There are times, travelling with Jason Atherton, as he does the rounds of his new restaurants and soon-to-be restaurants and not-quite-fully-formed-ideas-for restaurants in Singapore and Hong Kong and Dubai over the course of five intensive days, when you are profoundly grateful you are not in the company of either of his sometime mentors, Gordon Ramsay or Marco Pierre White. One such moment is at the luggage information desk at Dubai’s colossal, soul-sucking airport where, after the third overnight flight, the inevitable has happened and our bags have finally gone astray.
Atherton has just done a full cooking shift at 22 Ships, his inspired tapas bar in the heart of Hong Kong’s old red light district, while simultaneously checking in with staff about the lunch service at his Michelin-starred London home, Pollen Street Social, and fielding emails about his new ventures in Sydney and Shanghai. He’s due at a meeting with a developer working with the InterContinental hotel group in Dubai at 9am to sign off on a deal to open a new waterfront property worth several million dollars. He is in the jeans and T-shirt he has tried to sleep in on the plane, and unshowered. At 7am the glum manager of the luggage information desk, at which we are the sole customers, is showing little interest in our missing bags.
After extensive walkie-talkie conversations and a languid, fruitless search for a pen with which to take our details, a long hour or so has passed before he relays the information that “I think your bags are somewhere in the system”. At which point you might imagine Gordon or Marco, testosterone pumping, jetlag jagging, would have taken some selfish relief in reducing the manager, his system and the entire luggage information operation at Dubai International to a lightly astringent jus.
Atherton, who worked for Ramsay for 10 years, creating the highly successful Maze, and who has, as I have witnessed in various time zones, an obsessive interest in the efficiencies of service, remains courteous. “I tell you what,” he says, “I wanted to have a look at the fish market this morning before the meeting, so we’ll head out there, and perhaps if our bags turn up we can pay for them to be sent on to the hotel?”
Jason Atherton at Deira Fish Market in Dubai. Photograph: Richard Saker
We head to the fish market, a dockside hangar in which an extraordinary variety of sea creatures have been dredged from the Gulf to be vigorously descaled, chopped and then examined by some of the desert city’s army of chefs. Atherton is in his element, enthused by the idea that “there are probably 30 species here I’ve never cooked” and therefore further excited by the prospect of his Dubai kitchen, which might be open by the autumn, if he makes his InterContinental meeting.
We head to the hotel to find the bags have been delivered, testament to Atherton’s patience and local knowledge (“I worked here for Gordon for four years and I know if you start shouting the odds to locals you are screwed”). The chef makes his meeting, signs his deal, does a walking tour of the first-floor shell of a skyscraper fronting the marina in which his restaurant will take shape, and is still smiling at lunchtime when he sits down at the waterside opposite the building site, and celebrates the contract with a carrot juice. “The thing is,” he says of our morning, “if I start to get annoyed about a lost bag or whatever, I just make sure I immediately give myself a kick up the butt. You know, I’ve had more difficult days than these…”
Atherton’s journey to this particular waterfront began at a seaside about as far from the glass-fronted fantasy of Dubai’s marina as you can imagine. Born in Sheffield, he moved with his mother to Skegness after his parents separated when he was three. He lived with his mum and his sister in a caravan, “quite cosy but frigging cold in the winter”, and got his first taste of kitchens and hotels at a guesthouse, the Maryland, that his mother set up on Skegness’s North Sea coast.
“Even in the holidays we always had to work,” Atherton, now 41, recalls. “I would get up early to help do the breakfasts, then go out and be a donkey boy, doing rides for kids on the beach all day, then come back, help with the evening meal. My stepdad Dave was a joiner. He would be out first thing on building sites, then come back and put a dickie bow and a white shirt on and work the bar until midnight. On a Friday, the treat for my sister and me was to watch the telly, plugged into the cigarette lighter of the car, with pop and crisps, for an hour before the battery ran down.”
Jason Atherton’s quote which is on the wall of his 22 Ships restaurant in Hong Kong. Photograph: Richard Saker
This work ethic has clearly never left Atherton. After “24 years busting my nuts in other people’s kitchens”, he invested every last penny of his savings into Pollen Street Social in Mayfair only two years ago; with the help of partners he now has eight restaurants and counting across the world (two others opened earlier this year in London, Little Social, over the road from the original, and the Social Eating House, in Soho). All have quickly won praise and awards and, more to the point, customers. “We have two kinds of restaurants, extremely successful ones and successful ones, but they all make money,” he says and shows me the daily incoming texts of takings to prove it. Esquina, for example, has paid back its investment in just 10 months. Atherton, who is married to Ihra, a Filipina who worked with him in Dubai, and has two daughters, aged seven and two, is about to start filming a TV series for Sky, My Kitchen Rules, in which couples compete to create pop-up restaurants in their front rooms; he has three cookbooks in the works. It is, you might say, his moment; but having seen casualties of previous such moments up close, he is anxious, desperate, not to let it go to his head.
