The hardest thing about being creative is finding an audience. Creativity can be a lonely, inward-looking, even egotistical pursuit. It is a remarkable thing to find people who will engage with, support, and allow your work to continue. This is truer than ever in 2026. Today marks eleven years of The Wilderness and I am moved to share my profound and sincere appreciation for the thousands of guests who have formed part of our esoteric and adventurous tribe.
By my back-of-a-fag-packet calculations, we have fed over 50,000 guests since this tremendous and terrifying venture took form, serving over half a million plates of food. Some of you have supported us for eleven years. Across the pass I have watched your lives unfurl, evolve, change radically – and you mine. How we have felt wonder, ecstasy, pleasure, and pain together. The years have been sometimes kind, sometimes cruel, but god we have lived, haven’t we? Thank you for letting me share in your lives and, in doing so, becoming part of mine. It is a peculiar intimacy that represents the aspect of restaurants that I love the most.
How remarkable that all of us have come together in a space that once existed only as sketches and fragments in a notebook from 2014. I think to the first dates, the farewells, the momentous moments, and the everyday dinners that we have played host to. I think of them often, and fondly. This restaurant has been the most stable fixture of my adult life, and I cannot express to you what that has meant (not without more therapy, at least).
As we look forward to our twelfth year and plan for 2027, I dare to dream beyond surviving another year of these apocalyptic times. In what may sound like a contradiction, next year I wish to run the smallest possible restaurant. A small restaurant that exists in pursuit of the biggest ideas and ideals. A small team fully aligned to the values, standards, and culture that places the radical act of creativity at its heart.
I remain as excited as ever by the excruciating pleasure that a perfect plate of food can deliver. In a world that feels wild, I remain deeply soothed by the act of consistency and the pursuit of control, in tension with the playful experimentation that our restaurant entails. It is, I think, this that has kept me doing this so long. It is this that, as far as I could say, is my calling. To find the calm in the chaos, the beauty in the brutal, and to deliver my own idiosyncratic little world in a tiny old factory in the JQ.
To the very many of you who have allowed me to pursue such an indulgent calling, I furnish with my deep and sincere gratitude. To my team too, thank you – you have given life and longevity to my naïve scribblings and dreams. Let’s keep creating together. Eat well and drink the good wine. Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think.