Behind the Plate: The Heart, History, and Innovation of Angelina with Director + Founder, Josh Owens-Baigler

What inspired you to star Angelina and what drew you to Dalston?

I’ve been in hospitality for 15 years and I trying to escape for 7 of them – thinking I should probably get a ‘proper job’ (stemming from outside pressure of everybody who didn’t have to live my life) but I really loved it, so I’ve stuck at it!

I started working at the River Café when I was 18, pre going to university, but before that my first dream was football. I went to Italy to play, so the River Café made sense as an Italian restaurant: I spoke Italian and understood the culture, so it helped me get ahead at the start. I started behind the bar originally and loved it and worked there a year. I put my notice in, went to University, and about three months later I got a call from one of the ex-managers at the River Café wanting my help with a new opening in Kings Cross, Shrimpy’s for the initial three-month opening period but I got the bug.

I worked all through University and by my third year I was the Bar Manager at Bocca di Lupo, working and studying full time. After I graduated with a degree in Geography & Economics, I thought I should get a job in Finance as it was the “right thing to do” so I did… and I lasted 6 months. It just wasn’t for me. I went back to working in restaurants and never looked back.

I’ve done a bit of everything. I’ve done my Sommelier exams, I’ve worked behind the bar, the floor and the kitchen. I had a bit more of a corporate job, I used to run hospitality for the Jewish Community Centre JW3, it was super challenging, and we built a catering company and opened a restaurant, we were the first Kosher Deliveroo in the city – it didn’t work but we tried! I went to cooking school whilst at JW3 as I thought if I’m going to open my own restaurant – what happens if the chef runs away? So, I covered my bases and opened Angelina in 2019. We’re a family business (we haven’t got an investor) and in terms of why Dalston? We’d have opened on the moon!

We couldn’t afford a premium and the premiums were really high at the time, so you had to pay for the right to rent places. We needed somewhere that was a new lease and at the time the economy was booming in London, so it was really hard to find a new lease. Around 8 years ago, this stretch was derelict, Hackney Council wanted an independent business, and we put through a business plan proposal they picked us! Dalston had a really cool vibe, I moved to East London to gauge the vibes and I loved it. We were one of the first, after Pidgin who were doing really cool stuff, and it felt like a place that people would be receptive to our mad ideas. We were scared because we had marble tables, and it felt posh, and we weren’t sure how it was going to received but the rest is history!

Why Italian and Japanese fusion?

The Italian dream was always there for me but first it was with football. When I was 13, I wanted to be a footballer in Italy – I used to watch Football Italia on Channel 4 and thought “I need to go there!” I moved to Italy when I was 16 and lived in a convent and played football and fell in love with the country and the food. I didn’t drink or have any idea that this formative experience would end up forming what I do. I ended up at the River Café by accident but if I connect the dots backwards, the history and the culture was exciting for me, and you can’t do that without understanding the food. I think eating out and food was a really big part of my childhood. My dad used to eat out every night at the same restaurant, same time, same day and he loved Japanese food.

None of that was apparent at the time but when you start to burrow into Italy you learn so much. Everyone thinks Italy is an ancient country, it’s not – it’s one of the newest countries in Europe, it was only unified in the 1860’s and no one spoke Italian until the 1960’s. Dante’s Inferno was what prompted the change, it was a linguistic masterpiece and the Florentine dialect from Dante’s hometown, Tuscany became what is now modern Italian – so if you’re in Tuscany it’s really the one place you can speak actual Italian. They really struggled to get everyone to speak Italian – in the South you have Arabic and Basque influences and North you have places where they speak German and French because they are on the border and then you have places in-between – like Sicilian has Arabic words. It was television that proliferated Italian but still now, there’s certain villages in Italy that you’ll struggle to get by with Italian as they have their own unique dialect. It threw a bit of a spanner in the works – how do you open an Italian restaurant in London?

That was the starting point, there’s people who’ve done fantastic things but what is my version of an Italian restaurant? I wanted it to be thoughtful and authentic. At the time, it was fashionable to open a regional restaurant, people thought that specificity was expertise. Everyone was opening Burmese, Szechuan, Cantonese, Japanese Fried Chicken, Loire Valley, Sicilian, Northern Indian - the list goes on - so we thought we had to be specific and pick a region. I had this idea where I could take all the wines from the region too. So, an Italian region where I could take Italian sparkling, red, white and everything in-between which surprisingly wasn’t that difficult but we just couldn’t settle on one. We narrowed it down to about five regions, but nothing felt authentically us and something was really bothering me – you can’t recreate something, somewhere else. Restaurants are landscapes of simulation – you go to a restaurant, we don’t even realise it is happening, but they transport you somewhere else - it’s like Disney Land. Look at the High Street chains, the food isn’t the most important thing, you need a decent plate of food but it’s about the setting, environment, the person serving you, who you’re with…

