7 hours ago
5
Is this the world’s most macho introduction? On entering the garden behind the Butcher’s Tap and Grill in Marlow in Buckinghamshire, I’m engulfed in charcoal smoke. Through the fog I spy a countertop laden with slabs of raw meat – a leg of lamb here, a tomahawk steak there. And presiding over two enormous kamado grills is celebrity chef Tom Kerridge, 6ft 3in tall and with a meat cleaver in one hand and a butcher’s saw in the other.
“Smoke and meat!” he says with a grin before jumping into host mode. “Can I get you a drink? A tea or a coffee?” It’s a boiling hot day, so I say just a glass of water would be great. “Really?” he says, his face crumpling like I’ve just told him I’ve run over a beloved pet. “How about a gin and tonic? Or a glass of wine?”
And so that’s how this interview begins, with me drinking before midday and Kerridge, 51, enthusing about the forthcoming Oasis reunion. The band were his specialist subject on Celebrity Mastermind a decade ago, but he’s a little apprehensive about their imminent live dates: “One, because I had to pay a huge amount of money for the tickets. And two, because it’s in September so they might not even be together by then!” How much did he pay for the tickets? “A lot,” he says, sheepishly. “I can’t divulge because my wife would go mental.”
Kerridge is preparing for Pub in the Park, his annual summer festival that combines foodie pub fare with live music from the likes of Dizzee Rascal, Squeeze and various DJs and tribute bands. His mission, he says, is to create “the most fun-vibe beer garden” – there are cookery demonstrations, Q&As and “things in fire pits”, along with a presence from some of the country’s top gastropubs, from the Tamil Prince in London to the George and Dragon in Marlow. “The thing I love about British pub food is we don’t think it’s weird to have a Korean spiced mackerel dish followed by north African lamb tagine and then Sussex pond pudding,” Kerridge says. “You wouldn’t get that in France.”
Kerridge knows a lot about pubs. In Marlow alone he runs the Hand & Flowers (two Michelin stars), the Coach (one star) and today’s venue, which specialises in burgers and barbecue. In 2020, he presented Saving Britain’s Pubs on the BBC. “It’s all about doing the simple things correctly,” he says. “Saying hello when you come in, making sure you’re offered a drink, made to feel comfortable. A pub should feel familiar, like a nice warm bath. That’s the same whether you’ve got two Michelin stars or you’re having a burger and a pint.”
Yet despite Kerridge’s affinity for boozers, it’s been more than a decade since he last had a drink. Back in his wild days, when he was working his way up through the kitchens towards opening the Hand & Flowers, his drinking was notorious – a typical night would see him sink two pints – pints – of negroni, at least a dozen pints of lager and a pint of gin when he got home, all between the hours of 11pm and 2am. It’s not just the volume that’s astonishing, but the speed: “Yeah, I was very, very, very, very good at it,” he says. How long would a pint last, I wonder. Fifteen minutes? “Yeah … maybe not as long as that.”
But despite being back up for work the next day before 6am, Kerridge never got hangovers. “I was in a perpetual state of Nurofen and coffee,” he says. But he doesn’t regret a moment of it. The way he looks at it now is this: in order to build his business he had to work with a drive and intensity that was borderline unhealthy. And to maintain that, he needed a release: booze. Without the alcohol, without the chaos, who knows if he’d ever have been as successful?
Then he just gave it up – no professional help, just a realisation that he had to stop, immediately. So he filled his time with exercise – swimming, running, the gym – and healthy eating. Somehow, he can still be around alcohol. In fact, he loves being around it. Loves the artisan brewers (Rebellion Beer Company) he works with and the winery (Hattingley Valley) his restaurants collaborate with. Food, drink … It’s really all about the people for Kerridge, the social side. That’s what gives him faith that hospitality will survive, even though the industry faces unprecedented challenges.
At the Hand & Flowers they have a wall of honour – anyone who does two years with them gets their name on a plaque. “That’s a pretty big commitment in such a transient industry,” reasons Kerridge. If you do a decade, Kerridge gives you a luxury watch. Earlier, head chef Jamie May had flashed me his while he tended the grills. “Ten years in a company is a massive part of someone’s life,” says Kerridge. I tell him I don’t remember receiving a glitzy timepiece after 10 years at the Guardian and he immediately looks sad again, like I’ve just turned down another coffee. “Did you not?” he says softly.
