Australian Brett Graham didn’t have a game plan, but he’s made history in London

3 weeks ago 3

Does any teenager think it through when they leave their home town, say goodbye to their family and find a job in a big city? Not likely. Teenagers are driven by dreams. Only adults fuss about planning.

There was no big vision for Brett Graham when he left Williamtown, near the port city of Newcastle in NSW, for a job in the kitchen of a great restaurant in Sydney. Nor was there one when he flew to London a few years later to work in a famous restaurant in Mayfair. Nor when he opened his own restaurant in Notting Hill.

“I didn’t have a game plan,” he tells me as I study the menu at his very comfortable pub, The Harwood Arms, in a quiet street in the London suburb of Fulham. He leans forward, talking with an Australian accent that has been polished, ever so slightly, by two decades in England, and offers a bit of life advice from years of pressure.

Australian chef Brett Graham at his Michelin-starred pub, The Harwood Arms in London.

“I think that sometimes people think they know what the end looks like too early on. I didn’t predetermine anything. And I think fate has a bit to play with it as well. I’m not so much a person who thinks I will leave it all to chance – I don’t think that at all. But I probably, like, thought: this is my job, gotta be good at it.”

Graham turned out to be very good at it. We meet for lunch at the only pub in London with a star from the famous Michelin guide to the world’s best restaurants. But this is just part of his world. He also owns and runs The Ledbury, an elite restaurant that made his reputation in the intensely competitive world of London fine food. The Ledbury, in Notting Hill, has three Michelin stars – the highest accolade.

I am relieved when Graham tells me we can go with a set menu – no decisions needed. I’ll be starting with the venison scotch egg and the deer tongue on bone marrow toast, followed by cured sea bream with seaweed and shiso, an Asian variety of mint. The wine will be a glass of Les Femelottes Bourgogne Blanc from Domaine Chavy-Chouet.

My last pub meal in London was an underwhelming steak. Now I’m in another galaxy. It is just before one o’clock on a warm Friday afternoon and I have no deadline calling me back to work; I feel satisfied before I take a single bite.

Graham talks about the food with the relaxed air of someone who does not need to be in the kitchen. He has taken a break for lunch but will be at work tonight at The Ledbury. Because this is downtime, he has swapped his usual chef whites for a vibrant blue jacket and old jeans. His only pressing concern is to move his car within an hour: the parking inspectors in London are merciless.

Graham, 45, is the first Australian to own and run a restaurant with three Michelin stars. Only nine restaurants in London sit at this top tier. When The Telegraph chose the UK’s best 100 restaurants for a special issue in June, it polled hundreds of chefs, food writers and restaurateurs to decide the list. The Ledbury was No.3.

The great elevation of The Ledbury came in February last year, at a ceremony in Manchester, when the judges announced the decision while Graham was in the room. He had no idea it was coming. “It’s not a single job for one person, it’s a real team effort,” he says. “And so, of course, I felt huge achievement for the staff and for the restaurant. But it also puts a layer of pressure on you. So, at the exact moment when you feel this elation, you also feel this pressure, [it] squeezes in on you because the expectations have just gone up.”

The memory of the moment makes him incredibly expressive. He drags out the key word – “squeezes” – so it almost sounds like the pressure on his chest. Graham had won Michelin stars before, but not three.

“Quite often, like, we had two stars, and I felt really comfortable. I didn’t wake up every morning saying: ‘How are we going to get the third star?’ I’m not like that. It just organically, in some ways, sort of happened by trying hard. So that was really nice.

“But straight away, my mind starts going: ‘Oh, we’ve got to make sure we’re better. We’ve got to improve. We’ve got to keep upgrading.’ Before, I felt we were punching a little bit above our weight, and I liked being in that position. So you go from attacking to sort of defending, a little bit, if that makes sense.”

“You were an underestimated prize-fighter,” I say.

He chuckles at that. “And then you’re expected to win every day,” he says. “I probably get anxious about the restaurant a lot, about making sure it’s right, and we get it right. And I try not to be overwhelmed if we don’t get it perfectly right. It’s about trying to keep that balance because part of what drives you is that you have some doubts creeping in all the time.”

The sea bream is delicious, and Graham tells me it’s a recent addition to the menu by the head chef, Josh Cutress. The deer tongue is an even newer idea, chosen last night by Graham to replace the usual beef tongue. As I learn over lunch, he is a zealot for venison.

Cured sea bream with cucumber, shiso and seaweed at The Harwood Arms.

A few couples are at the quiet end of the Harwood. Behind us, meanwhile, a booking of 12 has expanded to a gathering of 16 young workers who have escaped the office for an afternoon of food and wine. I’m glad to see the long lunch is alive and well. Suddenly, there is a cheer from the group, and the restaurant manager, Tyler, explains what’s going on. One of them has just won on the horses.

A great restaurant lives for its customers – on this, Graham is adamant. He loves to hear the sound of conversation as well as the appreciation for the food, turning a space into a community: “I go into the dining room and it still feels like magic.”

