The night Tom Kerridge met his future wife, Beth, he had just finished his shift as a chef in Covent Garden, London, and he wanted to go home – but it was his friend’s birthday and his flatmate dragged him out. “We went into Camden, walked into a bar and there was this loud northern woman,” says Tom with a laugh. “She went: ‘You’re Tom. Give me £3 for the stripper.’” (To be fair, this was 1997, when it was still considered ironic to get a stripper for a friend’s birthday.) “That was the first sentence Beth said to me.”
Beth Cullen, a sculptor, worked with Tom’s best friend’s brother as an assistant for the artist Sir Anthony Caro. That night, she says, they “talked for ages, and somebody actually said: ‘How long have you been going out?’ We were like: ‘We’ve just met!’ We just hit it off.” What did they talk about? “I have to be honest, it was 25 years ago and I was quite a big drinker then, so I have absolutely no idea,” says Tom. But obvious flirtation? “It was like it was already there,” says Beth. “We were flirty, but it was already a done deal.” Tom adds: “It was like we’d known each other for ages.”
Six weeks later, Beth proposed. She asked him at 1am on a Saturday in Leicester Square, when Tom had finished work. “There was a guy cleaning the roads in his little truck, and he’s going: ‘I don’t know what the champagne’s for, but congratulations!’”
They had found in each other someone equally driven and passionate about their work. Beth, says Tom, is “this outspoken, creative force of nature”. Then, as now, Tom put in long hours as a chef. “I would get up and leave Beth at 6.30am and finish really late at night. Beth was never really a morning person; she was always very nocturnal.” It meant that when he finished work, she was still up for going out.
It was a brilliant time to be young and in London, he says. “It was very much a 24-hour party lifestyle. I was a chef working in basement kitchens in the middle of London; Beth was an artist working in Camden. We were living our best lives.” Britpop had exploded. Labour won the election. “Britain felt like a really strong creative force. If you were working in any form of the creative arts – like art and food, as we were – I think you felt that you were part of something quite cool, part of some sort of movement.”
Managing to keep their careers going in parallel has been an important part of why their 22-year marriage has worked, says Tom. They married in 2000, in an old theatre in north London, followed by hosting “about 200 people in this tiny pub in King’s Cross”, says Beth. They now have a son, who is about to turn seven.
When the couple were setting up their first restaurant, The Hand and Flowers in Marlow, Beth’s work was on pause. “I had to dig deep, but I knew that I wasn’t going to do it for ever,” she says. “I did actually say: ‘I’ll give you three years, else I’ll end up hating you.’ I thought he needed to just cook, so I was the accountant, handyman, electrician, front of house, bar, everything – I just wanted him to cook. He did, and it flew.”
As the business became more successful – now a small empire with Michelin stars, more restaurants, rooms to stay in, books and products – it enabled Beth to get back to her work. She built a studio in their garden and then: “I luckily – strangely – broke my leg, and that was the last restaurant shift I did.”
There have been tests, both personal and professional (the past few years, especially, have been tough for the hospitality business). “There’s been so many ups and downs in our life together, whether it’s business, my health, and issues with booze and whatever else, or Beth’s health,” says Tom, but he talks about their relationship as a strong structure they have built. “We constantly say we don’t want to get to 80 and go: ‘I regret not doing that.’ So we always say yes to things – we always take chances. We 100% live a life.”
Real Life Recipes by Tom Kerridge is out now (Bloomsbury Absolute)
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