S6, Ep 8: Tom Kerridge, chef

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:07I'm Grace Dent and this is Comfort Eating from The Guardian. A podcast where we pay homage to the lesser celebrated foods in life. Because even as a restaurant critic, I believe the food that matters most is often that snack you cobble together when you're curled upon the sofa. Each week, I ask my guest to lift the lid on what comfort foods have seen them through their lives. Because you can tell a lot about a person from what they eat behind closed doors.

0:44Hello friends. I'm standing in my living room waiting for my guest today. I am looking up at a large, dark hole in the ceiling. it is not at all glamorous. I can actually see the waste pipe of the toilet. What's happened here is that my shower, just above where the guests normally sit, it has been leaking for years and there has been a very genuine threat that the entire shower unit was suddenly going to plummet and just hit somebody. In fact, all of last autumn, I had a fear it would happen right during an interview with Tom Kerridge. It was never Gregory Porter. It was never John Ronson. For some reason, always Tom.

1:36Well, he's coming today and he is in luck because I have taken this bathroom situation by the hands. I am choosing tiles right now for my new project. It is literally all I talk about right now. No, no, come back. Honestly, I'm not that boring. Here's the problem. I am never going to feel grown up enough to choose tiles. Is that just me? It just feels, it feels very serious. It feels like a very forever thing. It's like getting a tattoo. It'd be easier to get rid of a tattoo. Every time I sit down and have a wee for the next 10 years, I'm going to look at these tiles. My top tip is don't ask anyone else's opinions on the tiles that you find.

2:22Don't show anyone, just do it. Just go and get them. They'll say that they don't like them. My man saw some lovely ones I found the other day and he said they look like acne. And then I was back to square one. A man who I know could pick tiles with confidence and aplomb is Mr Tom Kerridge. He has decorated no less than seven of his own restaurants. He is a multi-award winning chef and broadcaster who cut his teeth cooking at some of the country's finest restaurants. But it was when he started opening his own places that things really, really took off for him. It all began with the opening of The Hand and Flowers.

3:01It's the only pub in the world to have two Michelin stars and since then he's grown his empire to include venues across Marlow and London including a fish and chip outlet in Harrods. Since 2022 he has been a guest judge on BBC's Great British Menu. He sounds very busy. I'm sort of picturing him spending his days motoring between venues, writing his menus and brainstorming a moose-bouche. But when the grill's off and the last guest has finally walked out the door. What is he munching on to restore energy? I'm thinking leftovers.

3:52Tom Kerridge, welcome to Comfort Eaton. Thank you very much, mate. I feel very comfortable. Why is that? Is that because you're inside my house? It is. It's not a house, it's a home. And it feels very different. So people create spaces and you can feel this as a home, as a sense of personality. It feels that somebody lives here and it's welcoming and it's nice and it's lovely. So it already has a nice vibe. So I already feel very comfortable. I always like to begin with a serious and pertinent question that it's the thing that the nation is asking. Your name, Kerridge, autocorrects to Kedgeri.

4:36I love that. Yeah. Do you think that that led to your involvement with the food world? No, actually, it's because my mum's maiden name was Cook. There we go. Really? Yeah, it was. Yeah, really. My mum's maiden name was Cook. That was around before autocorrect. I'm going to ask another important question. Kedgeri. I love kedgeri. Where do you stand on whether it is a breakfast or a dinner item? I actually think the reality of it is that it is the sort of thing that you can have. Like at any point of the day, you could have it. It's like you're on the fence. No, no, no. I love the idea of it for breakfast because it's quite a left field choice of breakfast.

5:18It's a bit like kippers. like do you mean like if you've got all the things on a breakfast menu and you're choosing Kedjuri or Kippers I mean you're making a strong statement there so I would say it I think it's a very special breakfast dish.

