Stuart Collins
Stuart Collins
After working with the likes of Gary Rhodes, Michael Caines and Gordon Ramsay, Stuart Collins set out on his own to open Docket No. 33, a small but perfectly formed restaurant in the beautiful town of Whitchurch in Shropshire.
When Stuart Collins started out washing up in a butcher’s shop in Aston, Staffordshire, he can’t have known that his future career would take him to some of the best Michelin-starred restaurants in the UK. When he eventually progressed into helping cook hog roasts, before cooking simple but well-sourced food at a pub called The Bradford Arms, the idea of going to Qatar to open multi-million-pound restaurants with brigades of chefs from all four corners of the world would have sounded insane. But after starting catering college, Stuart eventually found himself in the kitchen at City Rhodes, Gary Rhodes’ Michelin-starred restaurant – the first step on his journey to becoming a top chef.
‘It was a whole new world,’ he says. ‘100 covers for lunch, 100 covers for dinner – it was a machine and there were loads of chefs and it was really boisterous and it was just brilliant. The pressure was on and it lit a fire in me, building upon what I loved about college. After that I got the opportunity to work at [two Michelin-starred] Gidleigh Park under Michael Caines, where there was a much smaller team – around seven or eight in the kitchen – but there was this incredibly inclusive, family-like feeling about working there. After my month was up, Michael said he’d give me a job once I’d finished college, so as soon as I completed culinary school I went straight back down there.’
After a few months working at Michael’s other restaurant ABode Exeter, Stuart moved over to Gidleigh Park, where he’d spend the next four and a half years. ‘It was amazing – I learnt so much. There was no fast-track or twenty-year-old head chefs; you had to put the work in. Even though I probably didn’t appreciate it back then because I was so young, we were working with the best ingredients money could buy. The passion from Michael and everyone else on the team was so intense and the food was so complex. I’ve got really, really fond memories of working there, and I can still remember so many of the recipes off by heart today.’
When Gidleigh closed for a refurbishment, Stuart decided to push himself further and got a job at Gordon Ramsay’s Royal Hospital Road (now called Restaurant Gordon Ramsay) in London, which held three Michelin stars. ‘At Gidleigh it was very, very disciplined and Michael was all about the recipes,’ he explains. ‘At Gordon’s, it was still very disciplined, but there weren’t really any recipes to be seen. It taught you how to cook rather than follow a recipe to the letter. The attention to detail and precision was insane, but there were less elements on the plate. They were very different types of cooking, but I feel Royal Hospital Road was where I finessed my skills.’
A year later, Stuart was transferred over to New York to help launch Gordon’s restaurant in the USA. The idea was to get three Michelin stars in the first year, so the pressure was definitely on, but this is where Stuart rose through the ranks and started learning how to become a head chef, with all the management and admin skills the role brings with it. ‘It was amazing to work for Gordon, but it was the other people in the team that made it such an exciting place to work,’ he says. ‘I’m still in touch with a lot of the guys I worked with in New York, even though they’re spread out all over the world now.’
Whilst working in New York, Michael Caines got back in touch with Stuart to ask him if he’d be interested in coming back to work for him in an executive chef role at another ABode hotel in Chester. ‘It was nice to come back full-circle and work with Michael again,’ says Stuart. ‘It was quite challenging as it was my first exec chef role, but I loved building up the team and bringing what I’d learnt from New York with me. After a few years, however, I got itchy feet and missed travelling – I was twenty-seven at the time, and I thought if I don’t go now I’ll never be able to.’
Stuart was approached for a job in Qatar – a country he had to Google as he’d never heard of it before – and suddenly he and his wife Frances (who landed a job in the same company) were on a place to the Middle East, where they’d spend the next five years.
‘There was just so much money flying around,’ says Stuart. ‘The budgets were so high that if you had a crazy idea you could usually do it, which was certainly not the case in the UK. Instead of opening a catalogue we could get things custom-made and we could source artwork and tableware from all over the world. The best part about it was working with so many different nationalities, though – as a young chef I’d never experienced that before. Around sixty percent of the team barely spoke English, so there was a lot signing and pointing, but it was such an exciting thing to be a part of.’
Working in the Middle East wasn’t without its faults, however. ‘We were opening a restaurant for Guy Savoy, who has a three-starred restaurant in Paris. He’s got this amazing carrot dish that’s absolutely delicious. We sourced the exact same carrots from the exact same market, the chef was from the original restaurant and knew how to cook it exactly the same. The only difference was that this carrot had been up in a plane and travelled to Qatar overnight. I don’t know whether it was the pressure or the variation in temperature, but that one thing meant we could never get it to taste as good as it did back in France.’
Having access to the best ingredients in the world initially sounds good, but having to fly them halfway across the world isn’t exactly ideal. There were also issues with suppliers – after the first few shipments, some would start sending lower quality produce, knowing there was no way Stuart and other chefs in Qatar could send them back. So when Stuart’s father became ill and he moved back to the UK with his wife Frances, he knew he probably wouldn’t be returning to Qatar. Instead, the pair began the search to open their own restaurant.
After a fruitless search in Birmingham, Stuart and Frances found a site in the market town of Whitchurch in Shropshire. ‘It was roughly halfway between friends, family and where I grew up, so it just made sense,’ says Stuart. Soon enough, Docket No. 33 opened its doors, with a menu focusing on local, seasonal produce. ‘We knew we didn’t want to be dealing with ingredients flown from all over the world again – there are obviously some things that you can’t get here, but if we could, we’d use it. Not only is it ethical and good for the environment, which we really believe in, but fundamentally it just tastes better. If a chef like Guy Savoy can’t get a carrot to taste good after it’s travelled, who can?’
Working with seasonal and local produce is a change of pace from the multi-starred restaurants Stuart worked in previously, where ingredients would be readily available by the crate-load. ‘Sometimes we pick berries from the fruit farm down the road and we’ll end up with enough tayberries for one night, enough strawberries for a week and enough raspberries for three nights, so we have to change the menu regularly to reflect that,’ explains Stuart. ‘But that’s great. There’s a lovely story to it and when you talk to the customers about why the menu is changing so much they totally get it. There’s a lady down the road who grows herbs for us in her garden and we get our charcuterie from a local guy who rears his own pigs. While having all the money in the world in Qatar was great for opening restaurants, I got sick of using ingredients that had lost any semblance of provenance on the flight over.’
Today, Stuart’s dishes might focus on British ingredients, but there are flashes of international flavours from his time working in the Middle East and America. The poaching liquor from cooking rhubarb forms the base of Turkish delight, while a classical cremeaux dessert is topped with dots of yuzu gel. What brings it all together is his years of experience in top-end restaurants and natural talent at combining flavours. Docket No. 33 has more of a neighbourhood bistro feel compared to the glitzy multi-million pound mega-restaurants Stuart opened in Qatar – but the food and warm service are far, far better.
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