Social star: Straker’s huge online following has helped shape his upcoming restaurant
(Picture: Press handout)Whisper it, but some people had a good pandemic. Thomas Straker, for one, had a very good time of it. When lockdown hit, the chef reckons he had about 900 followers on Instagram. Now across his socials, he’s closing in on 400,000, and it all started with a thwarted sailing trip.
“I got this amazing gig with a billionaire on his superyacht but lockdown came and so we went to their house in Connecticut, the old Rockefeller mansion,” he says. “It was meant to be a couple of days but we were there for three-and-a-half months. I was only cooking for a family of five and a few staff, so I had all these free afternoons. I started making videos — and then I came back with about 15,000 followers…”
The hard life, then. Straker says he wasn’t aiming for social superstardom, it was more about sharing a few tips with his friends. But views continued to stack up and he began to cook through all sorts, often breaking down the staples — salsa verde, French onion soup and Caesar dressing. “It’s how I cook at home, that’s the vibe,” he says. “I’ve never cooked for Instagram, exactly. It was never too curated — because I didn’t think it was a viable job.”
If it wasn’t viable then, it is now. With those clips regularly drawing well over a hundred thousand views, often twice or triple that and every now and then as many as 800,000 (corn ribs, the kind made famous after Fallow put them on the menu, proved particularly popular), Straker has become the chef du jour and questions about his own place have been flying about. Luckily, he already had one in the works.
Straker, a veteran of Heston Blumenthal’s Dinner, celeb hot spots Casa Cruz and Isabel, and Phil Howard’s Elystan Street, had been planning his debut opening since 2018. Back then, it was called Acre and set for Queen’s Park. Fame has done him good: the new place is called Straker’s and it’ll open on Notting Hill’s Golborne Road come June.
“The food will be more refined than what I do [online]. An epic neighbourhood restaurant is what we’re hoping to achieve,” he says. It will seat 44, with “east London wine bar vibes” and dishes will include clams with nduja and basil; potato gnocchi with burnt butter, lemon and parmesan; grilled sea bass with white peach and almonds; and wood-roasted dover sole with courgette fritti. It is, then, Italian-leaning although he plans to cook whatever takes his fancy: “I’m keen not to get pigeon-holed into, oh, Tom’s opening an Italian restaurant. I’m not. There are no recipes or rulebooks.”
There will be a short wine list — low intervention leaning, of course — and classic cocktails on the list as well, and the intention is somewhere where the hours get lost to the food, drink and the company. A cookbook is set to follow next April, and then, if things go well, maybe another restaurant. “I don’t want to open 10 Straker’s necessarily, but once we’ve nailed this, maybe I’ll do one out east, head for a rooftop…” Investors are keen. Plans are afoot. Bored afternoons at the Rockefeller mansion to nights on a rooftop? Ah, the curse of Covid.