5:37Tom every week my guest shares their go-to snack their bite their guilty pleasure it is something that makes them feel just a little bit better what have you got hidden underneath my uh it's a fortnum and mason's tea dog it's very very posh because you are a you are a michelin star chef it's very nice yeah there's not even any holes in this i've not even burned it or anything um can you please reveal your snack look at it it is the ultimate snack please explain what it is it's cheese and grapes mate and it is like cheddar and it's red grapes they're always in my fridge because it's very easy you haven't got to do any cooking it gives you bursts of sugar vitamins right grapes for me if i've done a couple of days work them i don't know sometimes if you're traveling you're just eating rubbish garage snacks do you know i mean there's no sense of vitamins or health or anything so if you come in load of grapes normally seedless sweet so you get sugar rushes but you also get a sense of vitamins coming through and cheese for me is amazing it's like the ultimate snack i don't mind that you know the cathedral city the pilgrim's choice slice of that some some grapes anytime it's just a real pick-me-up energy levels i love it so um i'm sensing that you you come in on a night when you just you lie on the sofa with with the grapes just kind of draped just draped like a like like caesar yeah i mean that's not actually strictly true i have a routine know how i do that as well so i'll come in and i'll take the grapes and i'll work out how many grapes i'm going to eat from the bunch and i remove them all right so and then i put them put them out of grapes so they're like little nugget sweets in a bowl and then the cheese and they'll sit on that and then it's almost like cheese and chutney isn't it that's just that's a thing but it's a good late night go-to snack like it didn't used to be that it used to be cheese on toast an old tube of pringles and a pint of gin but now it's very different

7:57although you've got three michelin stars under your belt you've described yourself as not really a michelin star kind of guy so i want to understand who the real tom kerridge actually is maybe it'd be better to go back to the start in a place that i know is really special to you take me back to your favorite childhood pub there's a number that have been part and parcel in my life there's a place called the four mile house which is just outside glosser four miles outside of the center of glosser what did that look like a small little white pub with a beer garden in the back that had like a rusty climbing frame and it was the kind of place my dad used to take you say when i was we were little kids play in the garden drink panda pops run around whilst he drink a few pints but i love that pub energy in this this pub you're going into four mile house what are they selling behind the bar like crisps and stuff like what snags have they got uh the smith's crisps where you put the salt on yourself they were the ones for me absolutely loved it because it felt like yeah because it felt like you were involved in something i like that you were doing something you were creating you were making your own crisp recipe and i like you know that that sense of involvement i don't know what happened there what well i always think that they're for people who aren't even adventurous enough to commit to salt yeah yeah very good point yeah very good point do you think that's the first time you ever chefed yeah it probably is actually that is the first time that i've added added something to create a flavor profile that you would be changing that is probably a very good point yeah you grew up in gloucester in the 70s and the 80s with your parents and your little brother sam talk to me a little bit about family life then in the 70s and 80s so it's quite odd my mum and dad split up when i was not it's not it was actually no different to pretty much anybody else when i grew up my mum and dad split up when i was 11 but pre that my dad wasn't around very much they didn't have necessarily the best of relationships.

10:02Do you remember them being together at all? Not really. I remember us being in the same house. There wasn't like lots of family holidays. There wasn't like that. We weren't hanging out. Did your dad work? Yeah, he was an art lecturer at the local college. And they split up when I was 11. And my dad was also then very ill. So he had MS. So this kind of family relationship, it really was kind of non-existent. My relationship kind of, I remember much more when it was just the three of us did your dad have MS when he when he lived with you he did yeah but we didn't really because we were quite young you don't really know what it means and it went he moved out so when I was 11 so my brother would have been eight and it was only the next few years after that when you start to realize how ill he was and how ill he became and that you realize what a hard disease it would have been to deal with in his world that he was living in and how he dealt with that and like it was just all very and it's hard to put together as an 11 year old because you can't work it out I don't think he was the best husband in the first place for for husband reasons let alone being ill so the reason they split up wasn't anything to do with his illness it was to do with him not working out together as a couple and then your mom is looking after you both she's cooking for you creating a home so you get back from school what's cooking i don't know what they call the kids latchkey kids so you would have the key and you'd come back in and you'd open the door and you would cook tea for my brother because my mum had two jobs so she'd be working as a secretary and then she'd go and work in a local pub washing up there'd be a couple of nights of the week that we do something we might make spaghetti bolognese together but apart from that it would be normally me doing i don't know potato waffles crispy pancakes fish finger sandwiches you know those sort of beans with like little sausages in that was like the highlight do you know i mean like those tinned ravioli did you feel like you were having a hard time you were hard done by or was it just absolutely not at all not one bit of it we never felt unloved and never felt like we were missing out because of the where we grew up everybody was the same we weren't like the odd ones out it was fairly normal for where we lived and i think it's probably still fairly normal for most people's lives now although every sunday my mum would do like a proper roast she would do like a proper a roast dinner and then we'd turn up with some kids that we've been playing rugby with on a sunday morning and we'd all have a bit of lunch so it's like yeah that must have been lovely do you know what i think it's the first bit where i feel that sense of hospitality where it's about making people feel welcome it's not necessarily always about the food it's about the sense of warmth it's so important so important to you i mean yeah yeah people i mean to you yeah yeah it's so important it's such a big thing like there's a point of going yes great we've cooked something they've enjoyed it and now they're disappearing off again but they've had something to eat and they've ridden off on their bikes and not even bothered helping washing up like shaking her fists as we ride off or something but still there was that sense of warmth and connection i think through sunday lunch is mega i love it i think sunday lunch is so important

