Tom Kerridge On 20 Years Of The Hand & Flowers

Forbes

12-05-2025

Tom Kerridge at The Hand & Flowers
It started with a lie. When Tom Kerridge and his wife Beth wanted to take over a pub in Marlow, they told the bank it was for a house extension. The truth was less mortgage-friendly: they used the money to start The Hand & Flowers—to buy the tenancy, max out their credit cards, source second-hand equipment, and build their pub-restaurant dream from scratch.
'We opened up with nothing and basically borrowed everything,' Kerridge says now. 'It wasn't even the leasehold of the pub.'
That was 2005. Back then, British dining was still emerging from its pub grub hangover. A Michelin star was the preserve of white-tablecloth establishments; pubs were for pints, not pig's head terrine or brown butter hollandaise. But Kerridge had other ideas. He wasn't trying to reinvent the wheel—he just wanted to cook brilliant, deeply flavoured food, in a place where people felt at home.
It was an audacious setup. A chef-led menu rooted in classical French technique, served with zero pretension and all the warmth of a proper local. No investors. No PR. Just a husband, a wife, and a kitchen so small it was forced to run on a four-ring hob.
Twenty years later, The Hand & Flowers remains the only pub in the UK to hold two Michelin stars—a status it's held since 2012—and the cornerstone of a hospitality group that includes multiple restaurants, over 200 staff, and a chef who has become one of the defining voices in modern British food.
'It's weird,' Kerridge reflects. 'I don't miss the early days, but I absolutely love them.' He remembers the graft—the seven-day weeks, the furniture they upholstered by hand, the panic and pride that came with every early service. 'You put everything into it. You risk everything. So your whole heart and soul is in that building.
'We never aimed to be where we're sat now,' he says. 'We just aimed to be better at what we do.'
At first, they didn't know if anyone would come. 'People were booking on the night,' Kerridge recalls. But within months, Saturdays were filling up by Tuesdays. Then weeks in advance. Word was spreading—not just about the food, but about the feel of the place: ambitious but affectionate, polished but personal. The kind of pub where sauces might take two days to perfect, yet you could wipe a plate of it clean with bread and not feel self-conscious.
The first Michelin star arrived ten months in. It changed everything—not because it validated them, but because it stabilised them. It gave the place legs. 'You knew what the revenue would be week by week,' Kerridge says. 'It allowed us to invest, to buy new plates, to push.'
Shortly after came his appearance on Great British Menu, a TV slot that catapulted Kerridge into the national consciousness. For diners, it turned The Hand & Flowers into a destination. For the business, it meant reliability. Growth. Staff. Equipment. Ambition. Eventually, even the top spot on the show's judging panel.
But even then, there was no grand strategy—just a sense that something was working. 'It's all just been this case of reinvestment,' he says. 'This almost perfect storm of a whirlwind that has just kept growing and growing.'
By 2012, they earned their second star. A pub—a real pub, with beams and banter and pints on tap—had joined the top tier of global fine dining. It was, and still is, an anomaly. But it never felt like a gimmick. The food earned it. And the volume followed. 'We were doing over a thousand people a week,' Kerridge says. 'That's 52,000 people a year. But there's only a certain amount of foodies that come and eat with you.' It was thrilling, but also relentless—and eventually, unsustainable.
'We didn't want to be that place people go to once and say, 'Yeah, I've eaten there.''
In an attempt to mature his business model, Kerridge and his team added more rooms. Today, the pub has 15. Guests arrive, settle in, dine slowly, stay the night. Still white tablecloths, still no dress code. 'I like it when people turn up with shorts and flip flops,' Kerridge says. 'It means they're comfy. And I love that about the space.'
That ease, of course, sits atop an extraordinary level of rigour. This year, to mark the 20th anniversary, The Hand & Flowers introduced a new 'Classics' menu—a curated retrospective of some of the most celebrated dishes of the last two decades. It includes the salt cod Scotch egg with red pepper sauce and chorizo (2009), the lemon sole Grenobloise with anchovy fritter (2013), the iconic pork belly, and more recent hits like the Tirami-'Choux' with hot chocolate sauce (2020). Three courses, £95, served Monday to Friday.
'It's not just a nostalgia piece,' Kerridge says. 'It's about celebrating the journey—reminding ourselves and our guests what got us here.'