He tells of a couple who came to the Ledbury to celebrate their engagement and then returned when their son turned 18. He remembers one lady gripping him by the arm as he passed her table one night. “Don’t ever do that again,” she told him. “Do what?” he asked. She admonished him for closing during the pandemic.

What is the worst behaviour? I’m curious about rudeness from people paying handsomely for the best food. Graham shakes his head sadly when he tells me of a recent sight: a man and a woman dining together but hardly speaking, both staring at their phones. When he walked past, he saw the man was on TikTok, watching cat videos.

The next dishes arrive: Iberian pork with grilled turnips, nettles and cider; and Berkshire fallow deer with smoked beetroot, blackberry and bone marrow. There is a story behind both. Graham has ventured out of the kitchen to create a business that supplies food to restaurants and caterers. It also makes rapeseed oil in huge volumes without Glyphosate, making a greener alternative to other oils.

The Berkshire fallow deer with smoked beetroot, blackberry and bone marrow at The Harwood Arms.

The company, Capability Graham, echoes the name of a famous London gardener, Capability Brown. He admits it was madly ambitious, but it was also true to form because he believes nothing can be planned to perfection on a spreadsheet. He imported Iberian pigs from Spain and got more than he bargained for: the males mixed with the females in a French paddock on the journey. He has raised herds of deer, and he talks with enthusiasm about caterers who replace beef with venison on their burgers.

“There’s a shift in the quality of food, like swapping out factory-farmed pork or whatever it is to wild venison. I find it really inspiring,” he says.

It is time for him to move his car, so I gaze around at the pub. Feathers surround the light fittings and a peacock sits in a glass cabinet behind me, giving the Harwood a touch of opulence. Graham tells me he collects dinosaur bones, but they are over at The Ledbury.

He is back in time for dessert. It’s a duck egg custard flan with peach and gelato, and it is mercifully small after a big meal. We are served a Welsh cheese: Perl Las, a subtle blue cheese that may end up on my grocery list.

The duck egg custard flan with peach and gelato at The Harwood Arms.

Perl Las is on the shopping list from now on.

Graham talks in detail about every step from the farm to the table, clearly fascinated by food quality and taste. Where did this ambition come from, I wonder? He hardly went to a restaurant when he was young.

Graham is the son of a mechanic who owned a small business selling and repairing farm machinery. He helped his mother in the kitchen with simple Australian meals, but ate out rarely. He went fishing on family holidays on Nelson Bay, north of Newcastle, and he thought about being a vet. At one stage of his teenage years, to deal with his asthma, he took up swimming and competed in national championships. Many paths lay ahead of him, and none passed through a kitchen.

But he remembers going with his grandfather, who owned a farm at Tomago, and buying cattle at the Maitland market. And he recalls a neighbour who put on barbecues with the very best beef from the local area, rather than the ordinary cuts from the supermarket. He learnt to kill a chicken and prepare it for a meal. Those experiences put him on course for a lifetime in food.

If there was a turning point in his life, it was the moment he arrived at a Newcastle seafood restaurant, Scratchleys, for work experience when he was 15. Other kids went home as soon as they could, but he stayed in the kitchen into the night, and the owner, Neil Slater, offered him a job within days. (They stay in contact and caught up in London only weeks ago.)

Three years later, he moved to Sydney to work at Banc, a restaurant that made reputations. He laughs about the night he complained to the chef about the sheer exhaustion of the job, only to be told to change careers if he could not cope. There was no sympathy, just more pressure. He kept at it, and won The Sydney Morning Herald’s Josephine Pignolet Young Chef of the Year Award. That gave him the money to try London.

Graham after winning the Josephine Pignolet award in 2003.

“I was clueless,” he says of his early years. But he was also ambitious. He worked long hours and impressed the chef and investors at The Square, the restaurant in Mayfair where he worked. They backed him to set up The Ledbury when he was just 26 – and the new venture had a Michelin star one year later.

He met his wife, Natalie who is English, and chose to stay in England. They have a daughter, 9, and a son, 6. “My wife is beautiful and my kids are adorable,” he says.

The phone rings. One of the children may be a little less adorable: there’s been an accident at home with a child and a pencil, so Natalie will need to get to an emergency department. Graham will drive across the Thames, then back through jammed traffic to The Ledbury to work. It will be a busy night.

In an age of celebrity chefs, good food can seem glamorous and effortless. Graham has done his share of television appearances – Top Chef in the UK, Masterchef in Australia – but his story is mostly about hard work and perseverance.

He owns The Ledbury now, but he says one of the great motivators was his anxiety about letting down the friends who backed him. “The fundamental thing was caring about something and making sure that you do your best all the time. I didn’t want to fail for them because I felt like they put so much trust in me.”

It’s a universal story and not really about food at all, I tell him.

“It applies to anything,” he says as the meal comes to an end. “I sometimes say to people: you’re in hospitality, you just don’t know it.”

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