As executive chef of Gary Usher’s Elite Bistros of the World restaurant group, Rich Sharples has his work cut out looking after an ever-expanding portfolio of top-quality restaurants in the north of England. When Gary opened Sticky Walnut in Chester in 2011, he had to choose between having a combi-oven in the kitchen or having decent tables and chairs in the dining room. Nine years later, Elite Bistros is one of the UKs most admirable restaurant groups, boasting six superb restaurants amongst its ranks. Rich has been a key part of that expansion – having joined in 2016 to take the helm at Hispi, he subsequently became Gary’s right-hand man and helped open Wreckfish in Liverpool, Pinion in Prescot and most recently Kala in Manchester City Centre.
So far as cheffing careers go, Rich started his relatively late – the Burnley-born chef grew up on a steady diet of home-cooked meals, but he never envisioned a career as a chef. ‘I’d been to catering college aged 17 but didn’t really begin to apply myself until 20,’ he explains. ‘I was half decent at cooking so it seemed like the right thing to do, but I never really applied myself to it.’ A couple of jobs in gastropubs followed, but it wasn’t until Rich worked for Darren Rowe at The Bay Horse in Roughlee that he discovered a deeper enjoyment of cooking. ‘Darren had worked in some really good restaurants – he’d been at The Langham in London and The Belfry before he took on the kitchen at The Bay Horse,’ says Rich. ‘He’s a great chef. It was the first time I really started learning things in the kitchen and that’s really when I caught the bug for it.’
The Bay Horse was only open a year, but it was long enough for Rich to be hooked. He headed down to the Cotswolds and found himself in his first head chef role at just twenty-two years of age. ‘A baptism by fire’, he calls it jokingly. He spent two more years with Darren at the Abbey House Hotel near Barrow-in-Furness, then jetted out to a chalet in Austria to work a ski-season with his girlfriend, now wife.