Cambridge Edition June 2019

FOOD & DR INK

lfy Fowler has only taken one day off since his vegan burger restaurant, DoppleGanger, first opened its doors on 18 January this year. I’m due to talk to him about his rise from pop-up to permanent eatery, but the mushrooms aren’t quite finished yet. I’m cheerily waved past the line of screens at the order station and bundled into the pocket-sized kitchen at the back of his candy-coloured burger bar. Alfy delivers a crash course in mushroom prep while I listen and try to stay out of the way of his fast-moving, plant-powered team, serving up lunches to a bustling room packed with burger fans. The mushrooms are soon judged to have reached a ‘leaveable’ stage, and we slope off to Parker’s Piece and sit on the dusty grass with iced coffees. It is early a

spring, but already hot – both under the chestnut trees and in DoppleGanger’s kitchen – but the endurance involved in running a restaurant isn’t new information to the young chef. “I worked in kitchens throughout studying as a graphic designer, and I worked with this one guy who was the manager of a pub that had a star. I used to do private dinner parties with him as his kitchen prep/waiter/kitchenhand, and that’s when I properly got into cooking,” Alfy explains. “I worked with him every weekend for a couple of years.” Having spent several years shuttling between London and Reading, and starting to see his friends take on full-time work, previously freelance Alfy then moved up to Cambridge and got a full-time design job. And then, just to see if he could, he tried going vegan for a month. “I only did it out of curiosity, for the cooking,” he says. “It was like learning how to cook again. It was less about ethical considerations – it was just

something interesting to do. I’d always cook every day after work, and I soon felt better for going vegan. And that’s why I stuck with it. I’m getting more hardcore now, but for the first couple of years I adopted the approach that if I made food for myself, it’d be vegan, but if I went home, then whatever my mum cooked, I’d eat it. I still sort of stand by that. I think that’s where it gets a bit lost, and some vegans can annoy people a bit by being a little evangelical. But that’s the difference – what DoppleGanger’s about: this is an option, and it’s tasty.” Faced with the prospect of relentless bean burgers, newly vegan Alfy soon started wondering what to do with the format of something-in-a-bun. “I wanted to make a decent burger, but the aim was never to make it taste like meat. We were never trying to replicate,” he explains. “My thing was that, texturally, a bean burger’s bad. It just turns to smush. If you have something between two bits of bread that has a bit of texture – because there’s

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“I felt better for going vegan. That’s why I stuck with it”

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