13:22we know you loved rugby but tell us more about teenage tom tell us about your dossiers as your mother used to say were you a wild kid at all come on i want to know no to know the most trouble you've ever been in with your mother? I can't say that great. All the most trouble. No, I can't. But I have been. Tom, I'm sensing there's a story there. No, there's none. There's none. I've never, ever been in trouble. Have you been brought home by the police? I have been brought home by the police. Oh! Yeah, I have been brought home by the police. What have you done? In all honesty, I don't remember. Probably drinking.

13:59You don't remember. Probably drinking, probably smoking, probably setting fireworks off, probably putting things through people's letterboxes, It's probably being like all sorts of ridiculous teenage naughty stuff that people get up to. Like that whole world of chaos that you live in as a teenager on an estate when you're bored and you haven't got a Sega Mega Drive. You know, what else do you do? Yeah. But then, because I didn't really know what I was going to do. So I left school at 16. My mum took us to a youth theatre, me and my best mate that lived opposite. I mean, Cheltenham's quite different to Gloucester.

14:31And, you know, this posh youth theatre, the Everyman Theatre in Cheltenham. when I come from an estate in Gloucester and it was kind of like, they also quite like naughty boys. Always. And you just go, so this is quite a cool space to be hanging out. Like as a teammate. It's literally like catnip to posh birds really. It was, it was quite good fun. So you just go, well, this is quite a cool place to be hanging out. I happened to stumble across Tom Kerridge's very own IMDB page. You're listed as playing a bully. Yeah. and Thug One was one of your acting credits. What does this reveal about Tom Kerridge as a teenager?

15:12Well, I think it was typecast from an early age. Like you just go like, so a borsal boy, Miss Marple, a bully. Thug One was my official title on London's Burning. That was when it goes up with your name, like the credit, Thug One, Tom Kerridge. I was like, there we go. Yes. can i ask you one more question about your childhood it feels as if when you talk about your your mom and your dad and then your dad was very ill but did that have a massive effect on you as you or it feels like you're pretty strong about it yeah i do you know what so he died when i was 18 i didn't really grow up with him as a young kid i don't have massive memories of like holidays together and all that sort of stuff because it just didn't happen and then from the age of 11 to 18 once he'd moved out and then he became very ill and then ended up in a home and then they're like they're the sort of things that you go through that i think make you stronger i think at those points you don't recognize the relevance of how perhaps upsetting it might have been did you see him during this time yeah yeah we used to go every week every friday evening for an hour or so and it got to the point where he didn't recognize us or like he couldn't talk or it was and it so it was very very difficult was this around the same time as uh cheltenham and the acting or was this yeah it was about the same time yeah so he yeah so he died when i was 18 and that was at the point where i was beginning to realize that i need to get my shit together and get a proper job and find my way in life properly because why why why those two things together well you know it was just a time it's just an 18 year old i needed money there wasn't acting work it really wasn't me i it didn't suit me i was still living at home i just needed to find a world yeah and i literally walked into a hotel kitchen looking for a job washing up it was that instant moment that it grabbed me so you uh decided against pursuing a career in the miss marple franchise uh and instead at the age of 18 you pursue cooking and this was a time pre-Jamie Oliver, pre-Nigella, pre-Gordon Ramsey, pre-Bakoff, pre-MasterChef.

