Where There’s a Will
Will takes us step by step through his climb from commis* chef to owning two of the most delicious places to eat here in the south east.
From school to employment, what steered you toward becoming a chef?
Will. As a kid, I didn’t dream of becoming a chef. I’ve always been interested in food, just because I like eating. My mum was working, and there were two brothers, my sister and myself, to look after. So she’d say if you want to eat, come and help me. It was basic food; we just needed to eat. And, there was a rule if you cooked, you didn’t have to wash up.
So I got into food, chopping onions and garlic and popping that into a pan. My dad cooked as well; it all felt quite normal. Going to the shops and buying the food was quite a big deal.
I didn’t do too well at school. We didn’t do food tech as a regular lesson; maybe once or twice, I don’t remember it. So, I was guided towards an apprenticeship. I liked fast cars and thought being a mechanic might be good. So I did that around 16 after my GCSEs were out of the way.
We moved around quite a lot, moving to Rochester at secondary school age. Moving from a busy-ish town to this tiny little village in the middle of nowhere, looking back, it was really lovely. We’d go scrumping in the orchards; we didn’t call it scrumping; we saw it as just walking around and eating apples.
I did the one-day-a-week apprenticeship until I was 18, which I didn’t enjoy; I wanted to party. So I moved to Ibiza for a year, after going on a couple of holidays. I did everything there; I worked in the garage as a mechanic, painter and decorator, chauffeur, ticket seller and club promoter. To make money, basically to enjoy myself. I didn’t go to uni, so that was like a gap year. Then, finally, I ran out of money, so I needed to leave the island and head home.
When I came home, Mum asked, ‘What will you do?’ I knew I didn’t want to return to a garage or be a mechanic anymore. She said, ‘Please go to catering college; I’ve been telling you for years’.
At the time, I believed it would be about baking cakes and making sandwiches. There needed to be input from the school pointing to it as an option to tell us cooking is a course you could do.
I was 19, which meant I could attend the course for free. So I signed up at my local college in Tonbridge. I did the first couple of lessons and could use a knife and chop well. The tutor asked if I’d cooked before or worked in a restaurant. But I cooked at home, so I was comfortable, and it felt good that the tutor had asked that.
“I knew I had some catching up to do because of my year away and four years as a mechanic. So I needed to get my head down and focused.”
So I did many different jobs, including making sandwiches delivered from a snack van that visited industrial states. I’d start there at four in the morning and then go to college, and in the evenings, I worked in a couple of different pubs.
I spoke with a recruiter from a four-star, 200-bedroom Marriott Hotel on a careers day at the college. She offered me a trial in a proper kitchen with 15 chefs, all wearing chef whites, wearing hats; it was big and noisy. Working with loads of international people felt cool like I did in Ibiza, but I was in Maidstone.
It was a *commis chef job, so that was the most junior person in the kitchen. But I got to see a whole world of hospitality that I’d never experienced before. I was still doing college one day a week, so my time at the hotel was like training. I’d get asked to sweep the floor and clean the fridge. From being on an apprenticeship, I know this game. If you hammer all this stuff, you get your head down, learn and show as much willingness as possible; you progress quickly.
I helped many people out in different sections and did loads of overtime. I did a couple of national chef competitions, like chef competitions around the country, to test myself and put myself in those uncomfortable positions to try and learn.
How did you start to move up the ladder and gain more experience?
Will. The sous chef was talking to me about Michelin Star restaurants. At the time, I knew Michelin from tires as a mechanic, but I didn’t know anything about it concerning restaurants. So he explained the history and took me to a restaurant.
The first restaurant I visited was Carriages, Mark Sargeant was cooking at the time, and it was immaculate. Everything was pristine; the service was impeccable. It made me sit back and think, what is this world?
I needed to leave the hotel because it was pretty generic with lots of mass catering, and I wasn’t learning too much after a year. By this time, I was running Sunday lunches and breakfasts for 150 people and doing functions like weddings and other events.
I sent my CV with a cover letter to lots of restaurants. Some got back to me, but they didn’t have space available. In the list were a couple of restaurants in GRR, the Gordon Ramsay Group. They got back to me with an opportunity at the Pétrus restaurant in Knightsbridge. I thought, perfect, so I went to have a look. It hit me with a similar emotion to walking into the Marriott Hotel for the first time.
So I did a week for free; I went and stayed up in London; it was an early start. In the kitchen before seven o’clock every morning and worked until midnight or 1 am shift. So after those first five days, I felt properly done. There was energy, adrenaline, people at the top of their games, and many international chefs. I worked with lots of chefs, people I’d heard of.
I went to shake the chef’s hand and say goodbye. I appreciate my time here, and I’ll be back to eat. He said ‘What are you talking about? I thought you were a new starter, well, do you want a job?’ ‘I’ve already got one’. ‘Obviously, you want a job; otherwise, you wouldn’t have come here’. So I said ‘Yes’, rented a room in a flat and moved up to London a few months later. Gordon Ramsay was there at that time, around 2010, to put pressure on to ensure it was the best it could be. He’s a very passionate, driven and inspirational person; he is a born leader. If you messed things up, you knew about it.
