At Chef Andy Beynon’s Behind Restaurant, the Menu Shifts With the Sea
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.
“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.
“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 this?’ They wouldn’t understand that the high-end level of cooking is really serious. That is changing—working in the kitchen is a really good career—but that was the case when I started cooking.”
Beynon has always had big aspirations, and his try-hard attitude translated well to the culinary world. “I love trying to push myself and be the best in sports,” he says. “And I think with cooking, that pushed me as well. So I wanted to work in the best restaurants.”
He started towards the top. Beynon’s first cooking job, at age 17, was at The Ledbury in London, which had just won its first Michelin star. “That was quite a shock to the system, working there when I was so young,” he says. “I didn’t know anything.” He moved on to J. Sheekey, an institution known for its seafood. Later, at Hibiscus, Beynon really began envisioning his first restaurant.
“I was thinking about my restaurant forever, but I didn’t have the skills of actually understanding how a restaurant ran,” he says. “I always knew I wanted to do it. But I think a big part of the chef’s table concept [came from] when I worked with Claude Bosi, and he had a chef’s table in Hibiscus. It was very chef and customer-led.”
He quickly realized how much he loved talking to customers and cooking in front of them. “You get more of an adrenaline kick, instead of being in a basement or a dingy kitchen where you’re told by some French waiter if table four loved it or not,” Beynon says. “You can actually be honest and speak to people.”
Beynon knew he wanted to open his restaurant in Hackney, an area he loves. The actual design emerged from the space he found near London Fields. He knew it should be an open concept with the kitchen in full view of all the guests, and he wanted a curved countertop for the seating. Behind serves lunch and dinner with only one seating per meal—all guests sit and receive their courses at the same time. It helps to create both camaraderie and an opportunity for everyone to see what the chefs are doing as they do it.
The dining experience at Behind is buzzy and convivial. When I went in December, dinner felt both like a meal and a show. Everything the chefs do is visible to diners, who are seated around a semicircular counter. There’s an island in the center so that the dish preparation is on display. Diners chat among themselves and with the chefs, something that doesn’t always happen in fine dining. It also affords Beynon and his team the opportunity to understand how people feel about the ever-changing menu items.
“It helps so much because I have so many regulars who are honest and upfront about what’s happening,” Beynon says. “I’ll talk about new dishes I put on quite openly with some of my customers. You can really gauge from people’s reactions what they think about the food.”
Behind is devoted to seafood, though Beynon is open to including other ingredients on the menu. He’s always preferred creating dishes with seafood, particularly at restaurants that are tasting menu-led. “It’s really light, really fresh, and it’s something people don’t always get at home or know how to cook,” he says. “Fish is fresh every day, and you can be so creative with seafood. You can be playful, like the prawns on toast dish I do, and really experiment.”
Beynon is constantly swapping out his dishes, but a few have stuck around, including his unusual take on Chinese restaurant classic prawn toast. It’s so popular that he has kept it on the menu for the past six months. “That dish just keeps evolving and evolving,” he says. “We use a really good prawn, so we just serve a prawn and the head meat, and that’s it. We used to serve it in the shell. So a lot of dishes I’ve kept on, but adapt so you don’t actually know what the original dish was at the start.”
The plates have impressive range. Some draw inspiration from flavors and cultures around the world—Beynon recently visited Malaysia and brought back many ingredients and spices—and others focus more on highlighting the fish.
Beynon is not interested in following trends. For him, what makes food exciting is thinking outside the box and doing something unusual. “It’s also about trying to keep things exciting for me,” he says. “And with seafood, you can be creative in different ways. You can be creative with the way you cut fish. But it’s also about adding interesting spice flavors. We’re going to do a curry-style butter sauce with the Mylor prawns. That’s where the next level with Michelin and trying to get two stars really comes into play.”
Most of the fish served at Behind comes from U.K. waters, although some seafood is imported from Morocco and Sicily. Beynon loves to highlight gray mullet, an underrated fish that lives on seafood. He incorporates smoked kippers, another British favorite, and he has considered trying out a jellied eel dish. “We go through five kilos of smoked kippers a week,” Beynon says. “So if you add it up since we’ve been open, I must be one of the lead buyers of kippers in London. I like the idea of keeping traditions alive.”
As a younger chef, Beynon remembers thinking it would be best to keep adding ingredients to a dish. But he now realizes that it’s more skillful to pare things down and allow the main ingredient to shine. He currently incorporates the smoked kippers into a scallop dish, allowing the kippers to augment the Cornwall-caught scallop.
“We don’t season the scallop,” he says. “We serve it where the scallop is quite opaque, quite undercooked, and it’s really sweet and creamy. So when you put that sauce on, you get so much salt and smoky flavor, and you can still taste the scallop. The combination is incredible. But if you put a normal amount of salt on a scallop, it could ruin the dish because you wouldn’t be able to taste the scallop. We try to be really clever about it.”
Beynon isn’t shy about admitting that Behind is currently working towards a second Michelin star. He’s as ambitious as ever (so much so, in fact, that he’s boxing his former boss Jason Atherton for charity in March). He’s in the process of opening a cocktail bar in the back of Behind, which he plans to call Behind Behind, and he has lots of ideas for new dishes. That second star may not come as quickly as the first, but Beynon knows it takes time to develop a restaurant, particularly one with a vision like his.
“I feel like we’re there,” he says. “For me, two-star level is giving something different to your diners. I’m doing what I think is best, and keeping things creative, and keeping a good team around me. I’m someone who is in, all or nothing. If I’m not interested in something, I don’t waste my energy on it. I’ve learned with getting older that it’s best to reserve your energy so you can be ambitious with the things that matter most, like the restaurant.” It’s clear he’s putting that energy in the right direction.