jobs while he caught up on all that missed partying. This led to a five year hiatus in his cheffing career until the age of 23 when he decided to do something with his life and get back in a kitchen.
His first job back was at Gordon Ramsay’s 
me. I can still remember that meal now. I had crab on toast to start, shin of beef for main and passion fruit parfait with dark chocolate sorbet for dessert. That meal made me want to work with Tom.”
He promptly did so, joining the team on the garnish section in 2007. Within three months he had been promoted to junior sous, before bagging the head chef position in 2010. During his time at the pub, Aaron has seen it grow massively in business as well as in stature and of course the award of that second Michelin star in 2011. “It was the single most important point in my life,” says Aaron. I broke down in floods of tears for a good solid hour. I called all my family, crying; they thought somebody had died!”
Nick Beardshaw, senior sous chef
Flowers and other top kitchens. “They try to make the atmosphere in the kitchen as nice as possible,” he says. “We have the radio on in the morning; we have premier league football matches on the iPad; at the moment we have the Ashes on every day; there aren’t many two-star kitchens in the world that would do that.”
Nick’s day is a long and busy one. He gets in at eight in the morning, checks all the orders have come in and that everyone is present and correct; next he oversees breakfast service for the customers staying in the pub’s four rooms; then it’s fish prep and the placing of more orders whilst at the same time checking that everyone’s getting their work d
one and are on schedule for lunch. Lunch service lasts until 4.30 or five o’clock, followed by a clean down, then it all starts again for dinner service which goes on until 11 or 11.30. Nick usually gets out by midnight but it can be as late 1.30 on a particularly busy day.
“Every day’s a Saturday,” says Nick. “We’re one of the busiest kitchens in the country but everyone’s used to it; we’ve grown to be that way so we’ve evolved with it and we’ve adapted; it works.”
Maybe it’s the busy nature of the kitchen that makes the team so tight: they have to be, to work in each other’s pockets so long without killing each other. As Aaron says: “There are 17 people in that kitchen and everybody gets on. I know those guys better than my friends and family because I work with them 16 hours a day, five days a week and I want to work with 16 people I like. It doesn’t matter how many Michelin stars you’ve got on your CV, if you come to work here and act like a d**k, you won’t last.”
. His first such task was to solve the issue of the pastry on the Essex lamb bun dish so that it had a consistently crispy texture but could be rolled easily and without cracking. First he looked at the temperature of the ovens, then he tried using a white bread dough followed by other kinds of dough, none of which fitted the bill. Finally, after a bit of head scratching and some conversations with other chefs, he came across the magic formula – a dough made with lamb fat, semolina and bicarbonate of soda. “The semolina gives it the crispy texture,” says Chris, “whilst the lamb fat makes it easy to roll and ensures it doesn’t crack.” The whole process took just six days.
Going forward Chris is tasked, alongside pastry chef Jolyon d’Angibau, with coming up with the Hand and Flowers version of afternoon tea, a new venture which will coincid
e with the opening of the new bar extension. “We’ll be looking at classic things like gateau opera cake and of course sandwiches,” says Chris. “It might be something as simple as a corned beef sandwich but an amazing corned beef that we make ourselves.” Chris is also tasked with creating a bar snacks menu for the new bar. He’s already got his eye on a delicious sausage roll with a homemade Toulouse sausage wrapped in his newly-created lamb fat and semolina pastry.
The longer term future could see a brand new Hand and Flowers development kitchen in which Chris can conjure his magic – he currently has to commandeer a station in the main kitchen or in the small prep kitchen once the chips have been cut. “The role is a very new one,” he says, “and it needs to develop but we might be looking at around a year’s time for the development kitchen.”
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