Ollie Dabbous can remember the exact moment when he went from being the chef of a new, potentially promising restaurant to being the hottest new thing in the world of British food. It was Thursday 2 February, around 10.30am. He sits at one of the refectory-style tables in the downstairs bar of his London restaurant, scrolling through the messages on his phone. "Here it is," he says, passing the phone over. The text, from his friend Will, reads, "Standard LOVES you!!!" The first review of the restaurant, from Fay Maschler, the veteran critic of the London Evening Standard, had just gone online and to describe it as positive is to wallow in understatement. Maschler awards stars out of five, but hands out the maximum very rarely, perhaps once every two or three years. She had given Dabbous, which had been open for just two weeks, the maximum five stars.
"I was massively surprised," the 31-year-old chef says. "She came in on our third day. I didn't know her. I assumed she'd prefer something more refined. We're deliberately a bit rough around the edges."
Indeed. Whatever may have been said about the food served at this newcomer, Dabbous is no gilded gastro-palace. The decor is pure industrial chic: the original concrete floors given a polish. There are heavy metal-work screens and cages for bags and coats, hard-edged wooden, cloth-free tables. In my review I described it as looking like a gussied-up NCP car park, though that doesn't quite communicate the charm of the restaurant. And yet it is certainly hard-edged and functional. If there is any warmth it comes from the frosted window that hides the kitchen.
Maschler didn't care. She described the braised halibut with coastal herbs as "the best thing I have eaten in a long time". She called the entire restaurant a "game changer". Dabbous admits he was "blown away, but at the same time I had a lot of other things on my mind". He had a restaurant to run. In any case the review was about to become the front desk's problem. "It started happening about 3.30pm when the printed edition of the paper hit the streets," says the general manager, Graham Burton. "There was a phone call. And then another. And then another. You'd put the phone down and it would immediately be ringing. We went from two or three emails for bookings to 300 in about an hour." In the short term the review actually cost them money. They had to hire another member of staff just to answer the phones.
And that's how it's been ever since. There have been other wow reviews – from Giles Coren in the Times, from bloggers, from, well, me – and so the noise has continued, with Dabbous even attending last month's gathering of chefs at 10 Downing Street, in aid of VisitBritain, alongside, among others, the Ledbury's Brett Graham, French Laundry's Thomas Keller and El Bulli's Ferran Adrià. Later that week Dabbous won "best kitchen" at the Tatler restaurant awards.
On the day I meet him, in the last week of April, weekend dinners are booked up until the end of December. Even lunches are booked up into July. Dabbous is so hot you could fry an egg on its reputation, to be served on a hunk of their own black pudding, spun through with apple and caramelised onions, and smeared with a butch mango chutney.
And that's the thing. The noise has been generated by food that is the opposite of prissy and overworked. It's big on flavour. Or as Dabbous himself puts it, "I believe in restrained simplicity and cleanliness. I want a dish that has the wow factor but looks effortless. I don't want my food to look cheffy." And it doesn't. Perfect asparagus are accompanied by a dollop of mayonnaise made from rapeseed oil alongside the crunch of hazelnuts and you wonder why no one has done it like this before. A hunk of Ibérico pork, from the shoulder, and cooked over the barbecue, comes with a toffee mess of honey, roasted acorns, almonds, salt and a deep-flavoured smoked red pepper. Best of all is an egg shell refilled with a scramble of egg, long-sautéed mushrooms and smoked butter. There are versions of this dish in many high-end restaurants around the world. Not only is this one of the simplest and most accessible, it's also, at £7, one of the cheapest. Dabbous has broken through not simply because of the quality of the food, but because of the – albeit self-conscious – lack of flummery around it, and the price point. In a city that is subsumed under waves of concept and high-gloss, overworked crockery and 5,000 denier linen, it's a huge relief.
The curious thing is that the chef behind all this is a complete unknown. Usually when a hot restaurant appears, a few people know about the person behind the stove. They've already been marked out as the next big thing in newspaper features, been talked up by their mentors. They've done pop-ups. With Ollie Dabbous all was silence. And yet this gently spoken, lissom, slightly intense chef has the kind of CV most cooks would kill for. Not that he has the life story to match. "There's no story of me podding peas with my mum when I was a kid," he says.
Ollie Dabbous was born in Kuwait, where his French-Italian father was an architect. Later he, his brother and mother moved to live in Guildford for schooling, while his dad stayed in the Middle East and they commuted during the holidays. "I suppose I'm a bit of a mixed grill," he says.
