The Power of Persistence
It has been nine months since the story of The Wilderness took a welcome, but unexpected twist with the award of a Michelin star in Dublin. In recent years I’ve shared longer form musings on the life and times of running a restaurant via this (now embarrassingly neglected) blog. It is, I accept, an oversight that, despite such a major event, I have remained largely silent.
We have posted beautiful photos of food and portraits of the team who delivered the silverware, but the deep stuff… I haven’t given myself the time to breathe, to process and to broadcast that. Guests continue to ask, or speculate, on my sentiments, so I thought it time we get into it.
I still think, as I’ve previously stated, it is a very dangerous thing for restaurants to exist solely in pursuit of stars, or indeed any award. The best creative work, for me, happens because the creator has to do the work for some deeply personal reason – without regard to the audience. Equally, and with some basis now for the assertion, I can confirm that there is no award or accolade – of which we have received, gratefully, many others – that has a tenth of the wider meaning or importance of a star. It is the most meaningful thing that has ever happened to my restaurant, and it has been the most transformative. Mostly in positive ways.
If you will indulge me, I think we should return to the six months prior to the ceremony. In June 2025, the restaurant was at a cross-roads. Our previous Executive Chef was leaving. I had set up a successful business outside of hospitality that offered me, for the first time, a sensible exit from the industry and a perfectly lovely lifestyle should I want it. It was, in many ways, intended as a swan song when I returned to The Wilderness kitchen full-time, with Ediz (who had worked previously form me in various roles) as my new right-hand man.
We had not made money for years, and hospitality was – and is – largely a financially ruinous endeavour. The restaurants existed because my other business paid for them to exist and I stopped taking any wages. This is the standard for an alarming number of your favourite restaurants. It is criminal that the UK has deteriorated to such a degree than this can be the de facto norm. I gave significant thought to closing the restaurant, and Rach and I made loose plans to close and move up North. Ten beautiful, brutal years.
The context is thus important – we were no longer trying to become a Michelin star restaurant. Rather, we were pursuing fleeting joy, a final frenetic bout of creative and meaningful work. Unsure of any happy ending.
Creating with no long-term plan was unexpectedly restorative, liberating and – although at times unreasonably hard – the most fun I’d had in years. We didn’t engage on social media. We didn’t pay attention to a great deal outside our little bittersweet bubble. New dishes felt like final important memories in a doomed relationship. We finished the year with a re-work of some of the dishes that had defined a decade of the restaurant – and no less than half the team off sick at any one time for the final four weeks of the year. A fitting final stretch of chaos, beauty, improbability and nostalgia.
On, or around, the 6th of January, we sat with the team and began to discuss the final chapter. On the 12th of January, Ediz and myself were invited to Dublin. We both cried, granted Ediz more than me. The same day our Sous Chef was – as I later learnt – planning to give us notice (he didn’t in the end). Life is made of these poetic, improbable moments, scattered like flowers at a wake. We told nobody. We actively lied to peers as to whether we were invited (for which I am very sorry). There was delirium and disbelief, with the star arriving as a late reprieve from the executioner’s axe.
On the 7th of February 2026, I wandered, en reverie, on stage at Dublin to receive a star. The week before I found a notepad from before I started the restaurant with “1 Michelin Star” as one of the scribbled goals – alongside various significantly more spurious ambitions.
I am not prone to great bouts of sentimentality, but staying the course with this project for long enough to see the naive and foolish dreams of 26-year-old me become manifest was remarkably important, personal and, until this point, private. I have long believed that persistence to your truth in absence of logic, sanity, or regard for your general well-being is pre-requisite of meaningful work. I believe this peculiarity in conviction is both the key to my career and, of course, hugely dysfunctional. As Virginia Woolf wrote in “To the Lighthouse” – one of my favourite books – “I have had my vision.” I am unsure whether this is a cautionary or redemptive tale, but it is my tale nonetheless.
To receive our flowers when I was 37 rather than in my twenties was also, I think, necessary and important. Owning a Michelin star restaurant with 40 knocking on the door is a very different matter from doing so in my wild and egotistic twenties. For me, the star was a tribute to tenacity as much as talent, to persistence as much as perfection and, ultimately, represented a huge amount of work and sacrifice from so very many talented individuals, both past and present.
The Wilderness has never had enough investment. It still doesn’t. Our toilets are still a bit shit. We can’t always afford to replace plateware and glassware in a timely fashion. I’ve never been able to afford a proper cook-suite, so we won the star on Nisbett’s basic hobs and a Konro. None of the gear, but some ideas. Some ideas that ultimately allowed us to reach this level on our own terms. The entire creative project has been in pursuit of a way of feeling, a way of understanding the world, through something as honest, universal and analogue as food.
The star happened with the right team at the right time. I am – and guests often ask this – in the dark as to the process, when we are inspected, and how it all works. What I will say is, to my mind, the process clearly has enough wisdom – or alchemy – to have awarded us at the right juncture. At a time where my philosophy of food and cookery became crystallised, and my coquettish tendencies of youth to court attention for attention’s sake had subsided. It was awarded to a team that were the least focused on awards and performing fine dining, and the most focused on food. It was also awarded at just the right time to save the restaurant, serendipitously.
Perhaps the most surprising misunderstanding is the number of guests and journalists who presumed an anti-establishment irreverence would diminish the gravitas of the award to me. I wrote some years ago at the pain and frustration of not achieving a star, but I am unsure I’ve ever downplayed the significance of it for the industry, nor the gravitas with which it exists in the increasingly insane world of restaurants. I also caveat that when I was younger, I was a bit of a dick — as is the male condition, regrettably. I am hugely grateful for the star and, given the apocalyptic landscape for Birmingham hospitality, hugely aware of the privilege to bring a new one back to my hometown. Even if part of me still wants to live in Leeds and run a bistro.
The star was validation for mine and Ediz’s particular idiosyncratic thoughts around food and restaurants, at a time where I probably most needed the encouragement. It is, I think, permission to go deeper into the work, and to double-down on the philosophy and DNA of the restaurant with, perhaps, greater justification for the trust we ask from those who visit. We have consciously done very little to alter our fundamentals, to fall back into the trap of performing it. Like so many things in life, I think you have to just be it, albeit with a pressure to maintain the invisible standards that elevated our position. I think often on losing what has been so hard gained. It’s become an additional pressure I didn’t anticipate and don’t always carry with ease. I try to be the nonchalant punk that so many of our guests and wider industry think me to be, but it is not always so easy.
The star is an important encouragement to keep going, with more at stake should we falter or succumb to the fear and the terror involved in running a restaurant in 2026. It is a promise, I think, that the work is not invisible, even when the profits often are. It is an encouragement to remember that restaurants are not just a business, but they are a space where hard work and deep conviction can allow dreams to happen. For guests, and the teams who give so much to what is, in some ways, a selfish pursuit.
I have had my vision, but now I am gifted the rarest privilege – to dream of taking that vision further, to imagine new futures. More beauty, more terror. A table of two strangers eating in a world that once only existed in my mind and one day will only exist in our collective memories. The late nights, the early starts, the heavy metal, the faint echo of charcoal in the air. It has been a beautiful fight. Still is.