The secret formula behind Andrew Sheridan's About 8 in Birmingham

It is an unusual admission from a chef of Sheridan's pedigree. The Liverpool native, who grew up in north Wales, had built a reputation as one the country's most promising talents after working as executive chef at Sosban in Llanelli, Carmarthenshire, and head chef at the Stargazy Inn in Port Isaac, Cornwall. What's more, he had twice represented Wales on Great British Menu. "All of that is very short-lived," he says of his TV fame. "It won't fill your restaurant. You have a lifespan of six months after going on TV. No one remembers who won MasterChef 10 years ago."

And yet two years after opening About 8, not only are all 16 seats at its counter fully booked for its Wednesday-to-Saturday dinner service, but Sheridan and business partner Sam Morgan have just opened a second 16-seat restaurant, Black & Green, in the chef's home village of Barnt Green, south-west of Birmingham. So what happened? "We started to get busy because we've been consistent," Sheridan says. "We've been consistent in changing the menu and we've been consistent in evolving."

What's in a number?

On paper, About 8 sounds like the most restrictive of concepts. The name is inspired by the date that Sheridan became a chef: 8 October 2006. It serves a 12-course tasting menu to 16 diners (that's eight times two) for £88, four nights a week (eight divided by two). And each dish is inspired by a story involving the number eight. For instance, a scallop and apple dish called ‘Eight Days a Week' not only references Sheridan's fellow Liverpudlians The Beatles but also their record label, Apple.

"I developed the menu around one number and came up with a concept around each dish, before knowing what the dish was going to be.

I thought it would be something that I could educate the diner on when they sat down. It's not just, ‘here's your food, hope you like scallops'."

While the story might stay the same, the dish doesn't have to. "Apples pair very well with lots of different ingredients," Sheridan explains, "and it doesn't always have to be fresh apple; I might use an apple sauce made with cider. The concept allows dishes to evolve. We get repeat customers because every time they come they see something different."

The idea for About 8 came about during the first lockdown of 2020. Sheridan had been working since 2019 as executive chef at Craft, the Birmingham restaurant inside the International Convention Centre. Sheridan had told Craft's owners, Morgan and his wife Emma, that he didn't see his future as "cooking for people with 300 different dietary requirements". Instead, he wanted to open a chef's table with counter dining.

Morgan backed him, and the pair soon realised that it would be more cost-effective to convert an unused bar space within Craft into Sheridan's new project rather than pay for an additional property in Birmingham city centre. As Craft is a business within a business, Sheridan hasn't had to pay any rent or rates, which proved a lifeline during those quiet early days.

Still, despite the lack of financial pressure, Sheridan wondered whether he had made the right decision. "I took a gamble creating something unique in the hope that people would come, but there were nights when I only had two people in for dinner and I thought I'd made the biggest mistake of my life. The first six months were hard. Really hard. We were launching off the back of Covid and we opened for three weeks before lockdown. When we reopened, The Sunday Times put us in a list of the top 10 world-class UK experiences and we were included in the Michelin Guide, both of which brought us a lot of customers."

Sheridan hasn't been afraid to jettison parts of the experience that don't work. An immersive cinema room screening that Sheridan called "8: the Movie", with a voiceover from Welsh actor Julian Lewis Jones describing the story of the menu's ingredients, went the same way as a separate dessert bar, where customers expected to find afternoon tea and finger sandwiches (it is now a cocktail lounge). And a glass wall filled with Jelly Babies never made it off the drawing board when Sheridan realised there was no way to replace mouldy sweets past their sell-by date.

Doing it right

Sheridan says he was "rubbish" at school and fell in with the wrong crowd. He became a chef because his parents got him a job in a local pub to keep him away from drink and drugs at the weekend. In an alternative reality he thinks he'd have ended up on a building site (his father was a painter and decorator) or in prison. "I thought to myself, if I'm going to do this as a job, there's got to be more to life than throwing a bag of mixed leaves in a bowl and calling it a side salad."

As a 21-year-old with a new baby girl, Sheridan couldn't afford to move to London, and he credits his success to "self-belief and slugging it out the hard way". The one subject he did enjoy at school was art, and while he says he loved the creativity, he also admits that pursuing his vision has not made working with other people easy. "I don't like following a crowd. I'm not interested in what anybody else is doing, which is why I never buy cookbooks. I'm always the guy that likes to do something a little bit more out-there, because that's my personality."

Sheridan moved to the Stargazy Inn when Sosban closed suddenly in early 2019, but nine months later he was looking for a new job and on the verge of quitting hospitality altogether. "I've always struggled with working for other people and listening to what their opinions on restaurants should be. I believe you've got to come up with a concept and stick with it." He was introduced to Morgan through a recruitment agent. "Sam is the same as me," Sheridan says on why they work well together. "He's hard-working and passionate."