Kerridge describes his workplaces as “a socialist space” where everyone is of equal importance. “A pot washer, that’s the beating heart, that’s the engineering, because a chef can’t work without pans. Housekeeping is vital … because if they forget to make a bedroom up and a guest walks into a messy room, that now puts a huge amount of pressure on the rest of the business because we have to look after those guests in a completely new way.”
Kerridge is a Manchester United fan so he will hate me for saying this, but the way he talks about getting everyone on board reminds me of former Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp. “Well, that’s why he achieved great things,” he says. “Everyone has their own importance and they have to be recognised for that.”
You might assume that someone as successful as Kerridge is riding through the current hospitality storm relatively unscathed, but he shakes his head at that. “We have six sites and I would say three operate at a very minor profit, two just about break even, and one’s losing a lot of money. It’s a constant battle of spinning plates and moving money to keep it bubbling along.” When I spoke to May earlier, he said the turbulence in the industry meant it was impossible to predict how each shift would pan out. “I prepare every day like I’m going into war,” he said, but that doesn’t mean armies of punters will show up at the gates.
Kerridge grew up on a Gloucester council estate, raised by his mother after his parents divorced when he was 11. He dabbled in child acting before getting a job in a kitchen and realising it was exactly where he belonged. He would put in regular 16- or 17-hour shifts, on a mission to be the best he could be.
“I was incredibly selfish. There was no other part of my world, whether it was social, whether it was girlfriends … even Beth, my wife, realised very early on that our lives are not going to be like a normal life.”
He points this out because it drives him mad when he hears people say that everyone has the same 24 hours in a day to make things happen. “That’s absolutely the most untrue sentence ever,” he says. “Everybody’s 24 hours is not the same. Some people aren’t carers, some people haven’t got an illness to deal with or a disability.”
Last year, Kerridge wrote an opinion piece for the Guardian calling out the Tories for failing the restaurant trade. What was notable about it was that his criticism went beyond policies that directly affected the industry (rising energy bills, VAT etc) to look at the wider UK. “If your staff can’t get affordable housing, or a GP appointment when they need one, how are they supposed to arrive at work every day and give 100%?” he wrote.
The overall state of the nation, he says, is one of the biggest problems he faces: staff struggling with the cost of living, rents going up, delayed treatments. “Marlow isn’t cheap. We have staff houses to provide spaces for staff to live in. We also have gym memberships for everybody. We try to make sure we’re not just feeding them boiled pasta every day. We look after the staff because their world is very, very hard right now.”
The Tories were booted out a few weeks after his column was published. So how does he feel Labour’s doing?
“I think they’re a six out of 10,” he says. “Listen, they’ve walked into something that’s incredibly difficult. Everything is broken. And global issues don’t help. But I sometimes wish they were a little bit more brutally honest about what needs to be done in terms of tax rises or how they’re going to do it. And I worry that not many of the members of the cabinet have run businesses themselves. So, like, the national insurance increase [from April employers have had to pay NI at 15% on salaries above £5,000, up from 13.8% on salaries above £9,100] was, I think, slightly ill thought out. For hospitality, healthcare, construction, where there’s a lot of lower-paid salaries, it makes a big difference.”
So if Kerridge was prime minister, what would he do? He barely pauses before answering: “A reduction in VAT. That’s a very difficult conversation to have when you’re trying to raise money into the Treasury, but it would keep places alive rather than closing. It would encourage growth long term. That and having another look at the NI raise would make a huge difference.”
The big one, he says, would be rejoining the EU, but he knows that’s a conversation nobody’s prepared to have in the next few years. “Even the most hardened Brexit supporter would have to say there has been some huge negativity from the fallout of it. For me, now we’ve removed ourselves, I think we find ourselves slightly isolated. Again, it comes down to a socialist viewpoint: problems are always better solved as a collective force.”
There are no easy answers, he admits. “There’s no cavalry coming over the hill to save us. And to be honest, I’ve never known fear like it. But hospitality is very fluid. You can adapt, you can change. If I wanted to put something on the menu tonight, I could do it. You can use social media and can create a buzz. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past 20 years, it’s that eventually things will change.”
