Serving up a festival full of inspiration in Marlborough

WHEN Duncan Jones ditched the classic crumble to present his home economics teacher with a lemon soufflé at the age of 11, she was rather dazzled.

But little did she imagine that her star pupil’s fare would one day pass the lips of Marco Pierre White, delegations of the globe’s power players and the Queen herself.

This scenario seemed increasingly unlikely when he chose a career as a quantity surveyor in London in the late 1990s.

Thankfully, the 21-year-old decided to ditch the job in favour of running the kitchen at his friends’ snug cafe in Hertfordshire.

Soon he was juggling his cooking role and food preparation training at college.

Diploma in hand, he and his wife-to-be Kelly relocated to France’s Val d’Isère to work at a five-star catered chalet.

After five months in the Alps, they bought a camper van and travelled south to St Tropez, hoping to join the select few serving the rich and mighty on the Riviera.

“I ended up getting a job in a private house at the heart of St Tropez,” explains the 39-year-old, who took the helm at The Bell at Ramsbury nearly five years ago.

“We stayed with the family for four years. We did a couple of winter seasons on their yacht in the Caribbean. It was an amazing experience.”

While poles apart from the life of a chef weathering storms in a hectic restaurant kitchen, serving multi-millionaires three meals a day was no piece of cake.

“What’s great is the creativity; you are always creating new dishes. But the problem is that you can’t perfect a dish, like you can in a restaurant. You don’t have a menu you can repeat and improve on.

“For the first two years for this family I didn’t cook the same dish twice. And you have to deal with any sort of fads that they go through. One day they’re on the Atkins diet. It can change at the drop of a hat — they might read about something new in a magazine. It was certainly interesting. I really enjoyed it and I got to travel the world.”

Enjoying the globetrotting lifestyle, Duncan and Kelly spent the next two years on luxury yachts in America. There he cooked for business kingpins, including none other than Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

Although not always privy to the identity or stature of his celebrity clients until after dinner, he did recognise many of the ‘neighbours’ moored nearby.

“I met Johnny Depp; we were moored next to him in the Caribbean. We didn’t really talk but he would say ‘good morning’ when he was reading the paper on his deck.”

Keen to settle down closer to home, the couple returned to England in 2006. Duncan did a further two-year spell as private chef for the ‘St Tropez family’, who had moved to the Hampshire/Berkshire border.

In 2008, Duncan sent a chance application to his local, Marco Pierre White’s The Yew Tree.

He was offered a sous chef position; 18 months later he was promoted to head chef.

“Marco came once or twice a week to check on the place but he didn’t run the kitchen. The Yew Tree was his little project.

“He was quite funny and down-to-earth. I think his reputation in the kitchen is very different from what he was like with us at The Yew Tree.”

Being judged solely on his skills was a surprisingly liberating experience for the father-of-two who until then had had to sell his personality as much as his expertise as a private chef.

“Working with multi-millionaires and famous people and living with them, when you go to an interview you are judged on personality.

“They want someone they get on with socially.

“It can be harder and that’s certainly more intimidating. It’s not just about your ability.”

Returning to his private dining roots, Duncan started his own company.

One high profile client hired him to host some important guests. A week before the event, Duncan discovered the guests in question were Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip.

The royals even popped into the kitchen before the meal to pay their respects. What struck Duncan most about the encounter was the Queen’s habit of eating a small triangle of brown toast with each dish.

“It was nice and easy. It wasn’t really nerve-wracking. We had already gone through the menu when we found out who was coming.

“She had no special requirements. The only thing is she had triangles of brown toast with everything.

“But her butlers dealt with that. I wonder if she asked for it once and they just kept serving it. Maybe she is really fed up with brown toast!”

Through some of his yachting days connections he found himself roped into designing the kitchen and recruiting a chef for The Bell, a hotel and restaurant at the heart of the village of Ramsbury in 2010. When they couldn’t find a chef for it, he stepped in. The rest is history.

“We’ve created great gastro pub food with some successful classics like burgers and fish and chips and mixed it with some more interesting dishes and touches.

“That way people can be a bit more adventurous and get the option to try new things if they want to.

“We have had things like sweetbreads and venison carpaccio. For me it’s about challenging people’s theories of what you can and can’t do with food.”

Duncan Jones will give festival goers a unique demonstration at the Parlour Farm Kitchen Theatre at 12pm on Saturday, May 16.

To book tickets to the festival or for more information go to www.garden-events.com/Marlborough.

STUCK at home with a broken arm at the height of the Canadian ski season, Chris Wooldridge ended up whiling away the hours watching back to back cookery show reruns.

An almighty obsession with Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares and Hell’s Kitchen soon blossomed.

Two months later Chris packed his bags, boarded a plane to the UK with one rather barmy objective: to train as a chef and join the celebrity cordon-blue’s  restaurant empire – in any capacity.

 “I was working as a ski and snowboarding instructor and I didn’t really know what I wanted to do or where I wanted to go at the time,” laughs Chris, who took the helm at The Marlborough in the town of the same name six months ago.

“I spent the last two months of the ski season watching Gordon Ramsay shows on TV. I got into my head that I would go back to England and work for him. I always enjoyed cooking  but at the time I was very proud to be able to cook lasagne or make a mean fried breakfast. That was about it.”

Back in England he joined the Menier Chocolate Factory in Borough Market (a restaurant, not a chocolaterie as the name suggests) as a commis.

Confident he had found his calling, the 21-year-old enrolled in Tante Marie Culinary Academy, a school affiliated with Gordon Ramsay Group, six months later.

Freshly qualified he embarked on a campaign of attrition with the rambunctious chef’s ‘people’ until he was recruited as a commis at the prestigious Murano headed by Angela Hartnett in Mayfair.

 “I kept emailing and emailing Gordon Ramsay’s HQ,” added the 29-year-old , originally from West Sussex. “I was relentless. It didn’t take long before there was an opening at Murano. That’s where the majority of my cooking knowledge came from. I was really lucky. It was thanks to persuasion and persistence but I was also in the right place at the right time.”

He was offered his big break when the restaurant’s pastry chef failed to appear for his shift. Chris was placed in charge of the section that day.

“I will never forget that day. I was thrown in at the deep end. I was promoted twice within the year. I got the best foundations I could have had. Angela was great.”

His ascent in the capital’s culinary microcosm was far from over. Eighteen months later, he joined  Bond & Brook at Fenwick, where he met his now wife, as pastry chef.

The couple later moved to the Channel Islands where they launched their own restaurant before running a catered ski chalet in the Alps. After some time abroad they returned to the UK.

Soon after Chris accepted the head chef position at The Marlborough – a daunting task which saw him redesign the entire menu and put his simple fresh food stamp on the kitchen.

“When the owner bought the place he decided he would get top chefs in. He had travelled the world and been to great restaurants. But he learnt quickly that it was not that easy.  When I came here, from day one, we’ve been on the same page. What I wanted to do was bring really good local produce seasonally. And we are doing really well now. It’s a mix, we have the classics –we do a mean fish and chips and burger - and I get to show off my flair with some of the dishes.”

His first time at Marlborough Festival will give him a chance to share his love of cooking and stay at the top of his game.

“It’s going to be quite educational for me; people will be asking questions. It’s another string to your bow.”

Chris will prepare one of his signature dishes at the Marlborough Food & Drink Festival on Saturday, May 16 at 2pm.