The example I always give is a Neapolitan pizza. If you want to make a Neapolitan pizza in London, you’d think it was easy right? It’s bread, tomato sauce and mozzarella. But when you break it down – you’ve got the dough: the yeast is different, the humidity in the air is different, the starter is going to rise differently to how it would in Naples. Naples is hot, London is cold and more humid. Different yeast grows here than in Naples. That’s just the starter, then you’ve got the flour. English flour has higher protein content. That’s only two ingredients and then you have water. You can count on that right? Well, the water in Naples is soft and the water in London is really hard. Then mozzarella – you want Neapolitan mozzarella, but you’d be frowned upon in Naples if you used pasteurised mozzarella - but you can’t get non-pasteurised past the FSA and into the UK. So, you need to have pasteurised imported from Naples, but it doesn’t taste the same, it’s a different product. Someone must be making mozzarella in London, right? There’s an amazing Italian woman running a business called Latteria making every Italian cheese in London BUT they use British dairy, which has 12% more fat than its Italian counterpart. Basically, you can’t make Neapolitan pizza in London – you can adapt one and make it delicious but it’s a London pizza, inspired by Naples. From this, we got this mischievous streak that this idea of authentic is wrong and we wanted to question that. So even if we’re when recreating a regional dish, we’ve got to have a London take on it. We had a meal on our explorations in Italy which was a couple of Japanese chefs working in a trattoria before opening their own restaurant in Tokyo and that was the lightbulb moment. When I lived in Italy, all I wanted was Japanese food and I would eat it as soon as I was back. I missed it so much.

So that set us on a path. If you go to eat Italian food in Japan – it’s called itameshi. It proliferated in the 60’s/70’s/80’s and it’s delicious but its not Italian food. In the 80’s, lactose intolerance was prevalent in 70% of the Japanese population, so they had cheese replacements for typical Italian dishes. After the war, there was lots of propaganda around Western Dishes and it being the reason that Japan lost the war so Western food got a lot more popular. In the 80’s when the Japanese economy was booming, everything was getting more expensive, so independent restaurants and chefs were looking for more inexpensive ingredients. Importing spaghetti was cheaper than using rice. Spaghetti Mantaiko is a national dish there.

It became a bit of fun that we were going to do this Japanese and Italian fusion and everyone laughed at us like: “what are you doing to do? Put sushi on pizza? Give it 6 months and you’ll be closed!”. People were quite confused by our background and how we were making it more complicated. Maybe I was young and stupid.

How did your personal connections and family contribute to shaping Angelina into what it is today?

We’re a true family business, it’s me, Amar, my best friend since childhood, my partner Laura, and my Mum, We haven’t got an outside funder, and we bootstrapped. My mum is responsible for the design, including the interiors and our beautiful bespoke plates. Amar and I have been best friends since we were 4. Laura and I met two years before Angelina and her family run restaurants in Brazil. So, she ran away thinking she didn’t want to join the family business and then a year in, we decided to open a restaurant – which is ironic, but worked out! It was hard for the first year having us all on the floor and after the first year I moved into the kitchen. A lot of the decisions were practical – set menu wasn’t from a fancy angle, it was the idea of us hating ordering from a menu, the complications that arise from dietary requirements, keeping coherence on the floor and being able to really showcase the best dishes we can. Set menus are common in Japan and Italy with omakase and marble cafes respectively so it felt right. We try to do it in a non-fussy and unpretentious way. It used to be ￡38.

It used to be that the first year that’s the hardest but now it’s the hype culture that means it’s a lot easier. It’s a challenging location, most of London’s affluent areas are in west London so coming to Dalston is a bit of a mission from there. I think we’ve got a good location. My mum lives in West London and it’s miles for her but I think the food speaks for itself and we’ve managed to thrive here.

What’s your favourite thing on the menu?

Right now, it’s the sea urchin pasta. It’s with porcini mushrooms, sounds weird but its delicious. Sea urchins are in season at the moment and it’s really amazing. We make the fresh pasta with smoked flour which gives it a hint of smokiness, as well as kombu which is a Japanese seaweed that we put in the pasta dough which gives it a real taste of the sea with an earthy element. We finish it with truffle, which is obviously just REALLY good.

What’s a typical day for you at Angelina?

