charcuterie is very labour intensive, but it’s very rewarding. There is a real sense of pride when I see people buying something I’ve made and enjoying it.”

Castellano’s, 802 Fishponds Road, Bristol. Tel 0117 965 2792. Open Monday to Saturday, 8am to 6pm.