Josh Angus: Hide Ground’s all-star head chef

Despite TV shows portraying chefs as glamorous rockstar-types, pretty much everyone in the industry will tell you that the reality is very, very different. Long hours, intense services, finding the time to be creative, spending years completing repetitive tasks until you have truly honed your craft – this is what it takes before a chef reaches their peak. But there are various ways to reach that end goal, and different types of chef roles. You can aim for the highest standards in Michelin-starred kitchens; become a private chef cooking for the well-heeled or go into development, creating new products. Josh Angus did all three before he became head chef at Hide Ground, one of the most ambitious restaurants London’s ever seen.

Growing up in Sheffield, Josh didn’t get on that well on school – his focus was on sports and girls above everything else. But there was one other subject that kept him interested. ‘I don’t know why but making cakes and things in home economics really interested me, so as soon as I finished my A-levels I went to Sheffield Catering College,’ he says. ‘By the time I was twenty I’d been head chef at two different restaurants, which I was nowhere near ready for, so I decided to start as a commis chef again but in Michelin-starred kitchens.’

This is a hard decision for any chef to make, particularly as it means a sharp pay cut and a return to ‘the bottom of the pile’, as Josh puts it. However, it was certainly the right move, as he secured a place at Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons – a restaurant renowned for its ability to train incredible chefs. ‘I worked at Le Manoir for about a year and a half, which was like going back to school. There’s cooking and then there’s real cooking – working methodically and keeping your section clean might not sound exciting but it’s a really important part of being a good chef, and that's what I learnt at Le Manoir.’

Josh would’ve stayed at Le Manoir for longer, but the sudden news that he needed to have a triple hernia operation meant he had to take a year out of cooking completely and move back home to Sheffield. Once he was back on his feet he moved to Hong Kong to work with Shane Osborn (previously head chef at Pied a Terre) to open a new restaurant with Alan Yau, before returning to the UK to work at Ollie Dabbous’ eponymous restaurant as sous chef.

‘After two years at Dabbous I wanted a bit of my own time and a break from Michelin-style cooking,' he explains. 'Even though it really shaped me as a chef and I loved every minute of it, the workload was brutal and the days were really long. I ended up being a private chef for the American ambassador, which was really different, but I got to meet some amazing people – Jimmy Carter would come round for breakfast, Ed Sheeran was there, I cooked for Annie Lennox. Even the Prime Minister used to come around to use the tennis courts! But after a while I wanted to get back to the kitchen, because sometimes I’d just be cooking plain white pasta for the ambassador’s kids over and over again.’

Stints at L’Autre Pied and Elystan Street followed, satisfying Josh’s desire to work at a Michelin-starred level once again. But when he was approached to become the development chef for Belazu, he couldn’t turn it down. ‘It was a really nice gig – normal working hours, decent money, interesting and different things to do,’ he says. ‘You see all the science behind product development and get to come up with ideas for new ones. A lot of the things I created are now stocked in Tesco and Ocado, which is pretty cool.’