Daniel Acevedo - Mildreds : the cookbook : delicious vegetarian recipes for simply everyone

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In 1988, when Londons Soho was still edgy, Diane Thomas and I took the plunge and opened Mildreds on Greek Street, right in the heart of the West End.

Back then, vegetarian restaurants still had that sixties hippy vibe doling out worthy brown food into earthenware pottery placed on pine tables. The whole thing felt dated, or so it seemed to us. Our aim was to open a restaurant serving good value, fresh and colourful international vegetarian food. Armed with the supreme confidence of youth (and little else) we took the lease on a small caf that, in its former life, had been a seedy sex club complete with an S&M padded cell in the basement!

At that time our porn baron landlords would come to collect their extortionate rent in person, usually with a glamorous brunette or blonde wrapped in fur and wearing large, dangly earrings in tow. After invariably asking for a bacon sandwich, they would slip the envelopes of readies into the inside pockets of their cashmere coats and head out for a real meal, as they put it.

The word on the street was that we would last six months.

Yet, despite the prophecies, it turned out that there were people out there who did want to eat the sort of food we were cooking, and we soon became a popular fixture in Soho. With main courses priced at 2.95, we also pretty quickly figured out that we needed to turn those tables to cover the overheads, and so we made the unusual decision (at that time) to take no bookings. As our clientele had nowhere to queue, we would spend a good part of each night running to and fro across the road to the pub, shouting out the names of waiting customers above the pumping rock music.

After 12 years, the opportunity to move to a larger premises with a proper kitchen, a bar and a private dining room arose. From inauspicious beginnings, Mildreds had grown up.

Diane Thomas sadly passed away in 2001 but is with us in spirit always.

Many people ask how the name Mildreds came about. I had been waitressing at the impossibly cool 192 before opening the restaurant and wanted a name that stood on its own without reference to wholefoods or vegetarianism. A friend started calling me Mildred after the lead character from the great film noir Mildred Pierce starring Joan Crawford. For those who dont know, she was a downtrodden waitress who managed to open a chain of successful restaurants despite being hampered by a scheming social-climbing daughter and a double-crossing playboy lover. The name seemed perfect.

Obviously the food, the service, the ambience and the profit margins are important, but thats only a small part of running a restaurant. Theres more. The people who bring the place alive are the staff.

The past 26 years have gone by in the blink of an eye and during that time we have had our fair share of ups and downs. There has been the joy of birth, and the sadness of death and illness. We have risen again after fire, flood and pestilence (the less said about the latter, the better). We have fallen in love, built lasting friendships, suffered breakups and divorce, and weathered recessions (its been touch and go at times). Yet through it all weve forged ahead together with pride, ambition, ideas, hopes, dreams, laughs and drama (the notorious incident of the missing chef found slumped in the walk-in fridge comes to mind!). Weve worked hard to still be here, and now its better than ever, with more to come. I embrace it all. Its my life. Its what makes me tick.

We still have the same values, integrity and love for what we do that weve had from the very start. Although over the years the food scene has changed, a lot of these changes such as the move towards using independent suppliers and organic, ethically sourced produce reflect the way we have always done things.

Daniel, the head chef, and Sarah, our chef extraordinaire, have been the backbone of the Mildreds team for the past ten years. What follows is the culmination of their hard work and talent. They are the real heros of this book.

This book has been a long time coming. We hope you enjoy it.

JANE MUIR

I always knew I wanted to be a chef. When I was young, I loved being in the kitchen. I remember coming home from school, grabbing my mothers copy of Cookery the Australian Way and baking Anzac biscuits and scones. I must have been about nine or ten years old at the time.

I started professional cookery in 1997 at the age of 17 and trained in various restaurants in and around Melbourne, working mainly with Italian, Greek and pan-Asian cuisines, before deciding in 2005 to move to London to expand my knowledge and further my career as a chef. One of the first jobs that I applied for was at Mildreds. I had never worked in a vegetarian restaurant and jumped at the chance to work somewhere where there would be a strong emphasis on the use of herbs and spices (which has always been the most exciting part of cookery for me).

Over the next couple of years I moved up to the sous chef position within the kitchen and soon after that I took over as head chef.

Working at Mildreds has given and keeps on giving me new opportunities, both personally and professionally. I love my job and my team of chefs in the kitchen and would like to thank them for the hard work they have put in over the years I have been nagging, pushing and encouraging them to deliver the best of themselves into the food we make at the restaurant. It simply wouldnt be possible to do what we do without such a strong team.

In October 2010, fellow chef Sarah Wasserman and I started a food blog for Mildreds, primarily with the aim of giving us a platform to experiment and share some of our recipes and daily specials from the restaurant with the blogging community. We always felt, though, that this vegetarian institution deserved a cookbook in its own right, and our blog turned out to be a first step on the road towards accomplishing this.

Many of the restaurants best-known dishes are featured in this book, along with my favourites, and I love and am very proud of the variety of internationally inspired recipes we have created. Working with Sarah is always a joy and I feel we have really pushed each other to achieve a wonderful book for the restaurant. What a great food adventure it has been!