I’m a big fan of David Beckham. He might kick me for saying this, but he wasn’t the best player in the world yet he worked like a dog on the things he was better at than others and became the best footballer he could be. As a child, success to me revolved around the idea of being a successful footballer. I wasn’t academic but always wanted to do something active or creative, something other than sitting behind a desk. I was a bit of a fantasist. To be honest, I didn’t know where I was heading, but everything I did want to do, I wanted to be the very best at.
When I was four, my parents had split and Mum said we were going on a little holiday to Skegness, but she never took us back to Worksop. She and the man who became my stepfather were strict, but they instilled in me that you only get out of life what you put into it, and if you do put your all in, you will succeed. From the age of 11 to 14, I did a summer job as a donkey boy on the beach. I’d get up at 5.30am to cycle to the outskirts to groom, water, feed and saddle the donkeys. When I was 15, my mum encouraged me to help in the B&B she ran – stocking the bar, preparing starters, emptying bins, everything. I’d save up any money I made and buy a quality pair of trainers. When you’re exposed young to some graft, it teaches you the virtues of work, an appreciation of money and an understanding of the mechanics of life.
Around the time I was doing my GCSEs, I was being bullied and I turned inwards. Fishing had always been a big joy, so rather than go to school I’d sneak off to Boston to go fishing. My parents went ballistic when they found out, but it’d given me time to be alone and daydream, and thankfully I discovered the idea of being a chef. I’ve always found daydreaming useful; nowadays I carry a Moleskine book to jot down ideas. A lot of people are too scared to follow dreams, therefore they don’t achieve. What I mean is, if you do have big dreams, don’t be afraid to chase them. At the same time, don’t over-think things. Nowadays, I deal with restaurants and projects around the globe on a day-to-day basis and that has to be handled naturally, taking each new challenge as it comes along and making sure everything’s done to the best of my and everyone’s ability.
At 16 I’d worked briefly at the County Hotel in Skegness, making mediocre trout with almonds and tomato soups. But you need inspiration and mine came from a book I bought for £12.95 from WH Smith in Skegness – Dining In France by Christian Millau. I thought, “Wow. As long as I’m going to cook food, this is the sort I want to cook.” And when you’ve decided to do something for the rest of your life, you’ve got to get your bum in motion and move to the best place to make a success of learning your craft. When I was 17, that clearly was London. If you send applications to lots of top chefs and get a day trial with one of them, you put your soul into getting the job. For me, that was a commis position at Boyd Gilmour’s Covent Garden restaurant. My sister said, “Jason, if you leave without telling Mum, she’ll go crazy”, and I said, “Yes, she’ll insist I stay in Skeggy, do college and wait until I’m 20.” So I just packed my bags and left. And thank goodness. (My parents still can’t believe it when I mention that I’m cooking that evening at 10 Downing Street or I’m at a Lakers game with Benedict Cumberbatch). You have to overcome the terror of moving to a city, but I lived in a decent youth hostel, remained determined and got stuck in. It’s a matter of impressing the chef-owner that you could be one of the special chefs who he can be confident will make his kitchen great.
I think it’s important for success that, after years of being a sous chef, I started learning about kitchen management and rotas and so on at [Oliver Peyton’s] Coast, which had 150 diners for lunch, 350 for dinner. By comparison, you don’t learn so much at Michelin-star restaurants, where everyone just turns up for work and does their own job. But going to Manchester to run Mash & Air [again for Peyton] came too quickly after that. I was 26 and rented my first posh apartment there off Alex Ferguson’s son. I suppose that’s what’s considered success and cool, after years of sharing little flats with five other chefs. But I was no way ready for the responsibility, with 55 chefs under me. Manchester in the 90s was a pretty brutal place, and staff would get wasted and not turn up for work. I was snowed under and it nearly broke my career. So sometimes you have to step back and admit you weren’t ready. I literally dropped everything, including my girlfriend, and went off to Spain to do an internship as a chef de partie, working for free under the great Ferran Adrià at El Bulli. It was one of the best decisions I’ve made. It felt wonderful to go in every day and open scallops, prep asparagus and wash spinach properly. And then in the afternoon – rather than going through orders and attending meetings about hygiene – sit with my feet in the sea, daydreaming for two hours. It was like therapy.
You want things perfect all the time as a young chef – especially when you’re single-minded and starting to push yourself – but it’s very easy to lose your temper and scream and bully, and very hard to be pragmatic and say, “OK, let’s get it right tomorrow by doing this and this instead.” You have to learn to behave maturely; you can’t just wake up one day a better person. It’s piece by piece. So, better today than yesterday – that’s my mantra.