One of the fascinations of Atherton’s rise – White singled him out recently as one of only three or four “proper” British cooks – is that he is very much a second-generation figure; he has learned from the excesses of the celebrity fathers. He won’t say a bad word about Ramsay but they don’t see each other now – “his choice not mine”; the Scot was characteristically annoyed that his protege eventually left Maze, but still Atherton has learned, he says, from his old boss, “both what to do and what not to do”.
Much of this is detail. In his autobiography, Ramsay reveals that when he started out he was in the habit of chucking any complaints from customers in the bin. The chef was always right. In the course of our travels, Atherton has any complaints made in any of his outposts immediately texted over to him. In Hong Kong he discovers that a lunch party in Singapore had to wait 20 minutes for dessert, while one of 100 diners in Soho at lunchtime thought his steak a little fatty. Atherton immediately responds with questions to sous chefs and maitre d’s, and apologies to customers. He talks in passing, “don’t quote me”, of memorably truculent guests over the years but prides himself on never losing his rag.
“I’ve never chucked anyone out,” he says, “and I don’t imagine I ever will. I have had people in Pollen Street say ‘there is not a single thing on this menu I like’. But I kill them with kindness. I go out and say, tell me what you want and I will happily cook it for you. I’m not interested in ‘chef knows best’ bullshit.”
When Atherton worked for Nico Ladenis in London in the early 90s they weren’t allowed to put salt and pepper on the table. “If people asked for pepper, Nico would likely ask them to leave. To me, if someone likes a lot of pepper, it’s not a problem. He has paid for it, he can do what he likes.”
It’s tempting to think that some of this spirit is a legacy from Skegness. He agrees that there was probably no tougher crowd to please. “We had busloads every week from Doncaster, Barnsley, Rotherham, Nottingham,” Atherton recalls. “We would have Leicester week, in which the only question you ever heard was ‘Ow much is it, duck?’ I’d have to check with my mum but I think to start with it was about £3.50 for the weekend, bed and board, so it wasn’t bad value.”
Atherton brought a good deal of that can-do possibility down to London with him. At 16, he wrote to the top 20 chefs in the country, from Raymond Blanc down, and asked if they might find a space for him. He received a positive reply from one, Boyd Gilmour, who had left the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra to set up Boyd’s in Covent Garden. Atherton came down with his knives and his whites, said he could start tomorrow and that was that. He lived in the youth hostel in Earl’s Court for two years with about a tenner a week to spend and “loved every second of it”.
He didn’t travel abroad until he was 22, working a season at the three-star Auberge de L’Ill in Alsace. Five years after that he became the first non-Spanish speaker to work with Ferran Adrià at El Bulli having turned up with a backpack and refused to leave until he got a trial in the world’s best kitchen. In between times he cooked with White in his heyday at Harvey’s and then at the Hyde Park hotel.
His time in Spain perhaps gives most clues to the kind of cooking Ahterton aspires to now – smart, witty plates, with intense flavours, made with sharing in mind. “You stepped into that kitchen and it was like you were in a different world,” he says of El Bulli. From White, the original el bully,he learned something about man management. “You’d try not to catch Marco’s eye at midnight when he was off hunting with his mates, otherwise you would be up making bacon sandwiches for them when they got back at five in the morning and then straight on to prepping,” he says. He put up with that, and even, he hesitates to suggest, the occasional physical confrontation, because “Marco was the best chef working in Britain. He was so fast and so perfect, all out of this complete chaos.”
Jason Atherton and staff outside his Pollen restaurant at Gardens by the Bay in downtown Singapore. Photograph: Richard Saker
As I witness a few times, watching him at work, at the futuristic Pollen in Singapore, which is housed in a glass-domed botanical gardens on the bay, or at Esquina, his tapas bar in that heart of that city, Atherton is hardly reticent when imposing his standards on his chefs. He is only here for a day or two, so each observation has to count. “When I do give someone a hard time it’s usually if they disrespect ingredients, or if the veg is not packed away properly in the morning. I know it sounds OCD but my organic carrots, I don’t want them tossed in a scruffy container: they are laid down nicely all facing the right way and treated with respect. I get angry if stuff like that is not done, but not madman angry.”
A running theme of our travels is the fact that Atherton only ever gets asked two questions by journalists: “How did you survive working with Gordon?” and “Aren’t you in danger of spreading yourself too thin?”
In a sense one of the questions answers the other. Atherton eventually left Maze not because of Ramsay, “but because I couldn’t work with his father-in-law [Chris Hutcheson, Ramsay"s then business partner]. I tried for years. But it was time to move on.”
