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Kinfauns Chef
Melanie Henderson talks to top chef Jeremy Wares, a big guy with big ideas about Scottish cooking.
Jeremy Wares is surly, burly enough to have been fed on prime fillet of Scotch beef since he was weaned, and possessed of a matter-of-factness that must often make less robust individuals flinch. It is difficult to imagine how such large, farmer’s hands work themselves around such delicacies as Tay salmon three ways with tarragon mayonnaise and easy to see why he went to Australia to decide whether his talents lay not in creating exquisitely edible dinners but in handling belligerent sheep. He is the kind of person who could give you rather a serious fright on a dark night, never mind in a hectic kitchen where flaming pans must somehow get from A to B regardless of human obstacles. "Sometimes I’ll get annoyed and throw things," he says. "If someone sees me coming they should get out of the way. It’s tough. I’m a big guy – you get in my way you get burned." He does not appear to be joking either. Well, if you can’t stand the heat…and Jeremy Wares most definitely can, which is why, after a relatively short stint at Kinfauns Castle Hotel, he has a Restaurant Chef of the Year title tucked into his whites and is creating a considerable buzz around his substantial person.
It’s difficult to imagine him turning up on the doorstep of a French restaurant to beg a job, having just hitched a ride in a lorry from Scotland in order to hop on a ferry and seek his fortune in the land of escargots. Then again, there’s not much chance he would have come across as a gruel-seeking Oliver Twist. He is quite clearly a determined young man with few, if any, self-doubts. That’s one of the reasons he is leaving Kinfauns to open his own restaurant in Perth which, he says, will be "quite a smart dining room…nice furniture" and will offer him freer reign to demonstrate his talents on a more extensive menu.
I thank him for my dinner of last night – the aforementioned salmon trio, followed by wild mushroom and celeriac soup and crispy fillet of sea bream with couscous, tomato confit and Mediterranean vegetables – a veritable melee of textures and tastes. He tells me he wasn’t in the kitchen himself, which speaks volumes about the way he heads up his team.
His first experience of cooking was at his parents’ hotel and catering business in Jedburgh, after which he went to Hong Kong through school and worked at the Hong Kong Hilton (where he met Kinfauns’s current owner James Smith, then the manager there). There was never much chance he was going to present himself before a careers officer and profess an urge towards astro-physics. He knew catering was for him – he just had some globe-trotting to do first.
He took a year out and worked on an Australian sheep farm, where he worked his notions about a living in livestock out of his system, then travelled to Hawaii and New Zealand before it was time to seriously put on the checked trousers. He was set against going to college, so dispatched a letter of self-recommendation to Restaurant Le Divellec, a Paris establishment with two Michelin stars.
"I got a reply saying they couldn’t pay me, but going to college was the last thing I wanted to do, so I managed to arrange transport, got across the channel and turned up at the door of the restaurant. The chef said ‘Go and get changed!’ and I said ‘Wait a minute, I haven’t got anywhere to stay yet,’ so he told me to come back the next night. A few weeks later I said ‘Look, I can’t stay unless you pay me.