I’ve spent much time in pastry, garnish, little starters, snacks, etc. I was cooking the fish but didn’t get to cook the meat there; that was like the highest-level job, and I wanted to. We were busting our asses, working hundred-hour weeks, no exaggeration. It was tough, aggressive, and you had to deal with it. But it was wearing a bit thin. And I thought, what’s my next step?
I spoke to his chef and said I wanted to be on the meat section. He said, ‘I was doing well and maybe I could move on to cooking the meat in another couple of years’. I thought I’d like to go and try another kitchen.
Alongside that realisation, I was missing Kent and all those things I took for granted in my late teens, plus I didn’t enjoy living in the city. I was living in Grove Square, so right off Oxford Street, I wasn’t part of a community like out east or south. Anytime I got two days off together, I felt the urge to head back to the green of the countryside.
Back in Kent, did you get the same opportunity to learn and keep climbing the ladder?
Will. Well, the best restaurant in Kent then was Thackeray’s in Tunbridge Wells. The guy who owned it, Richard Phillips, worked for the Roux Brothers and was executive chef for Marco Pierre White for years. Rave reviews, Michelin Star, so it had a good reputation. It’d probably been open ten years when I got there. I did a trial shift and loved it; just lovely people felt more like a family, the complete contrast to Pétrus.
The food was innovative and traditional at the time. Local people and businesses delivered produce, like the egg lady and a guy that grew micro cress. This was a while ago now, so the style of food is different now. The head chef used to shoot pheasant. We’d still had truffles and caviar; it was quite a fine dining restaurant. Dan Hatton, the head chef, was pushing hard to create something great there.
I joined as a chef de partie, two runs up the ladder from a commis chef, and worked my way into a sous chef position. I still had the same mentality of saying yes to everything. We did outside functions and events. Richard was doing a lot of demos, and I would put myself forward to help him out, things like the BBC Good Food Show, which he did a couple of times at Earl’s Court and Blue Water. Richard had four restaurants at the time around Kent, so I helped in all of them.
Then he opened a gastro pub called The Windmill near Maidstone in 2012; he asked me to be the head chef there; I was 24 then. That was my first head chef position; I hadn’t been a sous chef for long. I remember saying to Richard, ‘Do you think I’m ready?’ He said ‘You are ready if I’ve asked you to do it’. And I said, ‘All right, yes!’ And he showed me what to do along with the executive chef Chris Bower. The place needed a complete refurbishing from the floor up. We designed the kitchen and built everything.
It was another level of toughness; it was all on me. The times that had seemed brutal before didn’t compare with the responsibility and budget. The pressure’s real. Richard had an excellent reputation in Kent. He’d been doing it for a long time, and his level of expectancy was no less than extraordinary.
The first three months there were hard; I often slept in the restaurant. We never had everything prepped. We were never on top of things. We opened with a massive boom, carnage; I didn’t know how to organise it. But that’s where and when I learned much more about business, cooking, teams and leadership.
“It was a real challenge, but I told myself, you must nail this. You can’t move on to the next thing until this is perfect.”
We turned a dump into a profitable, strong business. I got to grips with Kent and using local produce and foraging. There was a guy down the lane that reared pigs. There was another guy at the top of the hill that had sheep. We were early adopters pushing English wine rather than champagne.
So five years later, I felt in a comfortable position. It was time to move to the next level and start the next chapter. I wanted to do something for myself, cook things that I wanted to cook and cook for a purpose. I wanted to learn about ingredients, who is growing it and where.
How did you take it to the next level?
Will. It’s 2016; I didn’t have a business plan or anything. I had shares in The Windmill pub business from the beginning, so I couldn’t just walk out. I told Richard I was planning to move on and do my own thing, and Richard said ‘Perfect’.
Slowly, I started to transition by doing some pop-ups, basically guest chef nights in cafés and other places. It went well, and I enjoyed it, so I thought that’s how we bridged the gap.
My brother Matt had already run pubs, a seafood brasserie and worked at The Windmill with us. After he had his son, he was out of the industry and back into communications for a while. I told Matt, I’m going to leave. I want to set something up where I’ll communicate with growers, design a menu and then find a venue, which we can borrow for the evening after that business closes for the day.
We’d do a tasting menu of everything we’ve found. And then we have a drinks pairing; that is where Matt comes in. We didn’t do wine pairings; we did beer pairings because we both enjoy drinking beer, and there are many wicked breweries around.
The rough plan would be on a Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday meeting with the farmer to learn about what they do, grow or produce. Going to Rye to buy fish, Hythe, Romley, wherever. I then cooked that stuff on Friday and Saturday nights for people. We sold tickets via TicketSource. A mate of a mate made a website for us for a few drinks. We were called No Fixed Abode, and we were moving around everywhere.
