Danny Wallace, a chef de partie at Gary Usher’s restaurant, Kala, in the centre of Manchester, is 23 years old. He has, at various times, also worked at Usher’s other celebrated crowdfunded establishments in the north-west, Sticky Walnut and Pinion, as well as doing stints at the Grosvenor Hotel in Chester, the Square in Mayfair and Angela Hartnett’s restaurants, Merchants Tavern and Murano. If that CV makes Wallace sound like a conventional recipient of our Young Chef of the Year Award, however, a little more background is required.

There are plenty of young chefs who arrive in some of the country’s best kitchens who have overcome obstacles to be there, but few can tell the kind of survivor’s story that Wallace lives with every day. A couple of weeks ago he sat at a table in the corner of Kala with me – it was his day off – and went through some of that story.

Wallace is an instantly likeable, intense young man, self-deprecating, quick to laugh. He takes a breath and begins, pretty much, at the beginning. When Wallace was three years old, his father, an alcoholic, died of liver and kidney failure. His mother, who was in prison, took her own life after being refused permission to attend her husband’s funeral. Wallace was taken into care. He had problems with speech – he had never been properly taught to talk as a baby – and was expelled from a couple of schools. He was eventually fostered on a long-term basis by a teacher, who retired early to take care of Wallace full time.

By the time he was 13 or 14 Wallace started taking an interest in cooking at home. After showing talent in shifts of work experience he was offered an apprenticeship at the Grosvenor and, at 16, he moved into a flat in Chester. “I wasn’t ready to be on my own,” Wallace says, looking back. “I had gone to a sort of behavioural school where you got followed everywhere and had no freedom at all. Barry, my dad, did his best to look after me – we still speak a couple of times every day and have a very close bond – but suddenly I was alone.” Wallace sometimes turned to drink and drugs to escape buried thoughts of the trauma of his childhood.

After nine months he parted company with the Grosvenor and ended up contacting Usher at Sticky Walnut. Usher – who recently talked in a Channel 4 documentary The Rebel Chef about his own troubled teenage years, shoplifting, taking drugs, before being saved by the creative rigour of his vocation – took Wallace on.

“If I think back to those first two years at Sticky Walnut,” Usher recalls to me later, “Danny may have been struggling a bit in the outside world, but never did he not turn up for work. He was there every shift without fail. He was still only 16 or so but was so passionate in his dedication to cooking, to doing things well.”

Usher had tried to take other kids on at a similar age to Wallace; he had set up an apprenticeship scheme with local catering colleges, because that is how he had started himself, but the scheme hadn’t worked as he had hoped. “None of them really cared about the work in the way that you have to at that age,” Usher says. “Danny came along and had real ambition, but also real commitment. He wanted to learn and be as good as he could be.”

After a couple of years, Wallace went “a bit off the rails again” with depression and decided to continue his cooking education in London – though kipping on mates’ sofas did little for his efforts to find more structure in his life. He was driven and gifted enough as a chef to do months in Michelin-starred kitchens, but the pressure of shouty 16-hour shifts and no sleep took its toll. “Most chefs need a drink at the end of service,” Wallace says, “but at one point I was drinking 16 cans a night.” As a result of a longstanding legal case against the local authority that had failed in its duty of care to him, he was awarded a significant sum of money out of the blue. Within a few months he had blown the lot on drink and drugs and was in hospital.

Two people stood by him. The first was his adoptive father. “If it wasn’t for Barry I would have killed myself,” Wallace says, matter of factly. “He is what has stopped me from doing it, knowing it would ruin his life if I did anything stupid.”

His other saviour was Usher, who had stayed in touch all the while, sometimes driving down to London to see Wallace when he was at his lowest ebb. “When I got well,” Wallace says. “I knew I had to change.” He phoned Usher and asked him for another chance. “The original plan was to come to Kala, but the opening was delayed, so I worked at Pinion in Prescot. I stopped drinking, stopped all the drugs.” His weight had ballooned to over 14 stone when he was drinking, but he shed four of those in the gym. “I did six months in Prescot, then I have been here five months,” he says. Not long before we spoke he had gone a year completely sober.

Wallace was crucial to the success of Pinion, Usher says, of the against-all-odds restaurant launch that was the subject of the Channel 4 documentary. “We couldn’t have done it without Danny, he was such a huge part of that. He may talk about me being there for him, but he was really there for me. It was a tough opening and you need people you can really rely on both as cooks and as part of the team. Danny has made himself one of those people.”

There are still bad days, Wallace says, but the rhythm and team spirit of Kala’s kitchen suit him – staff do 12-hour shifts and have three days off a week. He looks forward to coming in, developing his skills. “I’ve done a lot of pastry and starters but I’m really keen to learn some more butchery and fish prep now. That’s the next step,” he says, and smiles. “And then we’ll see where we go from there.”

Kala, King Street, Manchester, M2 4LQ; kalabistro.co.uk/