There aren’t many up-and-coming chefs who’d cite Ready Steady Cook as an inspiration, but for OFM’s Young Chef of the Year George O’Leary, BBC2’s daytime cooking show is where it all began. “My mum and stepdad were never any good at planning dinner,” he says, “and when I was 10 it became a family game: every Friday night, they’d pull everything out of the fridge and ask, ‘What are you going to cook tonight then?’ To begin with, I made it up as I went along, but I soon learned what did and didn’t go together.”
His Friday night Ainsley Harriott impersonation remained a fixture for six years – the only other cooking he did was in food tech lessons at school in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire – but even then “I just knew I wanted to be a chef”. So at 16, he enrolled at catering college in Reading, and the final month of the course involved him finding work experience. “I got out the Yellow Pages, drew up a list of pubs and restaurants in a 10-mile radius and ended up with a list of 150, which was ridiculous. So I narrowed it down to just the pubs.”
Why pubs rather than restaurants? After all, he was nowhere near an age to legally buy even a shandy. ”I love pubs,” O’Leary explains, “always have.” With an Irish mum, pub culture runs deep. “Whenever I think of good times as a child, a pub usually features somewhere, often ending up with me sleeping on a bench while pub life carries on around me. A good pub is like home.”
It was on his revised shortlist that O’Leary first came across the Hand & Flowers in Marlow. He happened to drive past and decided that he’d found the ideal spot to be a workie.
“I didn’t touch much food for the first two weeks, just vac-packing. Then they let me pop peas and peel onions.” But in his final week he was let loose. “I was given veg to prep that I hadn’t even heard of, let alone seen.”
Now 21, O’Leary is still there, as chef de partie. To stay that long in your first catering job is almost unheard of – why hasn’t he moved on? “Why should I?” he shoots straight back. “I’m still young, still learning, and all my family and friends are nearby. This kitchen is my second family. Also, when I started, I like to think Tom [Kerridge] saw something in me – but you’ll have to ask him about that.”
So I do. “We all love George to bits,” Kerridge tells me. “Nothing fazes him, ever. He’s just so, well, dependable: always on time, polite, the first to put his hand up to take on more. He’s a credit to himself.”
Another reason not to move on just yet is that O’Leary clearly adores what he does. “What we produce is still pub grub,” he says, “but done to the highest standard possible. Cooking gives you a buzz outsiders can never understand. There’s not a day goes by when I don’t get home, collapse on the sofa with a cuppa and wait for the adrenaline to die down. This may sound daft, but I get a real high off work.”
Not that he’ll be doing much of that on OFM awards evening, I tease. “We haven’t done the rotas yet,” he says in all seriousness. “I don’t know if I’ve got the night off.”