There’s no typical day. The constant thing is that it starts early as I’m an early riser. I’ll do some kind of exercise in the morning as that’s the only part of the day I can control – today I played squash. So, I’ll be on the court at 7.30am and I’ll get to work and do paperwork until 3pm – things like payroll, rota, research or recruitment. There’s a lot of forward looking and planning ahead with things like cash flow management. We’ve always known that we have an aspiration to keep challenging ourselves and keep growing so process is a big part of what we do both in the kitchen and bar. From 3pm, the focus changes to service, which is setting up the restaurant and arranging the flowers. Once a week we go to the flower market and service for us starts quite early as we don’t open for lunch, so that’s 5pm, Thursday – Saturday and 6pm on weekdays. It tends to be busy from 6pm and I divide my time equally between the floor and kitchen. Usman in the kitchen is far more talented than I could ever dream of being and Kay on the floor is much more efficient and quicker than me too, I’ve had my time – so now it’s about helping them shine.

I love doing it: I love cooking, I love being in the kitchen, I love being on the bar, I love wine. I’ve trained so hard for so many years to do all these practical jobs and now it’s a?big shift where for me to be good at my job I have had to evolve and delegate away some of the things that I really want to do and that’s really hard. If I do too much of what I like doing and not enough of what’s good for the business, I get in the way and that’s the problem and that’s been really hard for me.

In the short term, it’s always easiest to do it yourself. You’ve got the experience and to teach someone a task, it takes time letting someone fail - but failure is part of the getting better at things and learning. It’s a great pleasure. It’s been my dream to have my own restaurant, I don’t wake up resenting going to work. That Sunday feeling is foreign to me. If someone said to me, “you’re going to die tomorrow”, I’d like to see the people I love, play squash and then I’d go to work. The adrenaline at the 8.30pm rush is better than any drug. It’s hard and you have to want to do it – I haven’t had many holidays, I haven’t got many friends, I haven’t seen many people in the last 11 years – I calculated that I would have retired if I worked normal people hours. I’ve done about 80 hours a week, 6-day weeks. But I’m not complaining, I’m very present, I used to do it unsustainably, but I’m aware of what I need to do to maintain mental and physical fitness. Being in restaurants is such a massive sacrifice – you’re working when everyone else isn’t. But participating in other people's lives and making their important days special is huge.

I’m also doing a master’s degree now in business – you have to invest in yourself to scale and do what’s required.

If you could collaborate with anyone, who would it be?

There’s a couple of answers to this. One we’re trying to find time to do for fun at the moment is with Andy Beynon, from Behind. He’s a good friend and so much fun. We nearly opened a restaurant together, it didn’t happen – maybe we will in the future! That’s an easy answer but I’m fascinated by sushi. If I could pause my life, I would love to spend some time in a sushi restaurant. In terms of collaborations, I love watching Sushi Saito videos of YouTube. Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a beautiful film, it will make you cry – he’s 90 something and he goes hard every day, and he has three Michelin stars!

Dream dinner party guests?

Because I’m a sports fanatic – Roger Federer and Maradona. Can I bring someone back to life? Miles Davis! I need a hospitality one - Jo?l Robuchon. His contribution to food is amazing. Especially if he’s cooking! Can he cook and then join!?

If Angelina had a theme tune, what would it be?

It’s named after a song! Angelina – by Louis Prima. It’s sentimental. Amar and I used to spend every other weekend at my dads after my parents split up and in the car was a Louis Prima album and that was one of the songs we used to sing along to. It’s also an Italian American jazz singer about food – a waitress in a pizzeria. It’s sentimental for sure.

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QUICK FIRE

Favourite Pub: I didn’t drink until I was 22 as I was playing football. I’m a sommelier and I’m into wine. My partner doesn’t really drink either so we don’t really have much need to go to the pub. So, I’m more of a wine bar, wine guy than pub guy but I had to pick it would be The Grapes in Limehouse. It’s Ian McKellen’s pub and they have his Gandalf staff behind the bar and his Anthony Gormley in the river outside.

Favourite wine bar: Dalla Terra in Covent Garden. We’ve had some lovely times there. If I was recommending a wine bar, it would be that one – sentimental. The owners are good friends of mine and I remember dancing on the tables after Covid, it’s great.

Drink: Negroni or a Double Espresso – I have 6 of the latter a day and I love every single one. I have a really slow heart rate, so it actually helps keep me human! It’s genetic, my brother when he has surgery has to be given adrenaline before general anaesthesia! I love coffee, especially owning an Italian restaurant, I don’t like hipster coffee. I’m very old fashioned, I like a Lavazza tierra blend.

Favourite Area of London: I’m going to say Limehouse, I love the canal. I like running and walking on the canal and I live on the canal or Chinatown. I’m obsessed with Cantonese food or dimsum. If I didn’t have Angelina, I’d have a Chinese restaurant.

Best Market: New Covent Garden Flower Market. We get our flowers from there every week. It’s very nostalgic, I used to go with a mum every week and their very rude to outsiders which is funny and they have a wonderful café. I love it.

Favourite Park: Hyde Park. I grew up there until I was 3. I like walking around the Serpentine and seeing the geese get out the water at dusk.