Many a talented chef has been catapulted to stardom through the power of television, and for those who watched the 2019 series of Great British Menu, Kray Treadwell’s imaginative cooking certainly stood out from the crowd. Few chefs in the competition embraced the brief – a celebration of fifty years of British music – with as much personality and style as Kray; he conjured a ray wing into a mohican to celebrate punk rock, highlighted the ascendance of grime with a grimy veal sweetbread and hot sauce dish, and paid tribute to Brummie legend Ozzy Osborne and Black Sabbath with a Sunday roast that riffed on the band’s purple and black palette.
His dishes are reminiscent of another hyper-creative, outside-the-box chef who made his name on the show some years ago. Michael O’Hare’s Great British Menu dishes were as much conceptual art as food, but they delivered on both fronts to make him one of Great British Menu’s great successes. It should come as little surprise that Michael has been an important mentor for Kray over the last few years – the latter worked his way up through the brigade at The Man Behind the Curtain to become Michael’s head chef at the Michelin-starred restaurant.
‘I knew about Michael from when he was at The Blind Swine,’ says Kray. ‘I started there and then followed him to The Man Behind the Curtain – there was nowhere else I wanted to work really.’ Three-and-a-half years later, Kray had worked his way up to head chef, though he deftly credits that to chance. ‘I just fell into the role when other people left,’ he shrugs, ‘and then I was head chef for nearly two years.’
