Top 10 Young UK Chefs To Watch Right Now

Matt Gillan’s brilliant career in the kitchen began right out of school in his native county of Hampshire, where his talents emerged and diverted him from pursuing a graphic designer role. After a couple of years training under the aegis of chefs like Gordon Ramsey and Daniel Clifford, and a year spent picking vegetables in Australia, Gillan returned to the UK and now heads The Pass restaurant at the South Lodge Hotel in West Sussex. With a cuisine he define as ‘Progressive British’, Gillan’s dishes combine a variety of international influences with fresh British produce from specialised suppliers, a mix that earned him a Michelin star in 2011.

Born in 1981, Marcus Eaves followed his father’s footsteps into a career as a chef. A precocious talent, after attending Stratford-upon-Avon College Eaves worked with chef Andres Antona at Simpsons and David Moore at Pied à Terre. Mentored by then head chef Shane Osborne, Eaves refined his modernist technique and was subsequently invited to co-head sister restaurant L’Autre Pied in 2007, where two years later, at the age of 27, he was awarded a Michelin star. Since 2011, he has been back at Pied à Terre’s, where he now leads the kitchen. Widely praised for their aesthetic finesse, his signature dishes include marinated hand-dived scallops with razor clams, cucumber horseradish and borage.

Currently head chef at Adam Byatt’s Trinity, Graham Squire landed at the popular Clapham restaurant after a relatively short but intense career that saw him hailed as Craft Guild of Chefs’ Young Chef of the Year award in 2008. After an apprenticeship with the Academy of Culinary Arts, young Squire spent several years at Claridge’s before moving to Trinity. Fondly passionate of seasonal cuisine, his dishes bring a modern twist to British food and circumvent the exclusively high-end approach to include a wider variety of cuts and game meats. Squire is just about to launch his own restaurant, Lickfold Inn.

With an accent placed on the lightness of its food, and recipes revolving around fresh herbs, fruit, vegetables, juices and infusions, Ollie Dabbous’ restaurant, Dabbous, opened with little clamour in 2012. Suprisingly, the place soon became the most talked about and sought after sensation on the buzzing dining scene of London, its waiting list booked for months ahead. Having previously moved between restaurants like Le Manoir Aux Quat’Saisons and Noma, Dabbous firmly crafted his identity as a chef, which he impresses on his lightly seasoned dishes, as for instance in his widely acclaimed signature fennel and rose petal salad.

Unlike many of her colleagues, Florence Knight did not know she wanted to be a chef at the age of 10. Instead, she trained at London College of Fashion, but soon decided it was a kitchen she wanted to work in, and so enrolled at Leiths Cookery School and spent endless hours offering to work for free. The turning point came in 2010, when she was appointed to run Polpetto in Soho. At first , the restaurant was meant to be a smaller version of sister restaurant Polpo, but after an intermission between the end of 2012 and the beginning of 2014, the restaurant reopened, inspired by Knight’s ideal to ‘celebrate simplicity, flavour and texture’ with a renewed Venetian-inspired menu.