Extra hot chef: Jason Atherton

Jason Atherton famously fell out with his former boss Gordon Ramsay. But over the past few years he has been quietly making a name for himself on a global stage, culminating with his latest London opening, which is already booked up until Christmas. Not bad for a former donkey boy from Skeggy, says David Sexton
Pal Hansen
David Sexton25 October 2013

The day before we meet, Jason Atherton’s palatial new restaurant Berners Tavern — the jewel in the new £33 million Edition Hotel on Berners Street — gets a pretty remarkable review in a newspaper. It’s not just rated five stars, it’s headlined as ‘the defining restaurant of the decade’. For a place that’s been open just a few weeks, and a decade we’re only three years into, it’s a hell of a claim.

But then Atherton is on a roll and everybody in the restaurant world knows it. It’s only two years ago that, following his split from Gordon Ramsay after nearly ten years of working for him, Atherton, then coming up to 40, opened his own London place for the first time, Pollen Street Social, in a sleepy Mayfair backstreet. It was immediately packed and within a few months had won a Michelin star. Atherton now has four restaurants in London, including Little Social, also in Pollen Street, and Social Eating House in Poland Street, which has just won a Michelin star of its own.

Despite the fact that, just before Pollen Street opened, he said he couldn’t see himself ever owning more than two or three restaurants, he also has two places in Shanghai, one in Singapore and more coming up in Dubai and Hong Kong, as well as another London opening next spring, a City dining room in Tower 42.

He’s a driven man, then, really giving Ramsay a run for his money. Yet, to meet, he couldn’t be more unassuming. All he’ll say in his own favour is that he works hard and loves what he does. ‘I just go to work and cook and hope that people like what I do,’ he remarks, as if building an empire this big, this highly rated, this quickly, was as simple as that.

Berners Tavern, a vast, ornate, high-ceilinged room boasting 168 covers, is the most fashionable place in town right now: Kate Moss and Cara Delevingne were at the opening party. It’s also, Atherton is pleased to say, booked solid for dinner until Christmas.

His long-term associate Phil Carmichael is cooking there but the menu is very distinctively Atherton’s own style of modern British food, incorporating eclectic ingredients and inventive techniques to make every dish high-impact. ‘If you want to pigeonhole it, I suppose I’m a British Empire chef who travels the world, picking up ideas, robbing people’s spices and bringing them home and doing my thing with them,’ he says. He puts a lot of entertainment on the plate. Favourites include a jokey starter of ‘egg, ham and peas’ made into a refined little concoction, while perfectly judged halibut is served with a rich squid-ink risotto and crackling deep-fried squid. A lot of thought has gone into making every dish full of contrasts and flavours: it’s state-of-the-art stuff.

Atherton comes from a background quite different from most of his comfortably off customers, though. He was born in Sheffield in 1971; his parents separated when he was just three and he went with his mother to live in a caravan just north of Skegness. ‘We moved to a little town called Ingoldmells, which has the highest concentration of caravans in northern Europe. When you’re a kid you’re very adaptable. For me it was like I was on holiday.’

Eventually his mother and stepfather, a joiner, took on a guesthouse in Skegness, and Atherton would help with the meals as well as working as a donkey boy on the beach. He had lost touch with his birth father and older brother, but when he was 14 he simply called his dad from a phone box. ‘I picked up the Yellow Pages and looked for Atherton Conveyors; I knew that’s what his company was called. His secretary put me through and this broad Yorkshire voice came on, “Can I help yer?” ’

They see each other regularly now. ‘It’s nice to be back in touch. Life throws some tricky hands and you’ve got to get on with it. I’m a super-positive guy, even when things are really bad. I can’t change the past but I can certainly change the future.’

Somehow he knew even as a schoolboy that he wanted to be a chef but he can’t remember where he got the idea. ‘I can’t tell these tales of Mum growing her own vegetables and me podding peas on her knee. We were just an average family trying to make a go of Maggie Thatcher’s regime.’

On leaving school he joined the Army Catering Corps as a chef and was sent to Aldershot, but lasted only a few weeks: ‘I was the worst soldier ever,’ he says. Back home, he answered an advertisement to be a chef ‘at the local glamour hotel in Skegness, if there ever could be one, called the County Hotel, and I just took to it like a duck to water. I was so thankful that I knew what I wanted to do from an early age, because it meant I could really get into it.’

Aged 16, he realised that at that time London was the only place to be a chef. So, while his parents were away on holiday, he got on a train and came. ‘There used to be a chef’s hostel in Earls Court — such a shame it doesn’t still exist — called the PM Club. It cost about £20 a week and you shared a room with other chefs. I’m still friends with some of them today.