17:22So who actually is your role model? The thing that happened was when I was 18 and you look around it and all the cookbooks that were around were pretty much almost like textbook style. And you're learning about ruse and you're learning about, and it's all quite functional. And then my mom, I think it might be my 18th birthday, bought me White Heat by Marco Pia White and it just came out. and just remember sitting on the sofa and opening it and just the front cover it just grabs you straight away and i'd not heard of marco pierre i wasn't really into knowing or understanding what michelin stars were or what they represented or what they meant how long now is white heat is it a cookery book or is it a autobiography what is it is it a story or so white heat is marco's cookbook his first cookbook that has black and white pictures of the energy of a kitchen taken by a fashion photographer called bob carlos clark so all of a sudden this pristine french chef whites and tall hat like kind of polished shoes the reality of that wasn't like the kitchen i was in and it wasn't like the majority of kitchens that the british kitchens that we were and all of a sudden Marco showed what it was like cooking at Harvids at that point to Mission Stars, this 24-year-old chef, however old he was, like this creative scruffy bloke smoking cigarettes, like the energy, the excitement.

18:49And it was just like, this is what I'm doing. This is who I'm relating to. This is who I am. This is so exciting. This is incredible. And I just remember sitting there on the sofa and just been sucked into this book of almost like gnarlier proportions that you're going through a wardrobe into a world that I was kind of already half in yeah working in a country house hotel somewhere just outside Gloucester and all of a sudden it was like I am that cool so you see those pictures and what do you think I want that yeah I want that I want to be a part of this I want to live this world it's great it's the the energy is exciting it's fantastic You're talking about this with more enthusiasm than someone talking about a religious text.

19:32Because it's equal to me. Like, I haven't got a religion. My religion is this food and this creativity and this spark.

19:52So you're there. You're starting out. loving the rough and the tumble, the creativity of the kitchen. How did you get through those shifts? What's keeping you going? Well, that's changed as I've changed and got older and recognised that the places have changed and the kitchens have changed. And were you, back then, were you allowed to drink in the kitchen? Were you, did you drink alcohol? No, never drinking. No, no. After the shift? After shift. It's always post-shift. Like no one would ever drink in the kitchen. I've never been in the kitchen where people drink during service. Actually, that's a lie.

20:26I've been in a couple. Is it a case, I mean, look, I've hung around chefs for years and it feels like when you're in the kitchen and service is on, you're high energy, high energy, high energy, and then bang, the last order goes through, you've done your clean down, but you're full of adrenaline. Yeah. And that is when you drink. Yeah, that's it. it is it's a release it's a release of um pressure excitement and because of the nature of the a lot of people that work in it there is a lot of conversation about in terms of addictive behavior that happens in hospitality and that's because these people us myself are made to feel welcome in that world you might not feel that welcome in a standard stifled office environment you all finished work you all had a laugh and mugged each other off and now you're going to go and have a beer because you know the pub that you know does a lock-in so you all go and hang out there or your mate runs a bar around the corner i was going to say i'm not speak because we are both uh ex-drinkers yeah and uh i always say never drink with chefs i've done a lot of drinking with chefs the problem with chefs is that they've always got places to go because you all know people with venues yeah so after the lock-in there's always someone's restaurant and then after the restaurant there's somebody's cellar and it goes on and on and it's relentless and it never ends and it could always end at somebody else's house because there's something else there and there's something like someone's always going to get pregnant oh yeah yeah exactly or the police accord right how many pints could you we're starting at 11 oh you're in trouble mate i would start off with two pints of negroni like i would drink pints of negroni like to start yeah you have two pints of negroni start yeah and then what happens that's just the start then we're on the lagers you do six pints of lager as you finish in at the pub cleaning down and then go out and then it would be great so i really don't know but it could easily be on a big night out it would probably be 20 pints of lager two pints of negroni and a pint of gin right i've got two questions how am i alive yeah right right like i mean i'm being honest i'm not even laughing how are you not dead yeah how are you not dead well i was very good at it very big had to stop just went that's it i'm done why do you think you were drinking like that because i loved it like because i loved it and i I wish I could do it now without any of the health nightmares that come with it.

