‘Our dad was keen to do things step by step so that we didn’t leave our customers behind,’ Peter nods, 'so we started to make the menu even more Italian but far more high-end, stripping out old dishes bit by bit. We were looking at the best Italians in the country like the River Café for inspiration, and tried to apply that same minimalistic approach. Me and Jonray had also got really into cookbooks like Thomas Keller’s and the El Bulli one from that period, and also had amazing meals at places like The Fat Duck and Jason Atherton’s Maze. Those books and meals really helped provoke our feelings in food and also gave us the courage to do things like introduce a tasting menu, as only a handful of places were doing that in the UK at the time.’

The reinvented Casamia went down a storm and by 2009 had won a Michelin star (taking the brothers by complete surprise), as Peter and Jonray made it their mission to elevate the Italian menu further and further. Their next move was to relocate Casamia to a smarter harbourside premises where they’d chase further accolades but in 2015, a matter of months before they had completed the move, Peter lost his brother to skin cancer. ‘It obviously changed everything,’ he says, ‘but we’d known about it for a long time so we’d done a lot of planning. I was always of the belief that there was more to do with Casamia and it just made me determined to do it.’ Casamia reopened as planned and with it came two additional new restaurants – Pi Shop (closed in 2018), a more causal pizza joint, and cavernous tapas bar Paco Tapas.

Named after his father, Paco Tapas was a nod to Peter’s heritage and saw him cook a style of food that people weren’t used to from him at that point in time. ‘We’d grown up going to Spain so the cuisine was in our blood. The idea was to keep the food really simple, using amazing ingredients and cooking them over fire. I didn’t want any faffy garnishes or fancy presentation,’ explains Peter. Despite its simplicity, Peter’s food at Paco proved an instant hit, winning him another Michelin star within a year of opening, and cementing him as one of the prominent chefs in the South West. A year later, Peter also further expanded his reach, after being given the chance to oversee the menu at high-rise Mexican restaurant Decimo located atop London’s Standard hotel – an opportunity he says was ‘meant to be’.

Perhaps the biggest decision of Peter’s career however, came after the pandemic, when he made the call to close the doors to Casamia just over fifteen years after him and Jonray first took charge. ‘Luckily I’m not hugely sentimental,’ says Peter. ‘I’d already said goodbye the kitchen that me and Jonray had first cooked in back in 2015, so this was already a new chapter and it just wasn’t making sense from a business perspective any more.’ This wasn’t the end of Casamia entirely though. In 2022, Peter open Casa – a more accessible Italian restaurant, harking back to Casamia’s early days as a neighbourhood trattoria – in the same space. ‘I wanted it to be more like Paco in feel,’ he explains, ‘a flexible restaurant where you’re as at home having a glass of wine and a bowl of pasta, as you are having a more gastronomic experience. To me that’s the future of restaurants.’

Peter admits that deep down he still yearns to run a small kitchen where he can push for the highest accolades, as he and his brother always aspired to, but that would come down to the right opportunity arising. Regardless of his next move, there’s no question that his impressive portfolio of restaurants has already proved Peter to be one of the most thoughtful and talented chefs out there.