Roll! With About 8, Sheridan finally had free rein. "I almost felt like someone was saying, ‘right Andy, if you were directing a movie and you had a blank canvas, make the set exactly how you want it to look.' And that's what I did."

Diners enter a space that Sheridan says "feels like a nightclub and a restaurant and a really cool bar all at once". A TV wall displays the restaurant's logo, another is taken up with a wall of LEDs, while neon heat lamps reference the blazing tyre tracks from Back to the Future.

"I designed About 8 around movement," he explains. "How many moves does it take to serve a customer? How many moves does it take on a plate to execute About 8, with three members of staff doing 16 covers and 12 courses: that's a lot of plates of food." There are grooves set into the bar for the water and wine glasses so the chefs never put them in the wrong place.

Of course, it is those 12 courses that have taken the most thought. Sheridan says that balance is the most important quality. "The hardest thing for me to learn was moving from à la carte to just offering a tasting menu. When About 8 first opened, people were full before they even got to dessert. That was a big learning curve for me. Eighteen months ago I would have looked at a dish and thought there wasn't enough on a plate. Now I've gone from having 300 ingredients to three or four. We have one dish of wagyu beef with grated black Wiltshire truffle, pickled onion and beef sauce, and that's all that's on the plate."

Sheridan's signature dish is roast loin of cod covered in Exmoor caviar and a curry sauce that references childhood chip-shop suppers. The sauce is made from butter, cream and fish stock, which sounds incredibly rich, but the sauce is used sparingly and the cod is cut by a lemon vinegar. "The menu moves in stages, from light to rich then back to light," Sheridan says. "There has to be a balance."

Black & Green

He is now chef-director for About Dining, which includes not only About 8 and Craft but the private-dining Divide as well as Black & Green. The new restaurant opened at the beginning of June in Barnt Green; the Morgans live in the neighbouring village of Blackwell. Sheridan calls it "a gorgeous little neighbourhood restaurant", albeit one that is fully booked until September, with two chefs in the open kitchen and one front of house.

Like About 8, Black & Green has 16 covers, but arranged at tables around the narrow dining room (including two at the chef's counter). Wednesday to Saturday sees one dinner sitting of a weekly changing seven/eight-course tasting menu (£60/70) of ingredients sourced from local micro-suppliers. A ‘sparkling oyster lunch' on Saturdays offers six oysters and a glass of English sparkling wine for £25 per person.

Black & Green, however, isn't simply About 8 transplanted to a Worcestershire village. "It's not anything as wacky," Sheridan explains. "Black & Green is more about familiar foods cooked really well. We've just had braised pork ribs with roasted pork loin and burnt apple purée on the menu. I would never put pork and apple on the menu at About 8 because I think a diner who's in somewhere that looks like a movie set has be wowed in some way."

As to the future, Sheridan says he wants to continue evolving About 8 and Black & Green. "And, to be honest, I would love to open another 16-cover restaurant and just carry on what we're doing because the formula works."

Sheridan dismisses the suggestion that by creating a formula the uniqueness of the offering will be diluted. "By ‘formula', I mean small restaurants rather than big places with massive overheads and huge amounts of staff," he explains. "There's no way I could recreate About 8; I did it because I was going demented during lockdown. And Black & Green is unique because of how the menu fits the location. Ultimately the formula is the right people in the right location doing good-quality food that we care about."

Sheridan might not have had the best fortune before arriving in Birmingham, but with About 8, he has found his lucky number.

Wine not obligatory: proper drinks pairings

About 8 is not unusual as a chef's table in offering a drinks pairing (£64), but what is less common is that only two of the matches are wine. "I'm a big believer that if a drink goes well with a dish, then it works," Sheridan says. "It doesn't have to be wine."

About 8's drinks offering includes Aspall Premier Cru Cyder, Sharp's Brewery pale ale and in-house creations such as Rubis Chocolate Wine infused with barbecued hazelnuts for 24 hours, paired with a burnt-sugar caramel tart. "Me and the lads will try everything – from beer to wine to a cocktail. And it's the chefs who decide what goes best with the food."

Sheridan was adamant he didn't want a sommelier. "It's not that I don't believe they're educated in their field, but when I was a young chef, saving up for three months to be able to go out for a meal and looking forward to the experience, I would always walk away with the impression I'd been made to feel I didn't have a clue about wine. Just because I want a beer with my food there's no need to speak to me like I'm thick."

Sheridan admits that in the early days of About 8, customers who were used to tasting menus would expect to see a wine list. "I'd say to them, ‘Well, that course comes with beer. Try it with the food and if you don't like it, I'll get you a glass of wine.' More often than not, I convinced them."