Kerridge has always been outspoken about his industry’s issues. In 2020, he caused a stir by criticising customers who failed to turn up to bookings at his Corinthia Hotel restaurant in London. He says no-shows have improved recently, as people relearn social obligations post-Covid.
More recently, the owner of London restaurant the Yellow Bittern spoke out about customers who would turn up and share plates without ordering wine. Is it a customer’s responsibility to spend big? Kerridge sees both sides. Imagine you do 100 covers a night, he says. Plenty of your costs remain the same, but if everyone is spending £35 per head rather than £50 it’s going to make a huge difference in terms of revenue. “You need people to spend for it to become a viable business. But again, this is another reflection on society and people not having enough money.”
I wonder if the trend for appetite-suppressing drugs such as Ozempic is another thing hampering the trade these days. Kerridge smiles. “I mean, it’s hard to say, isn’t it? Nobody’s calling up to say: ‘I’ve got to cancel because I’m just not hungry.’ And actually, I think it’s a good thing if it improves the health of the nation.”
After giving up drinking, Kerridge lost a staggering 12 stone (76kg) in weight – these days he’s looking rather trim. Would he once have benefited from the injections? “I don’t know. Possibly, but my thing was booze. If you’ve had 16 pints of lager, then all of a sudden cheese on toast at 2am sounds like a good idea, doesn’t it?”
Kerridge’s journey through food was partly inspired by two books: Marco Pierre White’s White Heat, in which the bad boy of cuisine was photographed in black and white like a rock star. And Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, which brilliantly translated the rogue energy of the kitchen on to the page: the long hours, the brutal jokes, the thick skin required to hack it. These days that culture is surely dying out?
“Yeah, and it’s massively all for the positive,” says Kerridge. Really? I thought he might be a bit nostalgic for the lawless old days.
“There’s so many chefs saying: ‘It wasn’t like that back in my day when you’d have to work 700 hours a week and only be given chicken bones to eat.’ But how can you get the best out of people like that?”
Looking back, was he ever a bit of a dickhead during his wild years?
“Cameras weren’t massively about when I was living that very extreme, stupidly hedonistic lifestyle,” he says. “And I got caught out a few times on social media.”
But he doesn’t think he was ever a tyrant in the kitchen, where he’d always remain sober. “I think I always took the staff on the ventures and journeys with us. And a lot of people from that period when I was drinking are still here. I don’t think we lost anybody because of my antisocial behaviour. I mean, I wasn’t an angry drunk – it was always about having a laugh and doing daft things.”
Kitchens, says Kerridge, have always attracted people who like to live outside society’s norms: “Slightly more left-field-thinking people that don’t conform to a nine-to-five job, who are more artistic, or maybe neurodiverse, who aren’t so worried about working nights and weekends.”
Often it’s a haven for people who maybe didn’t fit in at school and crave a sense of belonging like Kerridge once did. “It’s not always the coolest kids with the smart hair. It doesn’t matter about nationality, colour, race, religion, sexuality, economic background. You come in, you work hard, you show a skill set, you’re in. That’s it. It’s a wonderful place to have found.”
These days Kerridge has replaced his reckless side with daily gym sessions and family life – he has a nine-year-old son, Acey, with his wife of 25 years, the acclaimed sculptor Beth Cullen-Kerridge. At one point the couple seemed to be ambivalent about having kids. “Then it came at an amazing point in our lives because it was when I’d stopped drinking – which might have had a huge effect on why we’d been unable to have them,” he laughs.
His favourite thing, he says, is having nothing to do on a lazy Sunday and then suddenly there are 20 people in his house for a barbecue. He just loves hosting. It’s the light at the end of the tunnel for him. Because despite all the current flux in the industry, the one thing he knows will never change is people’s need for interaction.
“Hospitality is about human connection, whether that’s a cup of coffee from the same coffee shop every morning or a pint of beer with friends after work. We still crave meeting friends and seeing people and doing stuff.”
He falls into a reverie. “When you go out for dinner on a Friday or Saturday night, you sign an unwritten contract with 100 other people in the room – that you’re there creating energy and noise. You don’t know anybody else in that space, but you’re there, creating that vibe together. That’s the thing we all love. So this might be a very difficult period. But long term? I think we’ll be all right.”