Atherton has so far been luckier with his own business partners. His principal backer is Mrs Mavis Oei, owner of the Goodwood Park group of hotels and daughter of the late Khoo Teck Puat, once Singapore’s richest man. Oei was seduced by Atherton’s food – he cooked for her first at Maze and then at her homes in Bray and in the Far East. Having invited him over to discuss a business proposition in 2011, she refused to let him return to the UK until he had signed a deal by which she offered an initial £3m as finance for a 25% stake in what became Pollen Street Social. The rest of the opportunities have flowed from there.
In a meeting with business partner Peng Loh. Photograph: Richard Saker
In Singapore, Atherton has breakfast with Peng Loh, a former lawyer who has hotel and restaurant interests throughout the world, including London’s Viajante and One Leicester Street. Their plans for the former Foster’s brewery building in Sydney are laid out on the table. “What do the Australians eat for breakfast?” Peng wonders. “Well, I do this great kind of mini-English breakfast on a proper pizza,” Atherton suggests, which sounds about right. In Hong Kong he meets Yenn Wong, perhaps the most immaculately groomed woman I have ever encountered, with whom he is renovating PMQ, the former colonial police barracks in the middle of town, with a casual “bread oven-type place” downstairs and a “farm-to-table eating” restaurant upstairs. There is talk of tracking down “the only properly organic farmer in China” for the veg. Yenn takes a precise note. She helped to design 22 Ships and they have plans for a speakeasy across the street.
All of which begs an answer to the second of the two questions Atherton is perennially asked: is he in danger of spreading himself too thin? Inevitably, I guess, but the trick is to find chefs who instinctively know what he wants, for each of his satellites, and to keep them happy. He has a scheme for Andy Walsh, a young Irish chef doing precise wonders at Esquina, which gives him a 10% profit share. His chefs in Hong Kong and London are on the same incentive once the restaurants have earned back their investment. “I feel like the bloke who did Dolly the Sheep,” he says at one point. “We clone them and we put them in a box and we ship them out. It’s like Madagascar 3, crates of chefs marked fragile.”
A day in the life of Jason Atherton’s Pollen Street Social, London W1
Atherton will have to find a few more crates yet. Three other London properties are planned for this year or next. A collaboration with the ultimate concept man Ian Schrager in the now defunct Berners Hotel; a City Social satellite of his deconstructed Pollen Street concept in Tower 42; and perhaps something in the old Bow Street Magistrates building in Covent Garden. Only a few places are beyond the pale. He was recently approached to do something in Moscow. (“I have no desire even to visit.”) Likewise Tokyo: too many great restaurants already. Otherwise, the world still seems a newly shucked oyster.
Looking at that world through the eyes of a chef like Atherton is a curious thing. Cities become not so much multi-faceted metropolises as the home to places you can buy food. “When we are not working in restaurants we are eating in restaurants,” Atherton says, and in my time with him this seems literally true. In Singapore he takes his chefs for spicy crab at the beach on their Sunday lunch off; in Hong Kong we visit the cheapest Michelin-starred restaurant in the world, the dim sum canteen Tim Ho Wan. In Dubai he checks out, and loves, La Petite Maison, and puts his head round the door of the outpost of Wheelers, to which Marco Pierre White has given his name, which is all but empty. And all the time he seems to be thinking, sniffing, tasting opportunities.
In his efforts to coolly colonise the world, one site-sensitive neighbourhood tapas bar at a time – “we are not into concepts, we are not fucking TGI Friday’s” – it seems he is not alone. One night, on our way between Esquina in Singapore and his bar over the road (which requires a password to enter, and in which a Buddhist cocktail impresario serves drinks in miniature wooden dhows), Atherton meets José Andrés, another graduate of El Bulli. Andrés is puffing on a big cigar, and also covertly looking for new opportunities. Outside 22 Ships in Hong Kong, Atherton runs into Alvin Leung, the so-called Demon Chef, who has just exported his “extreme fusion” cooking to London. They talk of cities not yet on the international restaurant radar, Rangoon, Bangkok, Manila. There is, Atherton suggests later as we wait for a plane, hardly a departure lounge in which he does not meet one Michelin star or another, all scenting possibilities in the global foodie air.
A few days after we return, I look in on Atherton in Pollen Street Social. After the spin of the previous week he seems relieved to be grounded. Before an impeccable lunch he shows me around with pride and joy. The kitchen in which all the carrots, and everything else, are facing the right way, the dessert bar, and the Buccleuch beef ageing behind glass. Downstairs is his office, in a corner of the prepping kitchen, no bigger than a Skegness caravan bedroom. He doesn’t have a PA, so he runs his mini-empire from here by email. What you’ve got to remember, he says, not for the first time, is that, “we are just a bunch of guys cooking food and having fun”; and the thing is, he still just about believes it.
Tim Adams stayed at the Goodwood Park hotel, Singapore
Jason Atherton: a 21st-century cook"s tour of the east
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