Pete Gray
Pete Gray
After training under chefs such as Paul Kitching and Adam Simmonds, Pete Gray now leads the kitchen at Heston Blumenthal’s The Hind’s Head, creating British pub classics with incredible technical precision.
Chefs tend to fall into one of two camps: those who always knew they wanted to cook for a living, and those that fell into the profession and discovered their passion for food on the job. Pete Gray is definitely the latter, although a taste of any of the dishes at The Hind’s Head would make you think he’d been born for the job.
‘I haven’t got any memories of cooking with mum in the kitchen,’ he explains. ‘I got a job working as a kitchen porter at Middlethorpe Hall in York, and eventually moved into the kitchen. I was a really picky eater when I was young so going into the kitchen was a real learning experience – I hadn’t heard of half of the ingredients in there, let alone tasted them. At first I was terrible and I hated it, but I stuck at it and over time working in the kitchen almost became a drug, and I was completely obsessed. I always thought I would join the army, but I never applied because the disciplined and regimented nature of being a chef was exactly what I liked.’
After three years, Pete (who was nineteen at the time) was told by his head chef to find a restaurant he liked and move on. ‘You’d get chefs coming into the kitchen and they’d talk about Michelin, which I’d never heard of. It really intrigued me, so the head chef gave me the AA Guide and told me to pick out ten restaurants I liked the look of, so he could help me write a letter to them asking for a job. My top choice was Juniper in Altrincham, which was run by Paul Kitching at the time. It was quite a quirky place – they were serving lemon tart with salmon and things like that – and I wanted to experience something different.’
Pete got the job at Juniper, which was his first foray into Michelin-starred cooking. The jump up in quality came as a bit of a shock. ‘I remember when I went for my trial there – it was on a Tuesday and they were closed Mondays,’ he says. ‘I opened up all the fridges expecting them to be full of food, and I was confused when I found them all empty. The sous chef had to explain to me that everything was made fresh in the morning before service each day, which I didn’t even know was a thing! But it was amazing and I quickly learnt so much.’
After one and a half years at Juniper, Pete decided to move back north to work with his friend. Realising that working with friends wasn’t actually that fun, he took advice from chef Nick Edgar who told him about Adam Simmonds at Danesfield House. This is where Pete spent the next four and a half years, soaking up all the knowledge he could. ‘Adam taught me about consistency, produce and attention to detail above all else. I realised you could get the best produce in the world but it was so easily ruined if you didn’t pay it the respect it deserved.’
Pete’s time at Danesfield House shaped him into an accomplished chef with plenty of Michelin experience, but the lure of travel saw him leave to do a ski season in Europe. ‘I didn’t want to go to London as it was too busy, so I decided to meet up with some friends in Méribel in the French Alps to cook for the skiing season over there,’ he explains. ‘I ended up doing that for three years, going to places like Marbella and Corfu to work during the summer, but then I got bored and decided to get back into the kitchen. Originally I was toying with the idea of becoming a private chef, but it can be quite lonely and frustrating so when I came across a junior sous chef job at The Hind’s Head I jumped at the chance.’
The move from restaurant food and cooking in chalets to a Heston-owned gastropub meant Pete would experience yet another type of cooking, especially considering the number of diners. ‘I’d worked to a Michelin standard before but that was at restaurants doing thirty-five covers, whereas you’d get into The Hind’s Head in the morning and they’d say ‘OK, we’ve got 100 booked in for today’. It was a bit of a shock! What really stood out was the sheer amount of detail and technical work that went into every dish. When the diner gets something like the chicken, ham and leek pie it looks quite simple and rustic, but there’s an awful lot of work that goes on behind the scenes to make it taste the way it does.’
Rapidly rising to the challenge, Pete steadily rose through the ranks at The Hind’s Head, being made sous chef, then senior sous chef and finally head chef in November 2017. Being his first head chef job, Pete was entirely focused on maintaining the quality of the food during the first few months, and is now firmly established as the head of the kitchen. ‘I have free reign to come up with ideas and put dishes forward for the menu, although it takes quite a bit of time for that to happen because we like to ensure everything about a dish is perfect before it’s served to customers,’ he says. ‘Now that I’m settled in we’re working on a couple of things which will come onto the menu in the coming months, and we’re always refining and tweaking existing dishes to ensure they’re as good as they can be.’
Working at a restaurant like The Hind’s Head, which is owned by Heston Blumenthal and is part of The Fat Duck Group is slightly different to other head chef jobs. With various development kitchens across the road from the restaurant and the input of people such as Heston himself and Ashley Palmer-Watts, there’s a more collaborative method of implementing changes to the menu and introducing new dishes. But Pete has proven himself a more than capable head chef, ensuring The Hind’s Head continues to be a destination restaurant that serves incredible British classics with a quirky Heston twist. The dishes themselves might look simple, but the amount of work that goes into ensuring every plate that leaves the pass is as perfect as can be is astounding.
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