How did you start cooking? “I’m from Kent [in southern England], and when I was 11 years old, one of my dad’s best friends was a chef in Confolens, in central France. Whenever we went there for holidays I helped him peel onions and carrots. He used to host dinner parties and he would say, ‘This is my little protégé,’ and the guests would all clap and I thought, ‘This is quite nice, I only chopped the carrots.’ “My mum isn’t a good cook, she just cooked for the family because we needed to eat. She never seasoned anything, saying too much salt is bad for you. My dad is by no means a chef, but he always loved to make the Sunday roast and I started cooking by helping him make it. “Carbs are my weakness. I never had time to eat, so I always ate pasta, and I wanted to know how to cook it. My favourite food in the whole world is lasagne. It would be my last meal. Even if I’m going to the electric chair, I would kill myself from gluttony before I get electrocuted.” What was it like to work for Gary Rhodes? “When I was 18 years old, midway through my second year in Canterbury College [in Kent], where I was doing a professional chef’s course, I got a call from Gary Rhodes’ human resources team in London asking if I’d be interested in working as a commis chef in the pastry section at W1. Gary is one of my culinary heroes so I went for the interview and got the job, but I couldn’t afford a place to stay. I told the head chef, and he said they had a chef who had the smallest flat in the world and I could sleep on the floor.” What happened? “I packed everything into two over-the-shoulder suitcases and went up to London on my first day at work. I asked about the chef I was going to live with and they said he quit last week. On my break I called my mum in tears. For about four weeks I was living in a different youth hostel in London every night. My parents would call and tell me which youth hostel to stay in. “I didn’t have money for transport so after I finished work, at 11pm, I walked over two hours with my two huge bags on my shoulders, checked into the hostel, stayed the night, woke up at 6am, packed up my suitcases and walked back to work. On Saturday nights, my parents would book me into a simple hotel, just somewhere where I didn’t share a room with 16 other people, so I could at least shower and sleep properly. Sometimes I feared for my life, sleeping in the rough parts of London. I kept my phone and wallet underneath my pillow, holding onto them as I slept.” American chef’s European awakening: he learned to forage for ants Did you find a place to live? “By the time I got my first salary I’d found a flat, but my salary was around £830 and the rent was £810. And then I forgot about the council tax, so I kept borrowing money from chefs just to be able to pay the rent. I worked there for six months and got into so much debt that I had to leave the restaurant. “I moved back in with my parents to pay off the debt, working in a restaurant in Lenham, Kent. A few months later, Rhodes’ team called me to come back and they increased my salary. I slept on the living-room floor of the sous chef’s house.” What was it like working at the three-Michelin star Waterside Inn in Bray, Berkshire? “Of the 29 chefs in the kitchen, 27 were French and two of us were British. It was one of the best times in my career, but it was also one of the worst because as an English chef, the hate you get from the French chefs is unreal. They would sabotage you at every turn. You could have canelés in the oven, and they would turn the oven off so they were ruined and then you got told off by the other chef. “It’s a miracle I even stayed for three months. Being there made me hate cooking, being a chef. It wore me down so much that I didn’t want to be in this industry any more. I was only about 22 years old.” What made you leave? “There was a chocolate room where we worked and every night you had to deep clean it. The head pastry chef would come with a permanent marker and circle each spot you missed so you had to scrub off the permanent marker. One time I thought I’d cleaned the chocolate room so well, but the chef told me to sit outside and all I could hear was squeaking. When I went in, he had written an essay on the workspace. Even cleaning off one letter took half an hour and it was already 1.30am. I thought, ‘This is not right, this is not what it’s about’.” How did you get to Dubai? What was it like? “In November 2009, Rhodes offered me another job and the following July I helped him open a restaurant in Dubai as the sous chef. On one of my first few days there I was a typical Brit on the beach. After five minutes I needed water and it was Ramadan and you can’t drink water in public, and no shops or restaurants were open. I almost died of dehydration and was put on an intravenous drip, and I burned my skin. “I was in Dubai for four years, one and a half years as sous chef, then the head chef got injured on holiday in Switzerland so I worked the next three months without a day off. I was Rhodes’ youngest ever head chef, at 24 years old.” You’ve had many guest chefs at Skye. Who was your favourite? “In 2018, Spanish chef Kiko Moya came. He has a very similar philosophy to me in that it’s not about showcasing what the chef can do, it’s all about showing what the ingredient can do. “Even though he has two Michelin stars, he is the most laid-back two-Michelin-star chef you would ever meet. His food was incredible, you can eat everything on the plate, everything tastes good. The recipes were one page long, five items, so simple. You can do good things with such simple ingredients, and to me that’s more interesting than any molecular gastronomy, than putting 25 things on a plate.” How did he inspire you? “I visited a lot of organic farms in Hong Kong, started using local fish, and worked with an online farmers’ market called Jou Sun. Now we have a salad that uses only local ingredients or those from our rooftop garden. The salad changes depending on what we have, and the same for the fish.”