Gary Usher, the multi award-winning restaurateur who’s worked under some of the most influential chefs in the world and now has a string of successful restaurants to his name, didn't have much fun at school.
“I hated learning and I hated school,” he says. “Probably dyslexia had a big part to play in it. You were just 'thick' if you had dyslexia back then.” It wasn’t identified until he was around 11, but by then, he’d lost interest in school entirely. “I didn’t get any support at all,” he goes on.
It was when he took a job at a pub in North Wales after leaving school with no qualifications that a final attempt was made for him to at least get some kind of paperwork saying he’d been formally educated. He was sent to college for a day a week as part of his apprenticeship, but he hated that too.
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The barber and bistro bringing the food of the West Bank to Stalybridge
The Rolls-Royce of pies and the warmest welcome at the UK's best pub, just an hour from Manchester
- The £45.50 all-you-can-eat menu with a slightly stressful time limit
“I think I went twice,” he says. “And I just said to the pub ‘Look, I f**king hate it’. It was like school to me. I didn’t want to listen to a teacher. I’ll listen to a head chef or sous chef and I'll do anything that they tell me. I respected the chefs, I think, which sounds stupid, but at the time, they spoke to me on a level.
“So they were asking me to mop the floor or make them a club sandwich or whatever it was, and it was almost like your mate asking you to do something. Plus I thought they were cool. My sister is a teacher, I should say, and a very good one!”
Catering remains among the most vocational of routes through further and higher education. But equally as many chefs have, like Gary, learned on the job as those who have gone through catering college. Sitting in front of the cosy fire at the White Horse in Churton, near Chester, the place he’s opening up this weekend, he’s now come full circle, from pubs to hotels to Michelin starred kitchens to bistros and back to pubs again.
But it’s been quite a journey, but he remembers after chefing a couple of seasons in Ibiza and then going travelling in Thailand, sitting on a coach at 19 and writing his first ever business plan. It was for a pub.
Read more: Inside Gary Usher's Cheshire pub that's a real country boozer
It was on his return that he got his first transformative job, working at the Grosvenor Hotel in Chester. It was ‘a massive step up’, he says.
“I remember cutting up lemons for the fish and chips, and the sous chef threw one back at me like ‘What the f**k is this? Why has it still got the pips in?’ I couldn't believe that each segment of lemon, I had to take the pips out.
“Such a tiny, tiny, tiny example, but that was when I realised, ‘actually bloody hell, you know, there is much more refinement in food’. Working at the Chester Grosvenor made me realise there was a lot more out there, a breed of chef who took it really seriously. There were these restaurants with Michelin stars.”
His hotel experience then earned him enough kudos to start applying for jobs in London and before long he’d landed a job at the hugely influential Chez Bruce, which has held a Michelin star for over two decades and was named London’s best restaurant last year, 28 years after it opened.
“Chez Bruce had the biggest biggest impact on me of my whole life, out of anything that I've ever done. I wouldn't have been able to do what we've done with the restaurants if it wasn't for my training at Chez Bruce,” he says. “It was tough, really really tough. But it made me a stronger person, though that sounds cheesy.”
It was after two years there that he stepped up another rung, to work with iconic chef Angela Hartnett (‘She’s amazing, absolutely amazing’) at York & Albany, which she owned with Gordon Ramsay, who’d infrequently wander into the kitchen unannounced during service in his chef whites.
Despite all this, despite working for world class chefs in Michelin starred kitchens, somehow he still lacked self confidence. So when he left Hartnett after two years to start his own restaurant, and she offered to back him, he turned her down.
“I didn't feel confident enough to be backed by her,” he says. “It's a lot of pressure. I thought if Angela backs me in a restaurant, and if it went wrong, everyone would know about it. I’d make a fool of Angela, and I didn’t want to do that. I’d rather make of fool of myself somewhere on my own!
“This is why I ended up in Chester, because I just thought if I can find something ridiculously cheap somewhere, and if it is s**t, no one will really notice.”
It wasn’t s**t. Sticky Walnut in Hoole, on the outskirts of Chester, was a huge success, opening in 2011, and followed by his second place Burnt Truffle in Heswall on the Wirral in 2015, and then Hispi in Didsbury, Wreckfish in Liverpool, Pinion in Prescot and Kala on King Street, which opened in 2019.
All his restaurants since Burnt Truffle have been started with crowdfunding, a model that has grown his company Elite Bistros to six sites, with more to come. An attempt to float the company privately by selling shares failed to reach its £750,000 target last year. Ever hard on himself, he said at the time he felt ‘naive and a bit embarrassed’, despite raising more than £500,000 in just a few days.
But not cowed, he still plans to expand, with a tapas venture called Joya in the pipeline, as well as his events catering business and a development and masterclass kitchen run from the company’s headquarters in Chester.
But this pub - he’s already mulling a second - will be where his heart is. The food won’t be ‘cheffy’ or fussy, not that his other restaurants are either. It’s solid pub grub. There will be a dazzling fish and chips, a great burger, a sirloin steak to share, and a range of things ‘on toast’, from ricotta and beetroot to pig’s trotters.
Some menu items will not be cheap, and that's because they can't be. He recently took to Twitter to justify the expense behind a £19 burger. “The burger is £19. Now, we don’t look at other places to do that. Comparisons are great – be aware of what other people charge," he said.
“We source the ingredients, the very best ingredients. We get all our own raw ingredients, we add them up then take that into account then work out the percentage that covers all of our costs. That’s how we came up with the cost of the menu item. That’s why the burger is £19.”
He also really hopes the White Horse, which has been closed since the first lockdown, will become a hub for the community, though he says he’s ‘not so arrogant’ to presume it will happen. That said, the local book club is booked in, as is the golf club, who’ll be hosting monthly meetings there, so he’s already on the way.
Locals came out of the woodwork the moment he and a big skip arrived on site, all of them offering up their services for free, dropping soup off in flasks, and generally being exceptionally supportive, something he’s felt humbled by. Around a hundred people arrived for the pub’s friends and family opening party the other evening, and he found to his surprise that he knew pretty much everyone’s first names.
“I did the first restaurant because it felt like it was the right thing to do, but the first places I loved were pubs,” he says. “They're the type of place I like to be.”
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