‘I don’t think I was different, but I knew that if I wanted to be somebody, the only person who could change anything was myself. I knew that for me to be a great chef it was just going to take a lot of hard work. There were some chefs out there, people like Marco [Pierre White] and Nico [Ladenis], who at a young age were better chefs than me, no two ways about it — but they didn’t have my determination to succeed. That was the key difference and I knew that. If it was going to take me another five or ten years, then so be it.’

He worked at a three-star restaurant in Alsace, his first time abroad; aged 27, he was the first British chef to work with Ferran Adrià at El Bulli, despite speaking no Spanish, and he cites Adrià as his greatest influence as a chef. ‘Until that point I don’t think I was really creative. At El Bulli, everything was questioned. Ferran would say, “Why are we doing this? Does anybody know a better way?” No chef I worked for had ever cared about my opinion. He was always questioning why, again and again and again. Because everything can be improved on. It changed the whole process of the way I think about things.’

Having worked with Gordon Ramsay in 1993 when he was setting up Aubergine, in 2001 Atherton went to work for him full-time, first at Verre in Dubai for four years and then, in 2005, creating Maze in Grosvenor Square for him, winning a first Michelin star.

It was while Atherton was in Dubai that he met his Filipina wife Irha, with whom he now has two daughters, aged eight and two. Irha is a co-director of Atherton’s restaurant group and very much involved in its day-to-day running. Working so hard is difficult for family life, he admits, even though he tries to keep weekends free for them, ‘but I’m very lucky Irha understands my job is what it is’. He talks about taking the girls around the restaurants and teaching them about food, and even says: ‘I’d love it if one day one of them shows an interest, and takes over the family business.’

Atherton has said in the past that he fell out with Ramsay, and Ramsay’s father-in-law and former chief executive Chris Hutcheson, over money. But he is full of praise for him now as a restaurateur: ‘I really learned a lot from spending 19 years with him for sure.’ But they don’t speak and Ramsay has never visited his restaurants. ‘No, no, we don’t talk, but that’s not my choice, it’s Gordon’s choice, probably because he’s too busy — he’s busier than me, I think! But if he walked into any of my restaurants, he’d be welcomed with open arms. He certainly wouldn’t receive a bill from me, because I owe him a debt of gratitude.’

His own management style is a little different, though. ‘I’m tough but I don’t run around screaming and shouting and busting pans around people’s heads. I think I’m fair — I’ve got OCD for sure: the job’s created that inside me.’ Maybe it’s just another term for his perfectionism? Although it has been reported that he likes his carrots all lined up in a row.

Atherton takes meticulous care of himself as well as his restaurants, running every day and circuit-training in the gym. He doesn’t drink or eat bread during the week, although he eats anything at weekends and produces a classic chef’s horror story about what he ate after getting home late from work one night: ‘Two slices of Mother’s Pride bread, a slice of ham, tomato ketchup, sour cream Pringles, some cheese and peri-peri sauce — pretty gross but it tasted great at 1.30 in the morning.’ There we are, a free Jason Atherton recipe.

He remortgaged his house and put all his life savings into creating Pollen Street Social, and the realisation that he would go bust if it failed made him nervous, to the point where, he admits, he initially over-egged the menu. But the restaurant soon settled down and he didn’t need to worry. ‘It made a profit from day one, the minute we opened the door, and so far we’ve not had to borrow a single penny — much to the bank’s dismay I’m sure. We don’t try to dig out massive profits from the restaurants, but every single restaurant we run is profitable, and that to me is crucial.’

He marvels at London’s insatiable appetite for restaurants. ‘Try to book a restaurant! Saturday night, it’s nigh on impossible, you’ve got to plan weeks in advance, even just for your average place.’ His wife called him recently from the queue outside Franco Manca in Balham, where they live — ‘On a Tuesday night, Balham! I’ve been trying to get a reservation at Hutong for tomorrow night, and even I can’t get in. I’ve been on the waiting list all week.’

He still cooks at Pollen Street Social from Monday to Friday: ‘I just go to work and cook and hope that people will like what I do, and when people mention me in the same breath as a great chef, of course I’m thrilled, but a bit of me still thinks: is all this real? Am I going to wake up one day and be back in Skegness, in my mum and dad’s guesthouse in Grosvenor Road, thinking, “Oh, that was a nice dream…”?’ Not very likely: Skeggy’s loss now looks like London’s permanent gain.

Photographs by Pal Hansen

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