It is 10am and in Notting Hill, Thomas Straker is sitting outside his eponymous restaurant, and not looking particularly fresh. There was a launch party last night — one he hosted. Straker has been celebrating his new range of butters, now for sale on Ocado and the Modern Milkman (with one per cent of annual turnover supporting agricultural charities; his Herefordshire-based family “have a small holding ourselves, so I understand the hardship of farming”). There are four — salted, unsalted, garlic and herb, chilli — and each under the brand All Things Butter. The move is a canny one: part of the Shrewsbury-educated chef’s enormous social following (2.1 million on Instagram, 2.3 million on TikTok) was built on a video series of the same name.
“It was mega viral, billions of views, millions of likes,” he says, proudly. “TikTok even did a case study on it, and I was like: that’s all very well and good, but how am I getting paid?” This is how, it turns out. Mind you, I say, you’ve built a restaurant on butter. “I definitely didn’t build the restaurant on butter,” he replies, shooting a look. True, there are the famous flatbreads.
The idea came about in the August of last year, with his partners getting serious in January. Straker explains the core team, who’ve got the brand going: two Tobys and a Gav, and then “there’s me. And basically my job was to create the flavours and not get cancelled.”
The flavours sit in their packets, but the latter is unresolved. On Friday July 29, Straker posted to Instagram his “chef team assembled”. That team appeared to be all male, all white, and mostly of a similar age. The lack of diversity was swiftly lambasted over the weekend, and by Monday was in the papers. One, @tcblu, perhaps put it best: “The main issue is that in the most diverse city in the world, in the poorest part of the richest borough of the country, not only have you managed [not] to hire any female chefs but not a single POC.”
Tcblu’s post pointed out the historic diversity of Golborne Road, where Straker’s restaurant sits. “How incredible would it be if you searched that community for young rising stars who may not get a chance to flourish otherwise in hospitality [rather] than hiring friends? Provide them with training and a safe place to grow as chefs. In turn, you’d be putting something into the very community that you’re gentrifying — intentional or not.” Does he recognise the criticism? “It’s all very well said and done, but if you go into the Moroccan butcher, it’s Moroccans behind the counter,” he says, putting his hands up.
There were other problems: the founders of female-led supperclub Mam Sham, Maria Georgiou and Rhiannon Butler, put up stories in protest. A lampooning post from @sluttycheff — “They told me it was the first time they’d even seen a woman in a professional kitchen and to that I replied: Wow, thank you guys, for being so open minded and welcoming me with such massive muscley open arms” — saw the account grow from barely a thousand followers to more than 12,000 overnight (and 26,000 now). There were more, many more, and an appetite for it. Things worsened when Straker replied: “Honestly people need to calm down”, he wrote. Then DMs appeared, from Straker to Mam Sham: “bitter and twisted much”, “you two are just obsessed with yourself”. It wasn’t a good look; a public apology followed, and the offending post was deleted.
How does he feel about it all now? He seems mixed. “My response was probably, like, ill thought-through and very reactionary.
“On reflection, it wasn’t well-judged, the photo. It doesn’t reflect the whole team and the diversity we actually have in the team. I have learnt a lot from it. You know, I’ve sat in countless meetings with professionals over diversity and inclusivity, with Be Inclusive Hospitality, I’ve sat with Mallika Basu, I’ve spoken to the Cue Point Kitchen. I spoke to loads of people. Really helpful, but obviously, we can always be better.”
He adds that there are sessions for diversity and inclusion training in his business, and he’s changed his hiring practices, too. “We were hiring through Instagram posts because it was free. And maybe I didn’t look at the demographic of who followed me on Instagram, right? That’s potentially why on reflection why we haven’t hired inclusively, because we were hiring through one channel.”
