After being plucked from near-obscurity at just 23, Brett Graham has hit the heights of global gastronomy. Now he’s turning his attention back to the farm.
Already a subscriber?Australians are no strangers to success on the global stage. They’ve won Olympic gold, Nobel prizes and Oscar statuettes. They’ve run multinational companies and international organisations. They’ve topped the pop charts. They turn up everywhere. But no Australian has ever run a restaurant that has won three Michelin stars. Until now.
Brett Graham with the mushroom cabinet in The Ledbury restaurant in London. “I want to get the ingredients immaculate,” he says of the impact of getting a third Michelin star.The dining room is intimately sized and warmly lit, and the volume level from the subdued chatter at its 17 tables – all occupied, always – is kept in check by elegant acoustic panels on the wall made of Yorkshire hemp fibre with mycelium grown over it.
He had already decided that all the “Yes, sir. Good evening, sir. Good evening, madam” schtick was not for him. The epiphany came early on, in The Ledbury’s first year in 2005, as he watched a customer leave the restaurant and head for a cab across the road, in the pouring rain. “I was too young. Quite a lot of the staff when I started were older than me, and I just had no experience. I mean, I hadn’t even written a rota when I first came here, let alone leading a kitchen and a restaurant seven days a week,” he says. “I didn’t sleep very much for probably a decade of my career, hardly three or four hours a night. And it’s what obviously made The Ledbury survive. But I was a bit shit at it.
Eventually, Graham drifted from the pool towards the kitchen. Choosing to be a chef was a surprising move for a kid who most wanted to be a farm vet. As he tells it, there was probably too much red tape for a year 10 student to do work experience as a vet, so he opted to do his placement at a restaurant instead. “And by about the third day I didn’t want to go home at night.”
Tomlin also toughened up the youngster. “I remember going out to the table to him, he was busy with all these people, and I said, ‘Chef, I’m a bit tired, I’ve got a headache, working so many hours.’ He said, ‘If you want to be any good, get used to it. Because if you want to be good at anything you do, if you want to be the best, you’re going to get tired, you’re going to be exhausted. And if you don’t like it now, then see you later.’ That was a really good lesson for me.
“She said to me, ‘Never, ever do that again.’ I said, ‘Do what?’ She said, ‘Close the restaurant.’ She said, ‘It’s not just your restaurant, you know, it’s our restaurant as well.’ That was a really special moment for me,” he says. “Restaurants can be very powerful places, with emotions, with memories.”
And for him, winning three Michelin stars is all about sharing the glory. He says the secret sauce at successful restaurants is “the people that work with you”. At the award ceremony, he was quick to embrace his head chef, Tom Spenceley, and his front-of-house manager, Jack Settle. “Brett made me the chef I am today,” says Billy Hannigan, who spent six years at The Ledbury and is now the head chef at. The work was hard, but Graham led by example.
On a sunny day that has warmed the otherwise underpowered English springtime into a state of perfection, Graham has donned his wellies and tweeds to whip a couple of hours up the motorway to Aynhoe Park, a manor house and grounds north of Oxford. As he shows me around, he talks with a proprietary air about the challenges of feeding the deer in the winter, the history of Aynhoe Park, and all corners of English farming life. I hear, for example, about the role of yew trees in churchyards, which were planted for their poisonous bark as a way of discouraging farmers from grazing cattle there. He is clearly in his element, and his idyll. He now has about 700 deer across four parks. “Running deer parks is not financially profitable.
So at a considerable premium in cost and complexity, he now tops up their diet of grass and silage with the pressings of rapeseed oil, and is also cooking with the oil itself. And he is working with farms to grow the rapeseed his way – without spraying the weed killer glyphosate on it. Although he was previously “never a lover of rapeseed oil”, he wants this business “to get massive”.Mark C.
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