Food Memories: pop-up king Jimmy Garcia on making fire pits in Spain

The story of how Jimmy Garcia started his pop-up food events business is a pretty good one. Having grown up in Yorkshire with a food-obsessed Spanish father, at 19 years old he took on a job working as a chalet chef in France, followed by stints as a private chef on a Mediterranean super yacht every summer during university.

Shortly after arriving in London, he decided to turn his front room in Balham into a restaurant one evening a month. He borrowed the tables and chairs from a local church, posted notes about it through his neighbours’ letterboxes and asked his housemates to serve everyone, which they duly did. This continued until they got so popular he had to start searching for bigger venues.

Since then Garcia has hosted dinners all over London in places like wine shops and warehouses, to a pub in Balham where during the winter of 2014 he served fondue to all his guests.

Two years ago he published his first cookbook, Social Eats: food to impress your mates, and this summer he is running pop-up barbecue dinners on the Southbank every night as well as doing private food events in France.

Continuing our series on food memories, here Garcia tells me what it was like spending summers building fire pits in Spain as a boy.

Jimmy Garcia’s first real food memories are of his family’s regular trips to Spain, when he and his parents and sisters would all go off to stay with their father’s relatives. The youngest of all of them and his cousins, Garcia describes his “equivalent of a night out” as being him “tagging along” with all of them on evening trips to build fire pits.

“I grew up in Wakefield, Yorkshire, which wasn’t very exotic, but in Spain no one goes out until 10 o’clock at night so I remember we’d all have dinner together and then I’d tag along with all of the other cousins and we would go down to this field create big fire pits there. Then we’d have asadas, and we’d put on steak, chickens and all sorts of simple things over the heat."

At other times, he and his cousins would go rambling up in the mountains, “where we’d create fire pits and warm blueberries over the top until they went really juicy. We’d also put meat on sticks and grill it directly over the fires, which was amazing.”

Being a tiny village in rural Spain, there weren’t shops to buy the meat from - instead “it was more like a couple of farmers in the village who we’d get it from - and the bread would come from someone in a white van who would just swing into the village, drop it off and go away again.”

While Garcia’s father and most of his generation grew up and moved away from the village, many of them would come back to visit at which point “the ghost town would really come back to life. There’d be my Spanish grandma there who would cure all her own meats and chorizos and I remember she also used to store chickens and rabbits in the basement of the house... my sisters could never understand that they weren’t pets. We weren’t really that exposed to what you’d call rural life, you see - but it was pretty cool.”

Back in Yorkshire, Garcia and his dad used to watch football and have lamb kidneys together on Sundays, which he says “was just the way we did things then. Dad is Spanish, but he’s so English these days - he’s been here for 45 or so years - but he does absolutely love his food. It’s definitely where I got my passion for it.

Back then he loved sardines but Mum wouldn’t let him cook them in the kitchen because of the smell - so I remember sitting outside with my dad in the back garden in the pissing rain, just barbecuing sardines and eating them until we couldn’t eat any more. They just went straight on the barbecue - it was all super simple.”

Years spent at university in Newcastle saw the next stage of Garcia’s obsession with grilling food over fires, as it was here that he and his friends built a fire pit in the back garden, "which everyone could come along to and hang out around..."

Moving to Balham, South London, it was a similar story, as there was a “massive charred circle in the middle of the garden” from where Garcia and his flatmates set up a fire to have impromptu parties.

“It’s really a house that’s split into five flats and we were in the bottom flat and had this garden, and we just decided that we wanted to invite everyone down to use it as a communal thing. So on a Thursday and Friday night, everyone would buy meat and come down to what felt like an open garden... I just remember that being really fun because being Balham it was quite a young area, but then after a while, my other flatmates asked me to stop having strangers in the house the whole time, which was fair enough.”

Looking back, Garcia think there’s “always been an appetite for this” which he puts down “to the naughty child in me, because I just love fire. I’ve actually got a fire pit now – and I want to do all sorts of things with it. First I need a really big garden!”

Jimmy Garcia's barbecue pop-up dinners run until September 20 on the Southbank (outside the Southbank Centre, river-side) from Tuesday - Saturday at 7:30pm. £45, thebbqclub.com