Graham Garrett, West House, Biddenden, Kent

Graham Garrett is the owner and head chef of his own restaurant, The West House in Biddenden, Kent. The restaurant is set in a fifteenth-century weaver’s cottage and specialises in making the best use of seasonal ingredients. Graham Garrett didn’t have your usual career start as a chef. Before holding a knife he held a pair of drum sticks as the drummer for 80s bands Ya Ya and Dumb Blondes. He left his career at the age of 31 and worked with Michelin star chefs such as Nico Ladenis and Richard Corrigan in London before establishing The West House in 2002. It earned its first Michelin star in 2004 and has kept it ever since. It has also achieved the highest rating for its food in the Harden’s Guide. Graham describes his food as ‘centred on the best local produce, with clean, strong flavours’.   The first question I have to ask you what is an ex rock musician doing as a chef? Well it’s the question everybody asks. I'm sure it is. I'm sure you get fed up of that one. Yes I do but you can’t dodge your past can you, not any more, not with the internet. I was going to go into cooking when I was at school… Isn’t it the other way round you want to be a chef and then become a rock star? It was weird, obviously I always wanted to be a rock star I was always into music and that was my main passion, it was what I always done but in the real world you've got to get a job. But cooking was always your passion. Cooking and music were the passions, cooking was a hobby and when leaving school, I told the career’s officer that I wanted to be a rock star,I got the cane. I wanted to go into catering but at the time there was a real stigma to it. My dad was like, “What do you want to do that for?” his classic line was, “Don’t you like girls?” Boys don’t cook. But I then went into butchery strangely enough. .So you came into it quite late, no real formal training, so are you one of those self-taught chefs? It’s very easy to say, “Yes I'm a self-taught chef,” in as much as it’s all out there to learn, there's loads of books and TV, there's access to everything. it was always a passion anyway. I'd be on tour, , reading cookbooks and cooking bits and pieces whenever I could. So you weren't snorting cocaine off groupies’ naked bodies and things like that? After dinner, I'd get the cooking done first. ((laughs)) So I guess you’re picking up all these little bits anyway aren’t you? Yes because if you’re interested in food you’re always looking. Whatever country we’d be in, we’d be taken to the best restaurant or latest opening and I would be the one to tell the other boys in the band what to order and what things were on the menu. I was one of these dinner party cooks, and it was always an interest so it was inevitable really when I stopped music that I would get more involved in cooking. Do you think having no preconceived ideas about what food should and shouldn’t be is a help or a hindrance? I think it’s a help, the help is seeing it from a customer’s point of view from eating in lots of restaurants, I'm really big on that. I always encourage anyone who’s ever worked for me to eat out as much as possible, either taking them to different restaurants or getting them into places to eat and not just to work because chefs, , we all know what we’re like. You’re in the kitchen and it’s very tunnel vision and you see it from your perspective only. If you had your time again Graham would you do it differently? Would you train as a chef? I’ve been cooking for twenty years now, working for the likes of Nico and Corrigan and in my own restaurant for the last ten, so feel I’ve done my time and really don’t regret any of my misspent youth. So was your own restaurant the ultimate goal? Yes it was always the plan, as I say even back in the band days, it might not have been the restaurant that this is but it was always to have my own place, to be able to have that freedom to do what you want to do. So talk us through here now then, how long have you been here now? I've been here just over ten years, June was our tenth anniversary. I'd had enough of London The whole clique. That whole scene really, the rat race. I wanted to cook and enjoy what I was cooking. That was the plan, so I started looking for a pub. like most chefs I didn’t have any money, then this place came along. It was a real dilemma because I didn’t really want to do the restauranty thing but it was kind of small enough that I thought I could get it going on my own. I kept it to about seven tables. I told the missus, “Look you've got to help me just to get it open,” she'd never worked in the industry and didn’t want to. I had a service plan that I used