I grew up in a small town in Australia called Williamtown, near Newcastle. We were like any other family in the 1980s; food was just put on the table. I can remember eating steak and microwaved peas for dinner most nights. We weren’t the sort of family that were out in the backyard picking apricots; food wasn’t a way of life in the same way it probably was in lots of other countries at that time. But I remember my mum having a signature dish, salmon lasagne with tinned salmon, and that was such a treat for us. On Sunday nights, we used to make pizzas with supermarket-bought pizza bases and tried to get creative with the toppings. They were probably my earliest memories of food.

I became interested in ingredients; we kept chickens so I was interested in cooking the eggs. An old boy across the road, when I was about 13 or 14, taught me to kill and butcher a chicken, which was a real eye opener to me about how food was produced.

During school, we did work experience and I wanted to be a vet, but my second choice was to be a chef. They don’t let teenagers around veterinary surgery so I went to a restaurant, Scratchleys on the Wharf, which ended up being my first job. I was fascinated by it and was hooked straight away; I’d never seen how chips were cooked. Rubbing prawns in coconut, deep frying them and putting mango sauce on them was quite exotic for me. That creative side – making platters of seafood and decorating it with different fruits and vegetables – [is what] I really enjoyed.

I started that job and [went] to a technical college one day a week, that’s where I learnt all the basics. After three years, I moved to Sydney to a very high-quality restaurant called Banc, which is no longer there, and I was fascinated by the attention to detail; [they] were peeling asparagus and using quail and venison. The amount of detail and the number of chefs that went into [producing] the food was incredibly exciting. The hours were punishing and I wasn’t used to it; we’re famous for working huge hours in our trade and this was no exception. They had incredibly high standards. That’s where I got hooked on fine dining restaurants because I wanted to be a part of somewhere that’s really progressive and focused on being the very best.

While I was at Banc, I won the Josephine Pignolet Award from the Sydney Morning Herald for a young chef who showed passion and commitment to the industry, and the prize was a trip to London. I thought I’d come here for a year or two, save some money and then go to Spain; I didn’t really have a concrete plan but I was excited to travel. At that age, I didn’t have very much money so I knew I had to start work pretty quickly. One of the guys at Banc set me up with an interview at The Square.

Arriving in London was quite a shock to the system. In Sydney I lived in a decent apartment quite close to the water and could walk to work and then, coming to London, I ended up in Earl’s Court in a tiny bedsit with three of us in a bedroom, sometimes four, because we were Aussies helping each other out and we all worked at different establishments. The standard of living felt to me, at that time, much lower in London, much tougher, the wages versus your transport and accommodation was just different. But I had a real strong burning desire to succeed.

At The Square, there was such excitement around ingredients and Phil Howard, who was the chef there at the time, is a brilliant guy and I became friends with him even though I was quite young in the kitchen. I’d never seen foie gras, girolles and wild venison coming in the way it did. It was a real eye opener and I was hooked; I stayed at The Square for quite a long time and really, really enjoyed it.

When they asked me, I was a little bit concerned that I was so young but I thought I’d give it a go. The first time I came to [the site of] The Ledbury I would have been 23 and it was an old American style restaurant called Dakota; I had something to eat there and thought I could give this a go for a couple of years. That was over 20 years ago.

Being a young guy, I was so full of energy but, like any business, you have an idea of what you’re going to create and the reality is very different. You think it’s just a menu but there are so many other things; I’d never written a menu or written a rota, or done payroll. At the start, I really struggled to get all of those things in order, which led to me working huge hours just to keep it going. It was tough; we sometimes didn’t do many covers. At lunch, we’d do five or six – dinners were always good, but lunches were a struggle. So I worked on building our reputation to try and get the business to work;it took some years but we eventually got there.

We’ve been consistent. Restaurants come and go and the trade is quite volatile; so many things come into play like where you’re renting, who your business partners are, who’s in your team. I’m really proud that The Ledbury is still achieving things, it’s still winning awards, but the best recognition is that we’re pretty much fully-booked all the time. Some restaurants get fully booked and, for whatever reason, go off the boil but The Ledbury has had strong enough demand to make sure we’re full.

I think it was just determination really; failing was never and is never an option. Part of the pressure [of running a restaurant] is that I’m responsible for lots of people’s lives, and in some cases their families as well, and everyday when I wake up part of my motivation is to make sure I don’t let anyone down.

The riots were a big hit but in the grand scheme of things, it was very short and we were very motivated to get back on our feet. They caused a bit of disruption and smashed the front door but we opened the next day for lunch without a front door – we didn’t close, we just cleaned up and went again. It’s that attitude that’s helped us get through difficult patches.

When Covid came, it didn’t look sensible to keep running a restaurant because there was no information and no one knew what was happening. I decided to call it a day – and I didn’t know how long that would be for, whether Covid would become something that just stayed here forever – so we closed. During all those long closures, I didn’t think too much about the future because I didn’t know what the future held, but I knew a fine dining restaurant with dividers in that tiny dining room just wouldn’t work. Some people think I had a game plan for Covid, but I didn’t.

