‘I wanted the abuse, to test myself’: chef Andrew Walsh on working with Tom Aikens
- The 36-year-old owner of Singapore restaurants Cure and Butcher Boy talks about becoming head chef at just 25
- Working in the kitchens of top British chefs Jason Atherton and Tom Aikens taught him a lot
What was your childhood like? “I grew up in Breaffy village, in County Mayo, a rural area on the west coast of Ireland, in a working-class family of eight kids. I’m the third youngest. When food was on the table, it was a fight of the fittest. In school, I was not the best student and left at 15 to wash pots and pans for my brother, who worked in a three-star hotel serving gastropub food. My parents weren’t happy about that, but the job gave me the independence I was seeking and filled the boredom I had felt at school. I peeled potatoes and carrots, and made puff pastry, and jams in the summer.”
Where did you learn to cook? “A year later, I went to culinary school at the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology. It got me a placement at d’Arcy’s Kenmare, in 2001. Kenmare is a small touristy town in southern Ireland and that was the first time I saw lobsters, foie gras, duck on the bone and caviar. That’s when I got hooked and realised there was so much more to learn.”
What did you do afterwards? “In 2003, I went to work for Thornton’s, the second restaurant to have two Michelin stars in Dublin. Kevin Thornton is tough, driven and cooks classic French. I learned discipline more than anything. I was also in Australia for a year, backpacking and working on farms, and I worked in New York for almost two years.
“Then I went to London to work for Richard Corrigan, who had a restaurant called Lindsay House. He was a tough guy who cooked great food in a beautiful chophouse-style restaurant in the middle of Soho. In 2008, Richard moved to a new restaurant, Corrigan’s Mayfair, but they talked me into staying at Lindsay House as head chef at the age of 25 to finish the lease. Running the restaurant with seven chefs was a massive challenge, but it was a great education.”
[Jason Atherton] was the first chef to teach me the business side of things, because it’s not just about the cooking
What was it like working for Tom Aikens? “Even though I was head chef, I felt my tutelage was not done. I had heard about Tom Aikens’ reputation, how he is like a machine, but I wanted the abuse, to test myself. He’s an intriguing character, but on the inside he’s a lovely guy and a great chef. I was there [at Aikens’ eponymous London restaurant] for two years and learned technique and precision. The food he was turning out was ahead of its time.”
What did you learn from Jason Atherton? “I heard he was opening a restaurant called Pollen Street Social [in 2011], the first in London to have a dessert bar. I went from head chef down to chef de partie to learn more about pastry. In the second week, the pastry chef walked out from the pressure, so I was pushed to run it. It was a learning curve. I was 28 and it was nerve-racking. We got a Michelin star in six months.