Emily Watkins, chef-patron of The Kingham Plough, Gloucestershire

Emily Watkins is the chef-patron of The Kingham Plough in Gloucestershire. After learning her trade in Italy and at Heston Blumenthal’s The Fat Duck, Emily decided to open her own place, The Kingham Plough, which has now been running successfully for six years.

The Staff Canteen caught up with the 34-year-old Great British Menu contestant and mother of three to find out about balancing the traditional with the modern and work life with family life.

What were your first experiences of cooking and how did you get into it professionally?

The thing about good cooking is that it all comes from greed – I always loved eating. Growing up, my mum was a good cook and I had two sisters who loved cooking so it was probably one of those few households where people fight to get their turn to cook! My mum manages a country hotel down in Dorset where we spent a lot of holidays picking spinach and doing pot wash duties – all the glamorous kinds of things that your mum ropes you into doing to earn your pocket money!

After school I wanted to be a chef but I was a bit discouraged to be honest because it wasn’t really considered a female profession back then, 16 or 17 years ago, so I ended up going to university in Bristol to do a degree in business. After uni I had an office job for six months and I’ve never been so bored in my life – or so useless at a job actually! So I packed my bags and went off to Italy armed with a Michelin guide and no CV of any consequence.

I went to Florence because I had a friend of a friend who was living there. I’d marked in the guide all the restaurants that I wanted to work in. They all turned me down at first but I persevered and luckily number two on my list, a restaurant called Ristorante Beccofino, took pity on me and said that if I waitressed for them, I could do two days a week in the kitchen; that lasted for two months then they gave me a full time contract in the kitchen. At first I couldn’t speak a word of the language, which funnily enough was an advantage because I couldn’t understand anything they were saying when they were shouting at me!

Then you came back to the UK, to Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck; that must have been a particularly exciting prospect?

Yes and because I didn’t have the formal college education and because I only knew some of the terminology in Italian it was a really good place for me. The way Heston cooks and the way he encourages you to think in the kitchen, is not to take for granted everything you’ve been taught at college, so actually it was an advantage to me not having that kind of training.

Everyone goes into The Fat Duck as a commis. I started in larder and it was so eye-opening – totally different to what I’d been doing before. Everybody there was enthused. It was a very positive working environment, definitely not of the ethos of beating people down but one of encouragement. Everyone was interested in food and everyone talked about food all the time and of course Heston was an inspiration to work for. I absolutely loved every second I was there; unfortunately I had a hip problem which meant I either had to have a hip replacement or change my way of life for a year.

After three years working as a private chef you set up The Kingham Plough; were there the usual challenges of starting your own place?

Yes, when we started painting, the wall fell down! Then the ceiling fell down and we discovered it was all lead piping which had to be replaced. In one way it was lucky though because while all the building work was going on I had time to research the menus and I got really into finding old Cotswold recipes and modernising them.

We expected it to be a really small enterprise but we got such a good response that we quickly had to recruit more staff, which was a bit of a headache when you’re in the kitchen from seven in the morning until midnight, changing the menu every day. I was basically trying to do everything myself at first and it was impossible. My then-boyfriend, who is now my husband, came in to help me and after a year we bought it off my business partner, got married and turned it into a family business. My husband, Miles Lampson, still runs the front of house at the weekends.

How has your food style developed since you’ve been at The Kingham Plough?

Hopefully the consistency has gone up. We’ve stuck to our principal of traditional cooking using modern methods which picks up on the strands of cooking I learned in Italy and at The Fat Duck – incorporating really good local ingredients, which the Italians love to do, with getting the best out of them using modern methods like Heston does. I love delving into the past for old recipes. What I love is that they only used what was available here in the Cotswolds because they had to, so they are authentically local.

You have just given birth to your third child. How do you balance being a mother with running The Plough?

The plan now, having had my third baby, is to have more of an executive chef role – being in the kitchen five days a week, because that’s where I love to be, but just working on the menu development. Until two weeks before Wilbur, my third child, was born, I was working a station five days a week with two small children at home and I was gone from seven in the morning until after they were in bed. With my first two, I was working up until the day they were born, and with my first, Alfie, I actually went into labour at work! I think it was slightly my own fault in that I find it hard to let go; it’s like having four children! Luckily I’ve got a fantastic head chef now, Ben, which makes things easier.

What are your plans for the future?

Just to keep getting better and to keep learning and improving. I’d like to do a few different things – I love doing ice cream and I’d love to do that on a larger scale, selling it to the local farm shops and anyone else who’d like to sell it. I’d also quite like to open a fish and chip shop and I’d love to do a book as well. Hopefully this new role of exec chef will free me up to do a few more of these things.

View Emily's recipe for Pork Loin and Hodge Podge Pudding Wellington

View Emily's recipe for Strawberry and Elderflower Split