"There was nothing particularly foodie in my childhood. In our house food was fuel." He describes his interest as self-propelled. He started baking at home, became intrigued by the business of cooking and when it came to finding a summer job he gravitated towards restaurants. When he was 15 he spent a month in Florence working in the kitchens of a trattoria where his father's cousin was a waiter. "I loved it," Dabbous says. "It was the produce, the accessibility of it."
It was that which made him decide to be a cook. And so he started writing letters. He wrote to Rowley Leigh at Kensington Place, who gave him a month's unpaid work experience when he was 16. Around the same time, through his father's connections, he landed another placement with the revered three-star chef Guy Savoy in Paris. They put him in the basement where he prepped girolles and artichokes for 12 hours a day. "It was shit but you just move on."
But it was the job in the kitchens of Raymond Blanc's Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons in Oxfordshire, after finishing A-levels, that gave him the real start. "It was the best place to go. Everything was done from scratch. They can afford to do things properly. It's the hardest place I've worked." What, I ask, did he get from Le Manoir? "I learned to taste everything. I learned the importance of freshness, the importance of seasonality."
Raymond Blanc, who would later become a backer of his protege's restaurant, returns the compliment. "Some people take a long time to find their confidence," Blanc says. "Some find it immediately and Ollie was one of those. You could see he had a connection with the food and the people. And he was always asking questions." Blanc credits him with a cool head beyond his years, and a monstrous work ethic. "He was always a hugely hard worker." Ollie acknowledges this. "A lot of cooks would come and go at Le Manoir, but I stayed."
He rose to be senior chef de partie, before leaving to go on a journey through some of Europe's great kitchens. He did brief one-week stages at Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck, at the highly regarded L'Astrance in Paris and at Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant that has become the figurehead for the localism movement. There were longer stints with Claude Bosi at Hibiscus in Ludlow and at Mugaritz in Spain, one of the leading names in the new cookery of the country.
Finally he returned to Britain to work as head chef at Texture, the newly opened restaurant of another Manoir graduate, the Icelandic born Aggi Sverrisson. "His own restaurant was always the plan. He came here to learn," says Sverrisson. Does he see much of his style in what Dabbous is doing? "No, his food is his own but we have similar tastes. It's all the things we learned from Raymond. The lightness of sauces, the strength of flavours."
After two years at Texture, Dabbous went to work at a nightspot called the Cuckoo Club, where he met the Swedish-born bar man and mixologist Oskar Kinberg, who would become his business partner. Kinberg had always wanted to do a bar and restaurant, and in Dabbous, he says, he found the perfect collaborator. What was it about Dabbous' cooking that he found attractive? He frowns. "You've tasted his food, haven't you?" It's a fair point.
I ask whether the staggeringly positive response to the venture had any downsides. "Well, because the restaurant is so busy a lot of people assume the bar is full too, and until recently it wasn't." There is a bar menu served down here: chicken wings, steak sandwiches, black pudding. But in classic Dabbous style the simplicity of the names belie the work that's gone into them. All the chicken wings are boned out, the relishes on the steak sandwich are their own, the black pudding is the one they make themselves. "To be honest, I just wanted this restaurant to survive," Kinberg says. "I thought it would take six months to get established. Not two weeks." It's good news for the relatively large group of backers, including family and friends, all of whom threw money into the pot.
For a while I stand in the small corridor of a kitchen during the lunch service. There is a coal barbecue they had built for them, and a couple of sous-vide water baths. Dabbous has his tiny pass by the door. Though there are knives and tongs, the implements of choice are tweezers for the placing of blooms and green herbs, and pipettes for dripping in just the right amount of oil or vinegar to a dressing. It is, like the food, quiet, controlled.
There is no shouting and clattering. Ollie Dabbous is clearly exactly where he wants to be: assembling the dishes he first started thinking about four years ago. I ask him where the idea of putting his name above the door came from. "We just wanted a word that didn't shout restaurant or bar. It's an odd word. It sounded right. If I'd known what was going to happen, though, I wouldn't have done it." Why not? "It just looks ludicrously egotistical."
Out by the front desk they are, as ever, fielding phone calls, making apologetic noises about the length of wait for tables. Suddenly they get a cancellation for lunch at the same moment as someone walks in off the street innocently wondering if they have a table for two. "You're in luck," the receptionist says. I tell the two new arrivals they may be the luckiest diners in London and they grin. "Weirdly," the general manager says, "it may be the one way of actually getting a table here at short notice. But please don't tell everyone or we'll have queues out the door."
At any other restaurant of this calibre, the idea of queues down the street would be ludicrous; the way things have been going for Dabbous recently, it really doesn't seem so far-fetched.
• Dabbous, 39 Whitfield Street, London W1T 2SF; dabbous.co.uk; 020 7323 1544
