Adam Handling
Adam Handling
With countless awards to his name and an ever-growing empire of restaurants, Adam Handling has achieved a huge amount in his illustrious career. Taking inspiration from his travels, utilising modern cooking techniques and sourcing the best of British produce results in flavourful dishes full of playful twists and theatre.
Drive, hard work and ambition – three things every chef needs to succeed in a notoriously difficult industry. You have to put up with brutally long working hours; constantly strive to be better than yesterday and soak up as much knowledge as you can. And while there are many role models that encapsulate this in the world of hospitality, few can hold a candle to Adam Handling, who has a plethora of accolades and a restaurant empire to his name. Not bad for a thirty-one-year-old; especially one who only started cooking so he could escape school.
‘I had experienced a lot of different cultures because my dad was in the army, but I don’t have a story about helping my gran in the kitchen or anything like that,’ he says. ‘I wasn’t the most academic person in school, but all my family went to university so it was expected of me – particularly because it was free to go in Scotland. Eventually my mum said if I wasn’t going to sixth form then I had better get an apprenticeship at a place that’s really well respected, and it just so happened that my teacher had heard about Gleneagles accepting apprentices for the first time.’
Donning his dad’s suit, Adam had to go through four interviews before he was offered the apprenticeship. ‘I’m a cheeky little bugger and I think that’s why they gave it to me,’ he says. ‘I’m brutally honest, very stubborn and I always want to be the very best at anything I do, and I think they liked that.’
The next few years were tough; with over 100 chefs working at Gleneagles, he wasn’t allowed to do anything more than prepare vegetables for the first nine months. But eventually he worked his way up to the grill and ran the section himself. By this point he’d gained the sort of expert training you can only get in kitchens like Gleneagles, and he was ready to move on. This led Adam to London and Newcastle for a short time, before he returned to Scotland to become the youngest ever head chef at Fairmont St Andrews. Soon after he was named Young Chef of the Year at the Scottish Culinary Championships, but that wasn’t enough – Adam was after a Michelin star. ‘I became pretty nasty and when I realised it wasn’t going to happen I just packed it all in to go travelling. I wasn’t sure if being a chef was for me.’
Up until this point, Adam had sacrificed his personal life to get a good grounding in his career, so he felt it was time to get out of the kitchen and see the world. ‘I know loads of people say you find yourself when you’re travelling and it sounds like bullshit, but it really did help me get some perspective on life,’ he says. ‘After a year I ran out of money, so I came home and looked for a job in London. Getting your foot in the door there is always hard, especially if you’re after a senior position like I was, because everyone would say ‘oh, you’ve not done London before, so you have to start as a junior sous’ – even though I was basically teaching the sous chef how to do things.’
However, Adam eventually landed a job as head chef at St Ermin’s Hotel in St James’ Park. ‘It was a great little place and it gave me my first chance to cook my own food,’ he explains. ‘Then when I went on MasterChef: The Professionals in 2013, the restaurant got packed and I got my name on the door – Adam Handling at Caxton. Everything was going really well until the owner sold the place and they decided to turn it into a steakhouse without consulting me, even though I had a contract in place. It ended really, really badly.’
Luckily for Adam, he had been putting plans together to open his own restaurant – The Frog E1 – whilst working at St Ermin’s. However, this sudden change meant he had to leave immediately, and he could only take five of his seventeen chefs with him. ‘It was really emotional; we’d all worked so hard and put everything into the place, and then all of a sudden it was all gone. But I got jobs for the twelve chefs I couldn’t hire myself, and over the years I’ve been able to offer all of them a job. Today, fifteen of those original seventeen chef are working for me.’
The Frog E1 was when Adam really came into his own – shunning the luxurious ingredients and classical training of his past and bringing in influences of the food he experienced during his travels. ‘I worked my ass off and got five restaurant of the year awards within the first two years. It was phenomenal – the best experience of my life. Travelling helped me find myself as a person, because I was a nasty son of a bitch before that. E1, however, helped me discover the sort of food I wanted to cook. We started cutting down on salt and introducing soy instead; there were way more aromatics and ingredients like kimchi in British dishes, which made it quite different.’
The restaurant was a big success, and led to Adam opening a second restaurant – Frog by Adam Handling – in Covent Garden. This is now his restaurant group’s flagship, with a menu that best represents his style of cooking and a separate bar called Eve in the basement. ‘I wanted Covent Garden to be something that got us noticed,’ he says. ‘The menu is a reflection of our personality. There are only around twelve dishes on there but we change them whenever we want. Dishes can appear and disappear from one day to the next. We wanted it to be about theatre, too – Covent Garden is theatre land, after all – so we have the pass and kitchen in full view.’
Frog by Adam Handling enjoyed the same success as The Frog E1, offering a slightly more fine-dining-focused experience (although it’s still representative of his relaxed, contemporary style). The two worked in tandem until the lease ran out at E1, which meant Adam had to find a new site. Rather than a hindrance, this gave him the opportunity to take the essence of The Frog E1 and move it into a bigger site, The Frog Hoxton – just a leap away from his Shoreditch base. He took stock of all the mistakes he’d made when opening his first restaurant (which was done incredibly fast and saw the kitchen team helping with everything from painting the walls to attaching door handles) and learnt from them.
‘I took the soul of E1 and put it in a new body with a new direction,’ says Adam. ‘Hoxton is not the same as Shoreditch; people want things cheaper and quicker, so we changed the menu completely. Portions for the sharing plates were made bigger, we made sure everything was extremely affordable and learnt from everything we’d done in the past.’
Adam’s next project involved teaming up with the Cadogan Estate and Belmond. He opened Adam Handling Chelsea, a restaurant and bar, and Cadogan’s tea lounge at the Belmond Cadogan Hotel in Chelsea. ‘It’s very different from my other restaurants – because of the history of the hotel, the dining spaces are a bit more traditional, but the food offering is very much my style,” he explains. ‘At first, I didn’t want to do it because I’d had bad experiences with hotel restaurants in the past, but they made it clear they wanted me to have a restaurant within the hotel, rather than work in a more executive role. When I heard Belmond were covering the hotel side of things, it all fell into place.’
The Frog Hoxton and Adam Handling Chelsea have since closed, allowing Adam to focus on his flagship (which won a Michelin star in 2022) and open sustainably-focused pub The Loch and The Tyne in Windsor, as well as Ugly Butterfly in St Ives, which celebrates seasonal Cornish produce. Whether it’s fine dining tasting menus, bar snacks and cocktails, zero-waste deli lunches or room service for a world-class hotel group, he has covered it in his string of openings – making him so much more than a brilliant chef.
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