23:12Oh, I love it. I love the chaos. I love the mayhem late night. I loved everything about it. And I love the release of pressure. I'm slightly disappointed in myself that I can't now ever enjoy a glass of wine or a beer on holiday because my brain doesn't work like that. It was always, always about getting absolutely smashed as fast as I can and then keep going. like relentless. So what, see, I hate talking about rock bottoms because sometimes I think that as drinkers, like I didn't have a rock bottom. I just feel as if like, it was like, uh, uh, almost like an anchor on a ship that was already on the bottom.

23:54And then it just like went along the bottom of the sea for about 20 years. Like there was loads of rock bottoms, but did you have, was there a, no, mine was an age thing when I gave up. Mine was, it was because i was approaching 40 and it was a point of reflection so we'd achieved two mission stars i've done television i'd had a best selling cookery book it was just like all of these things that wasn't getting pulled away from me because i was battered that was there and i was drinking it was all part of this whole thing but people knew you as that i mean the people knew you as really funny good time tom yeah drank so yeah you had to give away that identity yeah you do you worry at first i think that um people are going to think you're different and that you're going to be your identity of who you are suddenly you're going to be forgotten but like we're not stupid as human beings we're not stupid you know if you're drinking that amount it's not good for you you know if you're that size it's not good for you know if you smoke 30 cigarettes a day it's good for you we all know that we all we're not stupid we know so that like i was 39 and i just went what am i doing but why was there a moment where you went right from tomorrow that's it yeah no no there was a date that i put in but i had to work to it and it was about four or five months away from that point of going right this is where i know i'm going to stop and i have to stop at that point and i can't do it before then because there's this happening this happening this happening i can't change all that but when it's that point that day that's the end you were just so radically different looking really you know you lost 12 yeah yeah i did i lost 12 stone i put some back on it's in terms of like volume in terms of weight lifting and muscle mass i swam so i ended up with a quite longer thinner swimmer's body stop swimming now go to the gym and lift and become much wider.

25:52Yeah, you're hench now. I go through periods. I'm using the word hench. I'm going in there. But I go through periods of that. And at some point I'll go, right, I'm going to stop that. I'm going to swim again.

26:10As somebody that used to begin the weekend with two pints of Negroni and then go on to, you know, drink all the rest and who likes the chaos and everything can you please tell me how you managed to meet someone very very special set the scene of how you first met beth uh so i met beth it was my mate house mate's birthday so one of my my best mates his brother moved in with us as well and he was working he was a technician for sir anthony caro who's a major british sculptor and beth he used to talk about this girl that worked there as she was a mig and tig welder she went to the royal college of art and she was one of the technicians for anti-caro creating smaller mig and tig welded sculptures and bronze casting and then it was his birthday one night and we went out into a club in camden into a comedy club junglers i don't know if you remember it in camden so adam my mate was like come on it's tim's birthday we got go out and i just remember thinking i really cannot be bothered to go out but i had a quick shower quite changed i was going to say thank god you had a shower because i've dated chefs yeah you always actually stink of lamb fat yeah exactly yeah there's nothing worse if you've been on the fish all day you just smell it like like is that no no no it was like shower out and i walked into the bar bit of junglers i walked in and this quite fiery green-eyed girl just went give me three pounds for the stripper as a uh all right so i gave her three quid for the stripper and that this was beth and it was a stripper never turned up like anybody that's the first sentence that somebody says to you is like brilliant amazing and we got on really really well we've been together pretty much from that day So it was one of those relationships where she turns around, she says, give us three pounds for the stripper.

