Lunch with Thomas Straker, the chef the restaurant world loves to hate

Spectator

6 days ago

'It was a heavy week,' sighs Thomas Straker, explaining why he recently ended up on a drip in New York. He's been nicknamed Britain's 'bad boy chef', and his fans love him. He owns two restaurants in Notting Hill and has 2.6 million Instagram followers: not far off Nigella. Another restaurant is coming in Manhattan, so he has been spending a lot of time there. 'Post-service, out late, every night,' he says.
Straker Industries has many divisions: he runs a YouTube channel, has a butter range and is about to launch his own olive oil. On the day we meet, I spot him sauntering down Golborne Road towards his restaurant Acre for our interview. He's wearing a 'Game Eater' cap and a T-shirt with his own name on it, tucked into his Adidas trackies. He's a mere 40 minutes late. 'I dragged myself to Pilates this morning,' he tells me. He likes to get his top off in his videos.
He has an air of Withnail – lazy hair, hazy eyes, serrated cheekbones – and he stalks similar parts of London. Straker is that evergreen currency: Notting Hill swank, updated for 2025, and it still has much going for it. He stops to say 'hey' to a babe a couple of times during the interview.
Straker has a completely normal background for a Notting Hill celebrity but an abnormal one for a popular chef these days. He grew up shooting and foraging in Herefordshire, and his father was the second-in-command of the SAS and deputy director of Nato Special Forces in Afghanistan.
A misspent youth did not land him at Sandhurst, but at cookery school. He worked afterwards at the Dorchester and Heston Blumenthal's Dinner, and then became the private chef to Sir Leonard Blavatnik, the third richest man in the UK. 'When Covid came around,' he says, 'I saw more food videos come up and thought I should try to do that. I was working in the States for a family of five. It didn't take me all day to make breakfast, lunch and dinner, so I made good use of my afternoons.' Two years later, he had become so popular on social media that he was able to open his first restaurant, Straker's.
Straker's kitchen burnt down earlier this year. On the first weekend of May he woke up to 200 missed calls. It's 'not been particularly fun the past few months', he says. 'You suddenly go from a very comfortable, high-turnover business to a zero-turnover business… It's been incredibly stressful financially.' The restaurant reopened at the end of June. It is difficult to book a table, given how busy it is.
We eat in Acre, his new brunch and lunch restaurant. He orders an iced matcha with agave honey for himself, and some pan con tomate(£6) for both of us –'I literally had this twice yesterday,' he says. Acre is meant to be more casual, more affordable, more in keeping with the post-Covid desire for expediency and comfort than Straker's. 'You want to make it affordable as possible for your customers, but we're ultimately running a business,' he says. 'But this is definitely an accessible way to come and have some good food. It's not dirt cheap because we're not using shit products, but we'll be doing cod here instead of sea bass over there.'
A teenage girl having brunch with her father comes over to our table. She's doing her GCSE art project, and they've been asked to paint a building. She painted Straker's because she loves his videos so much, and she shows it to him. He smiles: 'Top grades for you! Let's buy it off you!'
He then tells me about the olive oil he's got coming out: 'So I was in Soho at 3 a.m. the day before I ran the London marathon… I got carried away.' That evening, he met a man from Puglia who insisted he made the best olive oil around, and that he would send Straker a bottle. 'I was amazed it arrived,' Straker said. It was good, and now you'll be able to buy Thomas Straker's 'Donna Franca' olive oil this autumn.
Po-faced restaurant industry types are suspicious of him. A couple of chefs have bad-mouthed him to me over the past few months. The popular Instagram page 'SluttyCheff' went viral with a satirical account of working as a woman in Straker's kitchen: 'Thank you guys… for welcoming me with such massive muscle-y open arms.' In 2023, he posted a picture of himself with the chefs at his restaurant: all eight were white men, and he got in trouble for it in the papers. I ask him if he thinks he's been unfairly treated. There's a long pause. 'I'm thinking about what I want to say and what I should say.'
At the time, he expressed some regret over it and says now that he was 'scapegoated for an industry-wide thing. But that's in the past… I'm having a good run. That is only down to how hard I work with my team, how hard they work. Everyone has an equal opportunity in the business.'
He's often accused of just riding the coattails of online hype. 'If people want to be like 'Oh he's not a chef, he's an Instagram chef', they can fucking say what they want,' he says. 'Open your fucking restaurant, whatever. I'm doing my own thing. It did piss me off for a bit, but now I'm just level. I know what I'm doing… I don't feel unfairly treated. It always comes around in the end.'
You get a sense that the world might be bending towards Thomas Straker. Jonathan Nunn, who edits the left-wing food magazine Vittles, recently posted about how he respects Straker for not trying to hide how posh he is. 'Thomas Straker is just repeatedly posting pics hanging out with David Cameron or cradling Boris Johnson's baby.' When Straker isn't in London, he spends time at Carole Bamford's Daylesford estate, producing online content from the Cotswolds.
America now beckons. He is taking over a site formerly overseen by Keith McNally (another enfant terrible of the restaurant world) and they're 'just about to go into building work'. I wonder what America will make of him. They tend to love posh Brits, less so gobby ones. Oasis didn't travel well across the Atlantic; Hugh Grant did. It will be interesting to see how Straker lands. In spirit, he is both Grant and the Gallaghers.
When I ask what he gets up to in New York, he shows me a tattoo of a naked lady on his shoulder, done for him by a guy called 'Bang Bang'. He grins like a teenager. Being Thomas Straker looks like fun.