I sold my shares in The Windmill and had that pot of money. Half of it I spent on equipment, plates, pans, induction hubs and other things. And the other half we spent on promotion and marketing. We started to talk about what we should evolve into. We were getting busier; I’d been using a friend’s shed set up as a prep kitchen for our prep, but it had come time to get a unit or something for ourselves.
I’d always had my eye on estate agent’s listings, but we needed the funds. Then I saw an old pub, The Globe & Rainbow, in Kilndown. It had been shut for two years. My father-in-law owns a traditional cafe in Tonbridge; he came with me to give me some advice with Matt. It had a small field, decking filled with holes and dodgy windows. Matt left, the estate agent was late, and my father-in-law said, ‘Where are we? What is this?’ I said ‘This is perfect’. It wasn’t; it was minging. But I had that bit of vision.
The original plan was to grow and prep food in Kilndown. We would do one monthly pop-up supper club and the rest at other venues. But when we started building up and developing the place. I started choosing the paint colour and nice lighting; it soon began to look like a restaurant. We called it The Small Holding and opened in 2018.
“It was disorganised growth, which developed through a passion for being creative in a way that serves guests and educates ourselves.”
Pre-COVID-19 and the lockdowns, everything was going to plan for the growth of the business. Then everything stopped; I didn’t have anyone to look after the farm, so I kept an eye on the weeds and the food. My mum ran the food bank in the next village, so we gave fresh vegetables to them and delivered veg boxes to other people for money to keep things ticking over. I’d walk to The Small Holding in the morning, feed the pigs, water the plants, and do other stuff. Then Matt and I might sit on the deck and polish off a bottle of wine, we had no customers and no money coming in, but we still had some bottles of wine.
Thankfully that is all over; everything picked up, and we are right back in the flow of things. The farm is working well, and people know The Small Holding in the area and come from further afield.
We’ve started courses called Grow the Seasons. So every quarter, we open the farm to guests to come in and spend a session learning how to grow their things at home.
Tell us about Birchwood restaurant at Flimwell Park.
Will. I saw the buildings going up at Flimwell Park and thought they were incredible; the whole park looked great. Initially, I thought we could have an office for all our planning and admin stuff.
Then we got an email; Matt asked me if I’d see it. ‘Someone’s asked if we’d considered running a café on a business bank’. I instantly replied, ‘Absolutely not’. Then someone visited The Small Holding to eat and mentioned it again. I told them we were really busy, but thank you for your kind offer. The third time lucky, they said, ‘We had asked you a couple of times, but can you come at least take a look? Maybe you can consult or give us some advice’. So I went for a look around and was blown away. It was an excellent opportunity to do something different.
We had a plan that we’d love somewhere with some accommodation at some stage. We wanted to be part of a community with breakfast, daytime dining, the option for doing supper clubs, book clubs, cheese and wine nights, family events, and things like that. We had ideas and targets in mind but with no set timescale.
I visited partly a building site on 40 acres of birch and chestnut woodland. The landlords were fantastic; they had built a unique park and were looking for someone to cook great food with an eye on sustainability. But this was the summer of 2020.
Steven Johnson is the architect of Flimwell Park, Founder of London-based The Architecture Ensemble, and Associate Professor at University College London, with the vision to create a place for sustainable living, community and a live-work environment. Focusing on the efficiency of the build and the carbon footprint of all the materials, they look to build more around the country as this project succeeds. Their goal is to innovate how things are built.
We went for it and opened Birchwood in October 2021. Birchwood and The Small Holding have entirely different offerings. Birchwood has so many uses or personas. Weekends might have families coming for breakfast. Take your mum out for a three-course lunch as it’s more affordable at a set price. People visit Birchwood on dates or to work, or for business meetings with lunch and some coffee. We have a workshop upstairs, which gets used for all sorts of things like illustration, watercolour courses, dyeing fabrics with natural plant dying, and yoga classes, many different uses.
We have amazing breath work classes. The first time I did it, it was like an out-of-body experience. I thought, wow, how have we not been taught this stuff from childhood? Why would you not do that if you can learn to control your breathing to make your body feel better?
The Small Holdings is about food, farming and a culinary experience around a tasting menu. And Birchwood is about quality ingredients in a versatile environment, with a community and lots going on.
“We are just getting started; we have so many ideas about big events and hosting food markets and all sorts.”
WILL DEVLIN - CHEF
The Small Holding Ranters Lane, Kilndown, Cranbrook TN17 2SG
smallholdingrestaurant.com
exploretock.com/thesmallholding
Instagram. the.small.holding
Birchwood 13 Flimwell Park, Hawkhurst Road, Flimwell, Ticehurst TN5 7FJ
birchwoodrestaurant.com
Call. 01892 341598
Instagram. birchwood.sussex