We had a fantastic site and a fantastic business that had been hard fought to get to that level. When we reopened, we had revised opening hours and a bit of a new team: a fantastic head chef, Tom Spenceley, Harry Corder as sous chef and restaurant manager Jack Settle, who had been with us for 10 years. All of them have been wonderful guys to work with and what’s been really valuable is having a team around me who can run their departments really well. In the early days of The Ledbury, I didn’t have that structure so sometimes I was doing too much and overstretching myself trying to run the kitchen, innovate new menus, run the business and look forward to the next year or two.

The new regime gave me the chance to decorate the restaurant the way I wanted to. When you open a restaurant at 23, there’s normally a designer involved and, this time, I wanted to have a bit more personality in the dining room. We had a fantastic lady called Rose [Murray], who has a company called These White Walls, and she helped us with the design. I was able to put a lot of personal things in there, like fossils and mammoth bones. We made a mushroom cabinet downstairs where we grow our own mushrooms. We just progressively improved on all elements we have in the restaurant.

If it hadn’t closed, we might never have been reborn. We went all out and spent a lot of time, money and energy trying to create a new dining room for when we reopened. It was exciting.

Anyone who runs restaurants will tell you that the pressures are immense, from staffing to services and laundry to cleaning. There’s so many elements that go into producing just one of the little things on the menu. For me, everyday is like playing in the Premiership; I wake up and I’m like, we’ve got to get this right tonight, we have to win, we can’t lose.

I still feel quite anxious about the restaurant and that’s a good thing. It’s hard on me and some of the other senior guys but it helps that we’re all pulling in the same direction. That’s what’s great about working at this level: everybody wants to be there to try and improve their careers and give the guests the best experience they possibly can.

I’ve seen some people who are absolutely obsessed by it. The advice would be to make sure you have good people around you; one of the things I always look for is people who try hard and to do the best job they possibly can. That’s something I really value.

The other thing that’s really important and perhaps, at times, gets overlooked is your customers. You’ve got to never forget about your customers; they make your business and without them you don’t exist. We put a lot of thought into making it a nice experience.

It was an opportunity that came to me; the owner was struggling to get it to work and I was asked by a friend if I wanted to get involved. It was an entrepreneurial thing and it was separate to The Ledbury. It was a big decision for me to make at that age, and it had risks as I had to put some of my own money into refurbishing it, but there was a good feeling there. I was excited by the prospect of creating something more simple than The Ledbury but being progressive with pub food. I wanted it to be where people could go for dinner, and not necessarily go to a fine dining restaurant, but still have fantastic food with a wine list that works.

I started the first deer park at Aynhoe Park in 2017 – I got married there in 2011 so I was friends with the guy who owned it – and he said would I like to open a deer park with him and I said “I’m a chef, I’m not doing a deer park” and parked the idea for a year or two. One day I rang him up and said I’d have a go. I got right into it because I thought we could use the ingredients from the deer park at The Ledbury and it would be great provenance.

Then I opened another deer park at Boughton House and started selling venison; we went from 24 carcasses in the first year to 1,250 last year. That started the wheels turning and then I imported some Iberian pigs from Spain in 2020 and now we’ve got about 2,000. We make charcuterie, sell fresh pork and venison, and produce [beef from] retired Jersey cows.

I have two young kids so they keep me on my toes and trying to spend time with them on my days off is obviously really important. I don’t always get the balance right and that’s the nature of our business – we work when people are having their dinner and that’s when people are traditionally at home. It can be difficult for my wife in terms of childcare and other commitments because of work but I try my best.

In my role now, I either spend full days in the kitchen or break it up by going front of house when we have a full team. The senior chefs have got to have some progression with how they do things; they’ve got to be able to put dishes on the menu, make decisions in the dining room and feel like they’re contributing. Tom does a lot of the dishes on the menu now and we work together on the ingredients. It’s a real team effort and that’s what gives it strength and longevity. I hope The Ledbury outlives me; it deserves to. Restaurants are just four walls and a couple of windows, but what makes it special is the people who work there and the customers we serve.

The biggest lesson from being a restaurateur and a chef, and wearing all those hats, is never forgetting about your customers. I really value them and still, after 20 years, am so thankful for every customer that walks through that door and I never want to let them down.

Restaurants are different things to different people but I have so many family memories at The River Cafe. I found out that my wife was pregnant on my birthday there, and I can still remember how I felt, so that restaurant has a really strong feeling for me. Restaurants can be very powerful like that.

I have such respect for everybody across the whole trade and people who have been able to keep a single restaurant going for more than a decade because you get so many challenges thrown at you. Anyone who has been able to build a business and keep it going, no matter what standard, impresses me because I know what it takes and how hard it can be.

I was looking at some of the old dishes we used to make and it was quite interesting. In the early days, like 2005, I put this dish on with mackerel and in those times it wasn’t something you served as a starter. I cooked mackerel over flames and served it with cucumber and mackerel tartare – that was one of the dishes that started to make our name and develop our style. Over the years we have developed other dishes – brown sugar tart, passion fruit souffle, a langoustine wrapped in shiitake, pheasant egg with dried ham and salt-baked celeriac – and they have helped us progress and keep going forward.

What I find amazing now is that we don’t rely on signature dishes, we rely on the seasons changing. We’re just about to start the game season. Last night we served caramelised duck liver custard with barbecued sweetcorn and a shiitake grown downstairs – but what’s really nice is that we can explain where that came from and see it on the plate. Sometimes we have our own beef, pork, venison, and honey – and I’m really proud that some of our dishes have two or three ingredients from our farm.