How I Started One of London's First Pop-Up Restaurants

I've got a colourful bio, I'm quite the accidental chef.

I come from a neighbourhood in Birmingham called Handsworth. You leave school and the only thing to do is work in the factory or go to prison so one day, me and my mate borrowed a few quid off his brother and ran away.

What we did was, we got on the wrong ferry. We thought we were off to France but ended up in Jersey. I got drunk and fell asleep and my mate had gone to the casino and spent all the money. We got off the ferry with nowhere to stay and I just saw this great big hotel. I went in there and met this Austrian chef—old school, with a brigade of about 80 vagrant, ex-French Foreign Legion-esque people—and got a job as a commis chef. My first job at 15 was turning 8,000 potatoes a day in a damp room. I used to put beetroot sandwiches in my pockets and sneak them home for my mates.

Back then, food was about necessity—the passion came later. I'm from a massive Irish family so we always ate but we ate for sustenance: trotters, tripe. My mum was like, You're gonna be a chef, people will always want to eat but the only interest I had in food at the time was where it was going to come from.

I'd been going to raves since they started in '86, '87 and around then, my family had Turnmills the nightclub, which had just started to kick off. I came down there one Friday and my cousin said, "Do you want to play some records?" I said, "Yeah, alright then" and ten years later, I was still there. It was accidental.

But we soon had a night and we made an album. We were the first people to have the Chemical Brothers, so we were quite forward-thinking. I got paid very well for partying for ten years and lost a fair bit of my soul in the process.

I'd be lying if I said food was the first thing on my mind through the "rave years" but when you're DJing and flying around the world, you actually eat in really good places. People tend to take you out so although I wasn't cooking at the time, I had a real interest in food … and raving.

But all good things come to an end. I was getting a bit older and I'd managed to come through the whole DJ thing fairly unscathed. Some people had been a lot wiser with their money than I had—I was probably a bit more spendthrift and I couldn't really see a future in it. I just thought, I've got to grow up a bit here.

I could cook so I just threw myself head first back in and went to work for Marco Pierre White at Belvedere and started at the bottom again. In those days, you just walked up to the kitchen back door with your knives: "Got a job?" I turned up four days on the trot and got sent home, but on the fourth day, I got a job. That was a baptism of fire. I went from earning a lot of money as a DJ to earning a pittance but learning how to cook again.

Working in kitchens is a hard world. Massive. What do you do as a DJ? I'd go to a gig on a Thursday, fly to another gig, come back, have Monday off, then Tuesday and Wednesday the studio. All of a sudden, that had gone out of the window. I was getting up at six in the morning for work and getting home at three. Hard change.

I never liked the word "pop-up" or used it, but we were the original pop-up! They were just all accidental, ad hoc things. We just thought everything in the food world was so prissy—table cloths and all this. We were all old ravers and wanted to bring what we had in the clubs into the restaurant environment. The demographic of people that come to a place like Chick 'n' Sours want is a good soundtrack and good visuals around them. They want the vibe. Food is important but it's just one part of the jigsaw.

We stripped it back so there was a banging dub reggae soundtrack, borrowed tables, jam jars, and the chefs serving the tables—just because we didn't have any money to pay anyone. And then suddenly, jam jars were cool.

All of our pop-ups have got such different story. You've got God Save the Clam where we did two tonnes of shellfish on a roof in Hackney or The English Laundrette when the The French Laundry [Thomas Keller's Californian restaurant] came over to make a £160 dinner and we did it for 40 quid in a gallery done out like a 1960s laundrette. The theme throughout is fun food that's a bit trashy but also well thought out. It might seem like chicken and slaw but there's a lot of thought and love behind the product we serve—as much as any Michelin starred restaurant.

We did pop-ups out of nonconformity—just the whole punk attitude—but like anything, it's going to get replicated and bastardised and diluted. I could get wound up but now I don't care. The corporates are always going to get on it, that's the way of the world.

Chick 'n' Sours was the first restaurant me and my partner David self-funded. We've learned a lot. We've had everything that could ever happen in the first year of a restaurant: floods, fires, litres of oil spilt all over the kitchen.

Next, we're opening a Chinese restaurant next door called Chinese Restaurant Syndrome. The story is that the term came about in the 1960s, when seven different people went to a doctors in San Francisco after eating at a Chinese restaurant—all with migraines. So this doctor blamed it on MSG, despite being totally unqualified to do so, and called it "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome." I thought, What a brilliant name for a restaurant.

We don't take things too seriously. I want it to be the trashy version of Chinese—you know, the Sunday-night-in-front-of-the-telly version. Not refined but we'll be doing lots of cool, clever stuff like making our own oyster sauce and reimagining prawn toast. And great drinks.

I've never been to Mission Chinese (I was outside the day it got closed down) so I'm not saying it'll be anything like that—probably nowhere near as good but I guess I'll take any comparisons if people make them!

As told to Phoebe Hurst.

The restaurant world is littered with DJs-turned-chefs, usually frazzled ravers keen to embark on an equally nocturnal, adrenaline-fueled career but with little in the way of actual culinary skill. Carl Clarke's move from raver to cook is less linear.

"Running away" from Birmingham as a teenager in the 80s, he worked in various restaurants before becoming a DJ at legendary London club Turnmills. Clarke returned to cooking a decade later and after a spell in the respective kitchens of Marco Pierre White and Simon Rogan, went on to open some of the original London pop-ups including Rock Lobsta and Disco Bistro. Chick 'n' Sours, his first self-funded permanent restaurant, opened in Dalston last year.