When Gordon Ramsay asked me to go to Dubai in 2000 to executive chef at Verre, I was single and thought, “What’s the worst case scenario? No one’s going to die.” Four years later, I came back and opened Maze and was credited with turning it into the biggest money-spinner in Gordon’s empire, but there were assorted factors in its success. Every so often you hit on a concept that fits the time – this was the mid-noughties – and there was a boom going on, there was Gordon’s name, backing power and restaurateuring skills to start a restaurant of magnitude, plus my cooking skills. And we achieved something quite unusual – haute cuisine stepped up and operated like an incredible machine. You couldn’t get a table for months; people were willing to pay anything to get in.
It’s important what Gordon told me, late in 2005: “It’s a marathon, not a sprint. Of course you want to be successful, we all do, but with everything you do, make sure you do it correctly.” And he was so right. Once, I thought I was impressing him by saying, “I’ve not had a day off in four months”, and he replied, “Then you’re stupid. You should be putting pressure on your sous chef. A kitchen should run just as well without you as with, Jason. I’ll look at you as a success when you haven’t got more bags under your eyes than I count at Heathrow.”
Since I left Ramsay Holdings and started Jason Atherton Ltd in 2010, I have combined my dreams with opportunities as they’ve come along, and the company currently has investments in 14 restaurants worldwide. I spend up to 40% of my time travelling around them, but of course it’s impossible, believe me, to run 14 restaurants day in, day out. You have to have strategic partners, really good restaurateurs doing that on the ground, with the chef de cuisines receiving a percentage so they drive up the covers, touch tables, work with the managers and report to me.
It’s very important that never at any point have I said, or implied by putting my name in the restaurant name, that I’d be cooking in them, except at Pollen Street Social. That is the only restaurant where I’m chef de cuisine. Yet every day I communicate with all the restaurants. Skype, text, phone calls, emails, you name it, plus weekly conference calls. Of course, every complaint received from a customer anywhere – about food quality, service or anything – is forwarded to and dealt with by me and my wife. The reason we handle those is that we have more of an emotional attachment and can use complaints to over-view failure and correct for success.
I might spend four days in each city when travelling. Say, four in Hong Kong, four in Shanghai, four in Dubai, then home. At times it’s pretty tough on the body, but I watch what I eat and go to the gym pretty much every weekday, then try to enjoy myself more during weekends, and it seems to work, you know. Functioning globally becomes natural, whether you’re travelling or at home. Time zones become nothing more than just a number on a clock – you deal with situations as you or they wake up in different zones. There’s always a possibility of something going on at any moment – there’s no time within each 24 hours when nothing might happen.
It sounds odd to say, with some of the restaurants still having massive debt, but I don’t feel under financial pressure. When I only had one, I felt under immense financial pressure, but now we’ve got 14 – and there’s another six opening over the next four years – I don’t feel it. It’s bizarre but true.
Probably my biggest failure in life is that I wasn’t as good a husband to my wife as I could have been in our first six years of marriage, as everything was about me. We were living separate lives and I regret that greatly, but I set about rectifying it by involving her much more, because I’m a big believer in marriage, keeping family together and being a team. That’s success.
People always say, “You must be so tired, Jason.” But it depends on which day you catch me. Some days I’m more tired than others, but I definitely live in a constant state of varying tiredness and have been since I was 16. But it’s not my thing to drown in alcohol. Yesterday, after we’d been super-busy at Pollen Street Social, I went home, had a cup of tea and a chat with my wife and then we started to watch the film Kajaki: The True Story, and I nodded off to that, no problem.
I feel really privileged and honoured to have a job I love, a family supporting and enriching my life, that customers are eating our food and appreciating it and coming back for more, and that I have a great team who have the same ethos as me. So that’s as good a work/life balance as I can think of. Once I’m 58, I’ll stop working nights and my kids will be in their early 20s. I won’t be able to go to clubs with them but at least there’ll be time for family dinners.
It’s intriguing how people perceive my success. An old chef friend I bumped into a while ago said, “Oh everyone’s so proud of your success”, then added, “I heard you’ve just bought a massive house in Mayfair.” Yet I still live in the same house in Balham as when I started the company. And drive the same car, too. But good clothes, I’m happy to spend more on those, because back in the day my nickname was Mr Country Casual.
