No matter how a chef has been trained or what restaurants they’ve worked in, they will all ultimately gravitate to a specific style of cookery. It may take time to discover exactly what that style is, be it classic hearty food or ultra-refined contemporary plates, but figuring out your culinary identity is often a defining moment in the career of a chef. Welsh chef Tom Westerland had always enjoyed the instinctive element of cookery but it wasn’t until recently that he found cooking over fire was the perfect way to express himself.
‘I’ve always loved that primitive feel about cooking,’ explains Tom. ‘My strengths have always been in that solid, old-school style.’ This perhaps isn’t surprising given the comforting style of food that he grew up eating in Wales, with his mum regularly cooking classics like cottage pie and macaroni cheese. Tom, however, was by no means a natural when he first started cooking as a teenager. ‘We did home economics at school and I was horrendous at it,’ he laughs. ‘My teacher said that she was glad she wouldn’t have to teach me the following year, so I basically chose catering out of spite.’
Tom soon fell in love with cooking though, getting work experience in kitchens throughout school before training at catering college in Cardiff. At the same time he began to work regularly in a professional kitchen for the first time at a local pub. ‘I remember finding the social aspect of it amazing,’ he says. ‘You meet the most interesting people in kitchens from all around the world. You’ve all got this love of food and they quickly become like family, which was something I really enjoyed about it.’ After a stint working in banqueting at the Holland House Hotel, where he would regularly plate up for hundreds of guests at a time, Tom moved to The Fig Tree in the coastal town of Penarth. By the age of just twenty-one, he had worked his way up to the position of head chef – but it was his next move that would prove career defining for Tom.
