Here at Hemingway we are always interested to keep up with the emerging restaurants to recommend to our clients and having been lucky enough to eat at one of Tom´s pop-up restaurants last year we are delighted to keep an eye on his progress and see that he is doing brilliantly well. If you are hiring a luxury car in London over the next year Story comes highly recommended, just make sure you have at least a month in the hand to book a table.
He’s tatooed, brash and a target for the “haters”. Meet Tom Sellers, the 26-year-old Michelin-star winner who a year ago was hosting pop-up restaurants.
Tom Sellers has a simple message for “all the haters” out there. Because, yes, despite his stellar year, not everyone is a fan; or perhaps it’s the success that’s to blame. After all, the 26-year-old has gone from hosting a few pop-ups to running a modish, waiting-list- only restaurant in just eight months. And did I mention the Michelin star?
But for the record he wants to say thank you to his critics, those negative bloggers, snarky TripAdvisor posters, and disgruntled vegans. “They just drive me on,” he adds. “It’s like anything; you turn the negatives into positives.”
His attitude explains a lot – mostly how someone quite so young can have achieved quite so much in quite such a short time. Before opening the £2m restaurant Story, Sellers worked with some of the world’s greatest chefs, globe-hopping from London’s Tom Aikens, to Thomas Keller’s French Laundry and Per Se in the US, before a crucial stint back here with Adam Byatt at Trinity in Clapham, south-west London, before winding up in Copenhagen with – who else? – Noma’s “genius”, René Redzepi.
It also, perhaps, goes some way towards explaining those “haters”. You don’t get so far, so fast without ruffling some feathers. “I think there’s an old brigade that are not so keen on young chefs opening up. I think they feel like we haven’t earnt our stripes.” That plus the boiling-point hype that preceded Story meant Sellers “was conscious that I couldn’t open a restaurant quietly, because of where I’d worked, and what I’d done, and my age”.
This explains the, er, unusual location: on the site of an old public convenience in the no-man’s land between Borough and Bermondsey in south-east London. “Essentially we had the vision that we would be a destination restaurant, so wherever we put ourselves, people would come.” The area’s foodie vibe helps, as does seeing the Shard framed in the floor-to-ceiling windows, which when combined with a liberal use of stripped wood, give the small venue the feel of a Nordic sauna.
“It’s safe to say we’ve found a nice little spot. It’s a great part of London,” Sellers says. He has just the one backer: Byatt put up all the cash. “And I put me in. That’s worth more than any money, no?” he smiles, adding: “I’m joking,” not entirely convincingly.
It would be naïve not to expect some arrogance, although I should state that he did a masterful job of keeping it in check during our interview. Self-doubters simply don’t get – or take – the chances that Sellers, who left school at 16 and didn’t go to catering college, has had. Nor do they make a decent fist of bossing 30 people around, including 14 chefs. “It’s 30 different challenges every day,” is how he puts it.
Despite the sultry poses and obligatory tattooed forearms, Sellers isn’t in it for the “rock’n’roll lifestyle” that is “part and parcel of what I do on a daily basis”. No, he’s there, up to 18 hours per shift, because, “When I started cooking, I fell in love. It’s as simple as that. It was like a girlfriend, and then nothing else mattered.” He also “fell” into food. “I never had this dream of wanting to be a chef growing up. I just pissed about at school a lot, didn’t enjoy it. When I left I just started cooking part-time and washing dishes. And the rest is history.”
He peppers his mini-masterclass in how to get ahead with enough sage advice to fill a book, which, come to think of it, might be one of the numerous “other commitments” he is also squeezing in. Not that he’ll say anything beyond that because, “Now, more than ever, as chefs have become cool you get more media opportunities, whether that be television, commercial, endorsement, publishing.” He does reveal he’s just filmed something for the BBC, but won’t let me disclose what it is. I’m left imagining endorsements galore, even clothing deals to get that hipster chef vibe in your own kitchen. “You’d be surprised; there’s lots of things happening,” is as far as he’ll go.
But he knows it’s the day-cum-night job that counts, insisting that for him a restaurant “is a lifetime project not an overnight” one. “A restaurant is a business. It’s very easy, in this day and age, to forget that and for people to think that it’s a vanity. But it’s not; it is a business, a real-life business. However self-rewarding it can be as a chef, the end goal is to have a restaurant that’s successful, not only in notoriety and accolades but in terms of a functioning business that’s profitable.” It all boils down to a “balance between being this maverick who pushes boundaries and wants to inspire others, to knowing your limitations.”
Sellers’ £2m restaurant Story is on the site of an old public convenience in the no-man’s land between Borough and Bermondsey (Fay Elizabeth Harpham) Sellers’ £2m restaurant Story is on the site of an old public convenience in the no-man’s land between Borough and Bermondsey (Fay Elizabeth Harpham)
Despite being constantly fully booked – Story releases tables a month ahead – Sellers reckons he can top “an amazing first year with a better year two, and a better year three” and still keep progressing. Thinking big, he draws parallels with each new model of the iPhone. “They’re always working on the software, the stuff inside. It’s the same for us.”
What he really wants is to disprove the doubters, who said that eating at Story would be a one-off experience to “tick off the list” (he can quote their exact phrases). “I think people come back,” he counters. Although his trademarks stay, notably the beef-dripping candle that melts down as it heats up, he tinkers with the tasting menu (available as six or 10-course versions) and has just swapped a mackerel dish for one with pig and langoustine. Yet he insists he doesn’t think food is the most important thing about his restaurant. “I truly believe the way we make our guests feel, [means] the first thing you’d want to do is come back.”
In any case, there are still plenty of first- timers yet to tick it off. The evening of our interview, Keira Knightley is due in, while the legendary American restaurateur Wolfgang Puck has recently been by for lunch. Other industry greats to have eaten there include Gordon Ramsay, Jason Atherton and Daniel Clifford.
Although reviewers notice the Nordic influence, Sellers says he’s worked hard to create his own style. Not that he’ll describe it. “We are what we are.” What he will say is that we “100 per cent play with what we’ve got. We don’t go and put bananas on the menu. We are an English restaurant that works with English produce.” He plays with the stories behind his dishes, which is why he plumped for calling the joint Story in the first place.
The narrative theme is fairly hammered home, from the groaning bookshelves and authentic-looking Dickens tomes that are dotted on each of the 13 tables, down to the tales that describe the dishes. Endless stories about provenance, so beloved by the trade, “show love and care”, Sellers thinks, and so what if you get “people who go, ‘I don’t give a shit about that stuff. Just give me the food, I want to eat it’?”
What’s clear is that Sellers has done a lot of growing up these past 12 months, which have had their downs as well as ups – at one point he switches off my tape and grabs my pen, forbidding me from talking about some of the hiccups. He’s not one to dwell, it’s all about turning those negatives into positives, after all. And grabbing those chances while he’s still sizzling-hot. “In three years’ time there’s gonna be a new kid on the block, that’s for sure.
