Ones to watch: Luke Selby

Luke is head chef of Hide Above – the top-floor tasting menu section of Ollie’s three-storey mega-restaurant. As we sit at one of the window seats, early morning sunlight cascades through the glass front, spilling into the restaurant and down that Insta-famous staircase. Despite the location, there’s not a peep of road noise from outside – a product of the triple-glazing, which allows Hide Above to feel bright and airy, but also hidden away from the world, hence the name. It’s impressive, there’s no doubt about that, and it also comes with its fair share of expectation. ‘The minimum is to get to a two Michelin star level,’ says Luke, 'but that’s not the goal straight away. When you work somewhere like Le Manoir, or Royal Hospital Road, they’ve been open for years and they have systems in place already. At Hide, we’re putting those systems in place from the beginning, so it’s a totally different challenge. It’s not going to happen straight away – it’s a journey and you have to put the work in, but we’re confident.’

Expectations don’t phase Luke much – despite his young age, he’s already a veteran when it comes to dealing with high stakes. He’s one of only two chefs to ever win both the Young National Chef of the Year and National Chef of the Year competitions (the other being Ramsay-protege Mark Sargeant). Luke won the latter in 2018, just six months after he won a prestigious Roux Scholarship. No one has ever won all three competitions before – Luke did it in the space of four years.

In fact, It was a cooking competition that kick-started his career in the kitchen the first place. ‘It was the Rotary Young Chef of the Year,’ he says. ‘I got through to the regional finals or something, up in Banbury. I didn’t know anything really – I was just a little kid in trainers and a t-shirt. Raymond Blanc came to judge the final and I couldn’t believe it! I made an open haddock ravioli, a duck main course and a raspberry soufflé for dessert – I remember Raymond saying the soufflé was technically perfect, but I came in second because I’d bought all my ingredients from Tesco!

‘The girl who came first had bought all this organic produce,’ he laughs. ‘I didn’t know anything about produce or sourcing – Tesco was all we could afford back then!’

Though the setting at Hide couldn’t be more different to Dabbous – Ollie reckoned the staircase alone cost more than the whole of his last restaurant when we spoke to him back in April – the food is no less impressive. 'Ripe tomato and bread' sounds simple enough, but it's a cascading waterfall of flavour when you cut into it – a ripe tomato stuffed with papa al pomodoro, black Kalamata olives and tomato essence. The 'fig leaf' dessert is no mere fig leaf – it's an almighty temple built to the fig gods. There's a fig leaf infusion, soaked chia seeds, fig leaf ice cream, a fig compote, crystallised fig leaves, roasted figs and a reduced fig liquor to finish. The attention to detail at Hide Above is astonishing – a product of the fission that occurs when you combine Ollie's visionary flavour combinations and Luke's precise cooking.

Hide Above is Luke’s kitchen, but the food that comes out of it is unquestionably Ollie’s – that signature free-spirit, natural plating and lightness of touch is plain to see. One feels that the next frontier for Luke might be the thing that brought him to Ollie in the first place – the dream of his own restaurant. ‘Oh yeah, I would love to have my own restaurant,’ he says. ‘Every chef in the world wants that. I’d love to have my own place in London one day, but that starts with focusing on this and seeing where it takes us. We've got great guys here and we're on a journey together – if we keep working hard, hopefully doors will open up, but we’ll see.’