It's dinner time, and the kitchen of Will Meyrick's Sarong, his original Bali street-food inspired restaurant, is buzzing. The chefs glide around one another, constructing salads, searing meats and chopping herbs. Meyrick tastes every dish, asking for a little more lime, a touch more sugar, before it's sent out to the restaurant.
Meyrick - a Scotsman who in October launched his first recipe book, Sarong Inspirations - hasn't always worked in kitchens as serene as this. Refreshingly, Meyrick doesn't pretend he became a chef because of any ingrained passion for food. He simply failed at school despite going to the best private ones, and needed a job.
After a fling with graphic design, his mother suggested two career paths for Meyrick, who was born in Portugal, had siblings born in Beirut, lived in Italy and Peru, and had both run and skied for Scotland by the age of 16. The options were physical education instructor or chef.
The problem with the former was that it was "full of biology". But cooking resonated.
"The great thing about cooking - and this is what I fell in love with - is, it has a structure. Aged 17, I was wild, wild, wild," Meyrick says. "I needed structure. I needed an environment where I was shouted at, told off, had pans thrown at me ... I needed that sense of discipline, and that's what made me stay in cooking."
After a one-year course, Meyrick headed into the London kitchen of L'Oranger, run by Gordon Ramsay and Marcus Wareing. He lasted about six weeks. "I didn't know the difference between chervil and rosemary. I got shouted at every day, and told I was useless," Meyrick says. Was he shouted at by Ramsay? "I was shouted at by everybody ... and I was only allowed to skim the stock for two weeks. But it was those moments that I needed."