Ashley Palmer-Watts
Ashley Palmer-Watts
Only a handful of chefs around the world can cook with the same complexity as Ashley Palmer-Watts, who was an integral part of Heston Blumenthal’s The Fat Duck Group for twenty years. Responsible for creating the two-starred restaurant Dinner by Heston, he has since co-founded Artisan Coffee and now helms the kitchen at London's most in-demand pub: The Devonshire.
Originally from Maiden Newton, a small village in Dorset, Ashley’s first taste of kitchen life came when he landed a job washing pots at the village’s Le Petit Canard restaurant. ‘I used to go in there every day after school, even if I wasn’t needed,’ he says. ‘I very nearly joined the army but when I was eventually old enough to sign up, I decided to become a chef instead. The day after I finished my exams I joined the restaurant as an apprentice.’
Ashley spent the next few years at Le Petit Canard, travelling with the owners to France, the US and Sweden (‘an amazing outlet to have for a seventeen-year-old in rural Dorset’) until they sold the restaurant and moved back to Canada. By this time he was working the afternoons and evenings in the restaurant, but was also a part-time watercress farmer in the mornings, and after reading about The Fat Duck in Food Illustrated went to eat there with the farm’s owner, cousin and wife. ‘This would have been around 1998, so the menu was very different back then, but I knew I just had to go and work there,’ says Ashley. ‘I wrote to Heston and he gave me a stage, but I had no idea what was going on. The food was bold, simple and clever, but it was before it all kicked off and people started focusing on the wacky things he was doing. It was a very magical place to work, and after months of badgering him for a job a spot came up and I joined full-time.’
As one of five chefs at The Fat Duck, Ashley joined at a time when the kitchen was an incredibly difficult place to work in. ‘It wasn’t a very harmonious environment – I can best describe it as angry – and the equipment was awful. We were trying to cook food that was way beyond what this old pub kitchen could produce, but we were all really ambitious and just carried on. It already had a star when I joined, but when we got the second star in 2002 everything started to really kick off. We refurbished the kitchen, things kept snowballing, and by the time we got the third star in 2004 it all just went mental.’
This was a time that Ashley describes as the most exciting time of his life. He was made head chef in 2003 (when he was just twenty-five years old), and after winning the third star he and Heston started working with neuroscientists and specialists who helped them approach cooking in an entirely new way. But it wasn’t without its downsides. ‘I look at how hard we work now and it was nothing compared to back then. We were working over 100 hours a week, with no idea of what was happening outside the kitchen doors; all we were focused on was how to make the restaurant better. The Fat Duck was all-encompassing, and we went from five of us in the kitchen to around forty chefs with loads of stagieres, development kitchens and laboratories. We grew incredibly fast and were breaking down barriers that no one had ever even considered before.’
Ashley believed he would work at The Fat Duck for the rest of his career, as he was such an important part of its rise to the top and, despite the intense workload, he loved every minute of it. But when the opportunity to open a restaurant at The Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park Hotel in London arose in around 2008, he and Heston knew they could create something just as special as what they’d done in Bray. ‘Heston always wanted to open a restaurant that sat somewhere between The Fat Duck and The Hind’s Head [another Fat Duck Group restaurant in Bray], and this felt like the perfect opportunity,’ explains Ashley. ‘We wanted to root the menu in historical British cooking and make it as high-end as we could get with a high amount of covers, with a simplicity and pureness to the dishes. We were incredibly ambitious but made sure we could execute what we were planning to do in such a large restaurant. We opened Dinner by Heston in 2011 and by 2013 we had two Michelin stars, which just blew us away.’
Dinner by Heston is a seriously fine-tuned operation – a world away from the frantic, hectic way of working Ashley experienced when he first joined The Fat Duck. Before the restaurant even opened, he and Heston worked with food historians from The British Library and Hampton Court Palace to put together a 100,000-word document full of snippets and pieces of information taken from Britain’s rich (and mostly forgotten) culinary history. Taking inspiration from these and breathing new life into them in a contemporary way is hard enough, but to consistently serve the incredibly complex dishes to over 150 covers every night at a two-starred level takes an awful lot of work.
