Riding the wave of the vegan revolution, Cambridge’s plant-based burger restaurant, DoppleGanger, plans to change the way the city eats. Charlotte Griffiths finds out more
Alfy Fowler has only taken one day off since his vegan burger restaurant, DoppleGanger, first opened its doors on 18 January this year. I’m due to talk to him about his rise from pop-up to permanent eatery, but the mushrooms aren’t quite finished yet. I’m cheerily waved past the line of screens at the order station and bundled into the pocket-sized kitchen at the back of his candy-coloured burger bar. Alfy delivers a crash course in mushroom prep while I listen and try to stay out of the way of his fast-moving, plant-powered team, serving up lunches to a bustling room packed with burger fans.
The mushrooms are soon judged to have reached a ‘leaveable’ stage, and we slope off to Parker’s Piece and sit on the dusty grass with iced coffees. It is early spring, but already hot – both under the chestnut trees and in DoppleGanger’s kitchen – but the endurance involved in running a restaurant isn’t new information to the young chef.
I felt better for going vegan. That’s why I stuck with it
“I worked in kitchens throughout studying as a graphic designer, and I worked with this one guy who was the manager of a pub that had a star. I used to do private dinner parties with him as his kitchen prep/waiter/kitchenhand, and that’s when I properly got into cooking,” Alfy explains. “I worked with him every weekend for a couple of years.” Having spent several years shuttling between London and Reading, and starting to see his friends take on full-time work, previously freelance Alfy then moved up to Cambridge and got a full-time design job. And then, just to see if he could, he tried going vegan for a month.
“I only did it out of curiosity, for the cooking,” he says. “It was like learning how to cook again. It was less about ethical considerations – it was just something interesting to do. I’d always cook every day after work, and I soon felt better for going vegan. And that’s why I stuck with it. I’m getting more hardcore now, but for the first couple of years I adopted the approach that if I made food for myself, it’d be vegan, but if I went home, then whatever my mum cooked, I’d eat it. I still sort of stand by that. I think that’s where it gets a bit lost, and some vegans can annoy people a bit by being a little evangelical. But that’s the difference – what DoppleGanger’s about: this is an option, and it’s tasty.”
Faced with the prospect of relentless bean burgers, newly vegan Alfy soon started wondering what to do with the format of something-in-a-bun. “I wanted to make a decent burger, but the aim was never to make it taste like meat. We were never trying to replicate,” he explains. “My thing was that, texturally, a bean burger’s bad. It just turns to smush. If you have something between two bits of bread that has a bit of texture – because there’s no meat in it – it frees you up to do more interesting things. With a burger, you’ve got the taste of beef, and beef should be what a burger tastes like – whereas with a vegan burger that’s not trying to be beef… what could you put in it?”
You have to do a lot more to a vegetable to get it to taste decent
Still working full-time as a designer, experimental Alfy ran a series of pop-ups on his office’s roof terrace on Hills Road in September 2017 – all of which sold out, proving that Cambridge was ready and waiting for his approach to vegan cuisine. An extremely popular residency at the subterranean bar 2648 followed, and investors got in touch. “At that point it was still something that I’d been playing around with, but it all changed after the pop-ups,” recalls Alfy.
Rather than jumping on the increasingly popular bandwagon for ‘dirty vegan’ food, Alfy sought out a healthier way of creating crispiness. “I’d always wanted to use air fryers. People say that making a vegan burger to taste like meat is stupid – valid – but what’s just as stupid is, ‘Oh, I’m eating vegan, so I’ll put everything in the deep fat fryer’. You go vegan, go more plant-based, so you feel better – and then you end up eating out and everything tastes of dirty oil – you’ve gone back to square one.”
He’s quick to defend DoppleGanger against accusations of unhealthiness. “Just because it’s a burger, and it looks a bit dirty… You’ve just seen the mushrooms being roasted. Nothing in what we make is ‘dirty’.” DoppleGanger’s bank of air fryers use a fraction of the amount of oil required to deep fry, surrounding food with a blast
of hot air to crisp the surface and start those delicious Maillard reactions.
He’s also lightning-fast to correct anyone who thinks that opting for vegetables instead of animal proteins has a positive effect on the business’s bottom line. “That’s a misconception,” he says. “Some people assume that my costs are really low, but the chefs I’ve got in now – in a normal kitchen they could get in at 9am, and prep for lunch, but our staff costs are higher, because you have to do a lot more to a vegetable to get it to taste decent. Time is the cost.”
He explains: “Say that mushroom – say that was a bit of lamb: you’d just have to bone it out, and it’s a bit of lamb. With the mushroom, you have to peel ten cloves of garlic, make a paste, chop and roast them for an hour – it’s a lot more labour intensive. I’m not laughing to the bank here: I wish I were! I pay all my staff the living wage and above, too.”
Along with investment, Alfy’s benefactors introduced him to a business coach, who’s been slowly adding to the young entrepreneur’s skill set. His approach to management has seen the vast majority of staff stick around, relishing the challenge of opening diners’ eyes to the possibilities offered by veganism. “I tell the chefs: your cooking now is your chance to impress someone with a plant-based diet. The diner could think, ‘Oh, this is bad, and so this whole diet is bad’, but my chefs care so much that they don’t screw it up. A lot of my team are very hardcore – some of them will only date other vegans. A cult, not a business – ‘cult classic, not bestseller’,” he laughs. Then he explains The Streets lyric that went sailing over my head. “Did you get that reference? It was in the early business plan as well. I don’t think they got it, either…”
Your cooking now is your chance to impress someone
No matter how driven you are, going from working on your own as a designer to having to run a team of people is a challenge. “I do enjoy it. I’ve been really lucky, I suppose. I try and choose the right people,” he says, “but letting people go is hard. I think that’s the other good thing about having been a designer. When I was at college, we were taught that you’ve got to disconnect yourself from this thing you’re working on. A lot of your heart goes into design – and the same with cooking as well – but if you take all the critiques personally, you’re not going to be very good at your job. You need to look at the thing as a product of what you made, and take critique on it. If it’s not good, you’ve got to say there and then: ‘It’s not right’. Ultimately, we’re putting a burger on a plate. If it’s not good, just redo it.”
Alongside Alfy’s matter-of-fact approach to management, he’s also sincere about the possibility that his restaurant can make an actual, bona fide difference to individuals and to the planet. “There’s no rosy nonsense about it,” he says. “If someone eats twelve burgers a year, but they have three of ours, then I’ve actually made a difference. That’s what annoys me about design: we can make better equipment for disabled people, but it’s completely inaccessible because it costs ten of thousands of pounds. But with this, we can make a burger, and if Mr Meat chooses to come to us, then we’ve actually… done something.”
But only one day off? Even on a plant-powered diet, there’s only so much a man can give. And although Alfy’s clear dedication to his business is reaping rave reviews and repeat custom, a balanced life is in sight for him. “It’s been seven days a week, 8am till 11pm. Maybe I get off early once a week… and I do feel pretty tired: it’s finally catching up to me,” he admits. “We’ve got some new chefs starting, so hopefully I’ll be able to take a bit of time off soon. People ask me, ‘Oh, are you scared to let go?’ And I’m like, ‘No way. Please have it!’,” Alfy laughs. “Some days you do ask yourself – is working every day worth it?” He waits for a beat, before his face cracks into a huge grin. “Yeaaahh – it is.”