28:06First sentence, yeah. And that was it. Yeah. I tell you what, any pretty girl from up north that demands three pounds for a stripper, you go, okay, I'm quite interested in how this evening is going to end, where this conversation is going to go, what's happening. And then from there, we've been together since. Hang on a minute. Right. Hang on. Let me wind back. so what i would say is like when you date men they often say that they'll cook for you and then they can't bloody cook you can hear them in the kitchen opening the jar of dolmio you know so there must be some perks of meeting someone like you in junglers that you are gonna woo them with delicious food yeah pretty much so i stayed um at best flat that weekend and she went to work on the monday and i think i was off on the monday maybe the restaurant was shut i can't really remember and then i thought well i'll cook her tea and she went into work she came back and i like boned and rolled a couple of chicken breasts that i got from the 24 hour shop opposite and wrapped them in bacon and done some pasta and did a very simple but really nice and beth came through the door she fully expected me to have been gone and the telly missing and actually to come back and i've done a bone and roll stuffed chicken breasts and some pasta and like a cream sauce yeah so i kind of won her over with um pasta from a 24-hour shop i think that if i come in and you'd done that that i i would have been like he's never going never going yeah i always seem to work quite well she asked me to marry her after about six weeks she asked me beth isn't just your wife you opened your first pub together in marlow in 2005 the hand and flowers tell me about those early days of your own place we were looking for all sorts of different sites and places we had a house with a studio but we didn't have enough money so i earned a salary in norfolk and beth wasn't working to try and create art but yeah couldn't afford any of the material or the because she's a sculptor not a painter okay so that didn't work either so we were looking at what we're going to do so we i said well maybe i should get a higher paid job in the center of london and go back and and beth was like look if you're going to go and do those hours we may as well just roll the dice and do it for ourselves so it's like okay all right let's do it for ourselves and that was the first point of jumping off and beth was like i'll run front of mouse you get to the point where you can cook what you want and we make it work as a business and i can get to the point where i can make uncompromised art it's money better than when you go there did you uh because you say things were quite tight and then when you get hand and flowers do you have more money no no you don't have more money absolutely none at all but you are in control of a destiny there's a big fear factor because i'd always spent my whole life working for someone so you know how much you earn so you know how much you can pay in rent and you know what if you're lucky enough to get a mortgage and you that's it that's what you can do now all of a sudden i was throwing that all away i was 31 years old and going the only way we're ever going to make this work is by me making it work so we lived above the hand of flowers and we we rolled that dice and took the decision what was it like for your relationship well it's quite our first year is really bumpy like if you are living above a place that you're working in and you're working 16 18 hour days and you're trying to build a business and all the pressures that are on it and the pressures on you as a relationship is really quite extreme it's quite anybody who's worked together i think with their partner would tell you the same sort of thing that it does some ways it really pushes on a relationship and in other ways it makes it so much stronger and what the end result is do you have to go upstairs if it's hospitality do you have to kind of be try and keep a wrap on the fact that you're really pissed off with each other in front of people to be honest and then go and then go and shut the door upstairs and have a shout yeah to be honest i don't think we were ever pissed off with each other i think we were pissed off with the situation i think you get pissed off with no escape route there's nowhere like the only way you can go is still upstairs in the business you know the only place is like there was no there's nowhere it's relentless how did you make it work as a couple you just you just make it work you just make it work you just keep going and you just keep driving and you keep going with the building on everything that you've got i think if you're a strong enough couple you get through it anyway don't you you just and then it starts turning it starts moving and then i mean not i mean god not always i'd say that hospitality is full of couples that have had to split businesses up and get the lawyers in and like that's very true that is very true and you survived yeah yeah not just survived thrived like done really well it makes it everything much stronger and and you understand each other much much more we've been through so much and you've been through recessions we've been through drinking issues we've been through like you know building businesses we've been through massively in debt we've built been through businesses having to close we've been through like all sorts of different things but i think the joyous thing about the two of us is that we still but we've also been through huge success