Palmer-Watts told us: 'My time at the Fat Duck Group was amazing, but I think at that time I’d have been 42 or 43, we’d designed Dinner by Heston in Dubai but it was really delayed as they were building a whole hotel. In those 18 months I thought it was now or never. I’d had an incredible 20 years, but I didn’t want to regret not exploring what else was out there.'
In early 2020, a coffee project came along which Ashley co-founded with a couple of his friends. He'd work work at home, blending beans into different styles of coffee, and thanks in part to the pandemic, there was huge demand for this kind of artisanal product.
'Coffee became an obsession for so many people during that time. We launched in 2021 with whole bean, espresso, coffee bags, ground, nespresso compatible capsules, the lot! I designed a chocolate with every single one too, so people could start to really understand the flavours behind each coffee profile.'
Taking time away from the pressures of a kitchen operation, not least one as influential as Heston Blumenthal's, was clearly an important choice.
'Having things to creatively spend time on was really important. At the end of 2022 I thought I wouldn't do a restaurant any time soon, but then two opportunities came up, at the same time, when I wasn’t even looking.'
One operation in Surrey was a long talked-about but never realised restaurant: the other was to become London's most in-demand pub.
'I thought that Surrey was defo going to happen and that the Devonshire would be easy. Actually working with Oisín (Rogers) and Charlie (Carroll), what could go wrong? On one hand you've got this great founder mentality and businessman in Charlie, then the ultimate landlord in Osh.'
Ashley continues, 'the first meeting was really funny - it turned out that Charlie had done a stage at the Fat Duck in 2005, but in the Development Lab. Our paths had crossed somewhat nearly 20 years ago. I was at home in my “studio of dreams” - it’s my little glorified summerhouse full of cycling gear and cookbooks and I’d seen online that Osh had left the Guinea Grill. I texted a friend asking “I wonder what he’s up to”. About two weeks later Osh had sent me a message on Instagram and asked me if I wanted a catch up and a chat.'
In that fateful meeting, Oisín initially explained he wanted Ashley simply for a recipe from the Hinds Head: the oxtail and kidney suet pudding.
'I said well I could give you the recipe' Palmer-Watts recalled, 'but really it’d be better to make something that’s synonymous with the place you’re going to open. He said he’d be doing 300+ covers a day and picking oxtail for that many guests is a lot of work, so I suggested something like beef cheek and Guinness. When we met again and they asked me if I wanted to come on board as a co-founder and be the chef.'
It's clear that the attention and focus on food that marked Palmer-Watts' early career wasn't about to let up just because he was doing a pub.
'We spent ages on this menu - about eleven months in total - and since we’ve opened not one thing has changed. You can come here and have a great steak and chips or a pile of langoustines with roasted turbot and hollandaise, pea and ham soup or the scallops: we wanted to make it timeless.’
To control the quality of the food, almost everything is done in house, ‘we bought the pigs from Brett Graham to do our own sausages. We cure our own bacon and make our own bread for the bacon sandwiches. We dry age our own steaks. The ingredients aren’t that seasonal really, I mean there are times where lobsters are plentiful and times when they’re not so plentiful and a bit more expensive. But we’re really lucky in the UK; you can get a lot of amazing British produce the whole year round.’
Ashley continues, ‘early on we were doing 25 for lunch and 25 for dinner. Quite soon, we were at about 100 each, then we started opening all day and we shot up to 350 all day, and these days we’re at about 550-600 all day, then 700 on Sundays, with the roasts.
But while the sheer volume of guests at the Devonshire each day brings with it energy, it's the staff that really make the difference.
'The energy in this building is everything. With just the staff here the energy levels are amazing and if you can start a day like that, the guests – whatever they’re coming into the pub for – they can feel it.' Palmer-Watts goes on, 'we’ve brought a busy pub back to the centre of London and what’s been really amazing to see is that precision and rigour that I’m used to in the kitchen being applied everywhere. Whether behind the pub or in the cellar, the level of attention to detail is so high.’
It’s clear from speaking to Ashley Palmer-Watts that his attention to detail is unrelenting. Whether working for Heston or running a pub, starting a coffee brand or his latest drinks venture, a vermouth brand named Forgotten, his focus remains.
These days, The Devonshire is busy, constantly improving, fun and profitable. Thanks in no small part to Ashley Palmer-Watts, it has established itself a beacon for how things should be done for the hospitality industry in the UK.
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