Fine — but there are unanswered questions. The anger — was it, perhaps, a bit of a late night? “No, no. Not at all.” So… why respond that way? “There were certain people who like, went at me. I did feel under attack and it did feel like a personal attack on me as well,” he says. “I was like: why don’t you come into the restaurant and talk about it? That was my initial response. And they were like: ‘yeah, we’d love to…’ and then they suddenly went out publicly and started going at me. And I was like: what the f***! If you want to come in to the restaurant and speak to me and speak to the team, and tell me what I’m doing wrong then fine, but then they completely went against that, and they were just trying to boost…” He stops. A breath. “I feel like they were just trying to ride off the back of whatever was going on. So I did get angry, I was p***** off. And obviously, I regret that because it just added fuel to the fire. And I regret it because I don’t actually… I’m not an angry person.”
Was there an impact? On the business? On him? “Not necessarily on the restaurant. Luckily we are full all the time.
“If anything,” he says, with a half laugh, “there was slightly increased demand and the phone was ringing a bit more. But there’s a whole thing of ‘no such thing as bad press…’ I think people wanted to come in anyway. It didn’t impact business, it has impacted me personally.”
How so? Straker says “it completely it ruined my commercial partnerships” — the butter was on the line (“we had to go through the ringer with certain retailers”) — and he says he was called a racist, and much more besides. He also says it was hard on the team: “They were suddenly put in a position where their faces were all over every single paper in the country.
“And yes, there’s mental strain. And in the world of, like, ‘everyone’s so worried about everyone’s mental health’, where was the worry for me when I’m just being lambasted by the press? I’m living a pretty stressful life anyway. And then suddenly, I’m getting ripped in half by every paper — not because I’ve been bullying my staff or anything like that, just ‘cause I put a picture of them up.”
There is something contradictory about the way Straker reports his side. He suggests the backlash was unjust and refers to it as “a trap”, but also asserts “the overwhelming response online was support. The majority of comments were supportive.”
Does he understand, now, why the picture prompted the response it did? “I hadn’t seen it as being a problem because it wasn’t the whole team. I knew we had diversity in the whole business. I look at my business as a whole.” He says today the team is “probably 40 per cent women. [The] majority, yes, in the front of house.” But, he adds, “you can’t force people into the kitchen. We do have a couple of women in the kitchen. Chefs in the kitchen. People of colour in the business. We could always continue to be better but we are trying our best.”
As Straker tells it, it was just an oversight. “Literally the night before, I thought: I should get some team shots because we haven’t put anything out. So I text a girl, my friend [photographer] Lily Bertrand-Webb, mixed race girl from Ladbroke Grove, and she came and took the photo. I thought if she, you know — we’re great friends and I thought if she had seen something like all ‘ooo, this could potentially be a bit...’ She sent that to me. It was a last-minute thing, we didn’t have the people who were actually working.”
Right. But, I say, if the team is and was actually diverse, why not issue a corrective? Why was there no follow-up photo to prove people wrong? “When I spoke to crisis PR, the general consensus was: no comment. We put out the statement and then… if we start saying ‘we’ve got these girls working for us’ or this or that… it becomes like a different thing. That’s not the narrative we wanted.” And what about the accusations that everyone looked alike? “I found that was the most offensive thing because I don’t think any of us look the same. It’s like if you put that on the other side and it was eight people of colour, and you said they looked the same — what, the… ! You would be in serious trouble. I find that extremely offensive, incredibly offensive to the point where it’s actually, they should apologise.”
These are not the only problems Straker has. Reports have emerged of an alleged affair with Princess Maria-Olympia of Greece; Straker is married with young children, and his wife is said to have kicked him out (Straker declined to comment for this article). But now, aside from the butter — he jokingly identifies as “the butter baron” — his plan is to keep on learning, and he hopes one day to have a programme with a local school to bring more people into kitchens. It’s not an overnight thing, he says. Having been built up by social media, being torn down by it too has made a difference. “It was definitely a wake-up for me. But the only way I can view it is as a positive change — I can’t look at it like, poor me. I’m very stubborn, I’m very driven, I want to be the best that I can be for me, for my team, and as someone perceived as being like a leader in my field. And that’s where the biggest ego hit was, probably, in the fact that, s***, people actually think I’m this thing and I’m not.” Is Straker a changed man? Only time will offer an answer.