Tom Kerridge in the kitchen at The Hand & Flowers
Still, Tom Kerridge's restaurant group has become much more than the sum of The Hand & Flowers' parts.
First came The Coach, a more casual restaurant opened a decade later that has since earned its own Michelin star. 'The menu is separated slightly into meat and no meat, and it's smaller plates,' Kerridge explains. 'The chefs will serve you across the counter, and it's much more relaxed.'
Then came The Butcher's Tap & Grill, designed for a different kind of crowd entirely. 'It's very much foodie-based steaks and burgers, and football on the telly,' he says. 'It'll have the sport, and it's much more kind of like beer and burgers space.'
Between the three, there's no attempt to force a single brand identity. 'They're very, very different,' he says simply.
What links them is ownership—not just creatively, but structurally. 'We have no business partners,' Kerridge says. 'Everything that we've done has just been about us and the business.'
When previous pub company leases made growth harder than it needed to be, Kerridge also decided to steer clear for future projects. 'They were quite difficult to work with,' he says.
Now, they own the buildings. They answer only to themselves—and, occasionally, to the bank. 'Banks make really good investors,' he laughs. 'They're relatively faceless... they're not going to tell you to paint the bar a different color or to turn up at 10 o'clock at night and demand a dish because they're your investor.'
Starters at The Hand & Flowers
It's not all been easy, of course. When COVID hit the UK, like everyone else in hospitality, Kerridge was given no time to prepare. 'We were told to shut on one evening, and that was it,' he says. For three days, there was silence from the government. No plan. No promise of support. Just panic.
'That bit there, that sense of responsibility—that was a huge thing that weighed heavy on shoulders for quite a long time. And it still does.'
The weight came from knowing who was behind those pay slips. 'We've got people that have been in our company for, like, 15 years, 18 years,' he says. 'Young kids that then got married and then got kids of their own.'
Some of them started as commis chefs or apprentices. Now they're head chefs. Some have left and gone on to win Michelin stars themselves. But it's the ones who stayed—and grew—that Kerridge talks about most.
'I love it when people stay with us, they grow professionally... and personally. It gives me such a sense of pride.'
As Kerridge enters his third decade at the helm, the word that comes up more often is legacy.
'I've become rapidly aware that I am getting to that older age group,' he says. 'We used to... win things like 'Newcomer of the Year' and now I can feel myself getting, like, 'Special Award' or 'Lifetime Achievement.''
He laughs, but the shift is real. He talks about The Hand & Flowers not just as a restaurant, but as something he wants to last—not in trend pieces, but in memory. 'I'd love The Hand & Flowers to keep going for another 20 and be a part of it all,' he says. 'You can't keep being the most dynamic and the new opening, but, you can still stay exciting and relevant.'
He is inspired by places like Le Manoir and Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, in particular. 'What Raymond Blanc does, and what he's done, and his legacy... is just truly outstanding. I'd love The Hand & Flowers to be talked about in the same kind of vein in 10, 20 years' time.'
Tom Kerridge at The Hand & Flowers
Part of that future, for him, is also about where he came from.
'I'd love to do a lot more in terms of—not politically, but—representation,' he says. 'The backgrounds and areas of poverty that I grew up in; I came from a single-parent family and qualified for free school meals. All of those sorts of things I try to drive on a secondary basis.'
He knows the contrast can be jarring: the man behind one of Britain's most expensive restaurants, wanting to talk about ways you can use frozen vegetables to keep costs down at home. 'It's easy for someone to find fault in the juxtaposition of the two spaces, but I would like to do a lot more of that now I'm a little older and the businesses are a lot more settled. Now that pride gives me a voice.'
What he's built with The Hand & Flowers is rare, and that may be the clearest legacy of all: not that a pub earned two stars, but that it stayed the course. That his culinary empire was built with heart, run without compromise, and makes people feel looked after, whether they're popping in for quick comfort food at Kerridge's Fish & Chips or treating themselves to a blast from the past at his two-decade-old original.
'What can I say?' Kerridge smiles. 'I've done 33 years, and loved every minute of it.'