33:31it was only a year after opening that the hundred flowers got its first michelin star and six years later it got its second can you remember hearing the news it's quite a weird thing because they sent a camera crew and gave us a letter and videoed it and as i opened the letter and the letter says that we achieved two mission stars and that got and the kitchen brigade behind it and it's one of those amazing phenomenal moments and it and because it was all about the emotion in your eyes yeah no it is it but it's amazing it means so much and it meant so much for the whole team because everybody had been on this journey and there's still the people there that are on the journey from there from that day and that and you go this is so significant it was just an incredible magical brilliant moment for the whole team you've now got your own family your son ac who's eight now you didn't have a father figure how do you think this has impacted the sort of dad that you are a lot of it i think is down to having a son as a slightly later age like you know my son's eight like the idea then when we've got a little baby the idea of having a hangover when you've got like it's not and now on a day off i just i want to hang with him i want to be a part of him growing up we talked about earlier missing like i didn't get a real understanding of a father son relationship when i was a kid so i'm learning being a dad at the same time as he's learning being a son we're going through this journey together and i really like it and we get it wrong and we get it right we're very similar we argue a lot like the two of us like because we we bash heads because we are very similar like my poor wife beth every now we'll have proper arguments like like but like so childish was like i'm like eight go no it's your fault you and then she she'll absolutely beth will lose her shit go the two of you and then she'll walk and i go see now look what you've done mum you'd be upset like it's just like it's just and then you find yourself we're more like brothers but there's like 42 years difference do you feel like you yeah you're you're learning what fatherhood is because you don't remember 100 yeah 100 i've got no point of reference to go this is what it should be like and this is what we did with my dad and this is how it should be i've got no point of reference so does it make you sad uh i think probably more so thinking of it from my dad's point of view because i think god you missed out what you missed out on all of this partly through your own decisions that you made also because of your illness so i feel sad that he missed out on that but not i don't feel sad that i missed out on it because it's not something that you recognize as a kid so it's kind of a weird you don't know what you're missing in it if you haven't got it it's only now that i'm going and i'm probably i'm quite pleased i haven't got i quite like the learning curve i quite like that we're learning together you know i think that's quite special you have seven restaurants now from the coach in marlo to the butchers tap in london hundreds of covers every day um not only this you're doing fish and chips in harrods presenting on telly you do charity work too around food cooking cost of living uh you've grown an empire uh my question is have we now hit peak carriage yeah i think we have I struggle with the idea of more volume.

37:10I don't micromanage, but I like to be in business. I like to be in the businesses. I like to understand what's going on. What's the motivation though? Is it the money or is it just the idea that you were this young lad from where you're from and now there's like this enormous picture of you every time you walk in somewhere? Is that it? I think it is because it's not the money because restaurants, irrespective of what people think or prices that are charged or whatever, they don't make money. They're so difficult. Margins are so, so tight. Now, you mentioned we have six sites. We're constantly still right now moving money around from accounts to be able to pay bills in different spaces.

37:51Some make money. Some absolutely lose money. Some go through peaks and troughs. And so every month is a really difficult juggling act. You know, I've just got a bill for a part of a solid top in the oven on one of the properties. It's£6 ,000 to repair. And you go, well, this month it's not made that. So where do we? So we've got to move money from there to there to go. I honestly thought that you would have no idea how much tops and fridges and things still were in your places. Honestly, if you just said to me, does Tom know how much the new fridge is in that restaurant? I would have thought. 100 % I'm all over that.

38:30We're dealing with that. Do you see the complaints? Yeah, I do see the complaints. Yeah, yeah, I see the complaints. How quickly do you know when I've been in? When you've been in. I get service report every night from each space. So if you've been in and they've spotted you, I will know.

38:50We're coming to the end. But in 2017, you launched Pub in the Park, a festival of food and music. It started in your hometown of Marlow. It is now right across Britain all summer long. But this year, you've got Van Morrison playing. Now, he's a famously grumpy old git. I'll say it. I know you can't. I'm going to set the scene here. Van Morrison has been to pub in the park. It's raining. It's a typical British summer. He's got trench foot. One of his speakers has blown and he's properly kicking off. You, Tom, need to give him something to placate him. It's got to be fast. What's it going to be?

39:37Just choosing grapes, mate. Van Morrison, I'm going to tell you, look, forget everything else, Van Morrison. Listen, Van the Man. Listen to me. Pilgrim's Choice, right, and a couple of red grapes. That'll ease all the pain. So you're not even going to get a bit of bread with it? No. Maybe some Irish soda bread. Tom Carriage, this has been a roller coaster. Thank you for comfort eating with me. Thank you so much. Thanks for making me feel comfortable and allowing me to comfort eat cheese and grapes. I'm going to have a little bit more.

40:14This episode of Comfort Eating was produced by Tom Glasser. The executive producer is Lucy Greenwell. The music was written by Axel Cucutier. Visuals by Sophie Harrow. Mixing and sound design by Solomon King. If you love this podcast, then you'll love my book, Comfort Eating. It's a slice of joy, sprinkled with nostalgia about my family, stories of the making of this podcast, and recipes which will leave you, well, frankly bewildered. Finally, go on, leave us a review and you can follow or subscribe so that you never miss an episode.

41:02This is The Guardian.