Thomas Straker: ‘I don’t think anyone has ever left a restaurant going, “God I wish I’d eaten more purée”’
Britain’s ‘bad boy chef’ on dying his hair neon pink, serving ‘real’ food and going Stateside.
Thomas Straker — shorn pink hair, blue apron — is chopping the heads off of sea breams while I watch him from his mobile, which has been angled on a prep table and occasionally slides flat so that the view becomes spotlights and vents.
It’s before the lunch service and he’s in the kitchen at Acre (one of his three places on Golborne Road in Notting Hill) making stock, folding focaccia dough, and butterflying fish while my questions pipe through his earbuds. We’re meant to talk about his in-the-works restaurant in New York, which is opening sometime this spring. But his neon hair is also new and I ask him about it.
‘Ah, well,’ he says. ‘It was because of dry January. I got to the 10th, or maybe it was the 5th, and I’m not drinking, you know, and I’ve got this medium length, mousy brown hair. It’s very boring. And then suddenly, lightbulb moment, I got out of the shower and saw a pair of clippers that I’d used to shave the dog six months ago.’ He gestures at his head. ‘So I gave myself a number one buzz cut. My wife Davina was standing there, going “What the f**k have you done?” and I was like, “You know how we can make it even better? Let’s go neon pink.”’ He laughs. ‘There are times I’ve regretted it.’
Eighteen years ago, after attending Ballymaloe Cookery School in Cork, Ireland, Thomas was making £13,500 a year as a commis chef at The Dorchester. He lived in a rented attic bedroom in Battersea that he shared with a friend, and paid for it with cash in hand. From The Dorchester, he climbed the ranks through positions at Dinner by Heston Blumenthal and Elystan Street, both Michelin-starred, but it was his knack for social media that earned him enough of a personal following (2.7 million followers on Instagram and 2.5 million on TikTok, at the time of writing) to launch his first, perennially-packed restaurant, Straker’s, in 2022.
Straker’s won over po-faced critics with crowd-pleasing flatbreads and saucy langoustines, and the reviews staunched a certain amount of industry sulking that Thomas was, and probably still is, best known for his snappy videos involving different types of butter. (Thomas himself does not appear to mind the association — in 2023, he started an organic butter business called All Things Butter with a co-founder, Toby Hopkinson. This past January, they expanded to cottage cheese). Acre, where I’m watching Thomas at his prep station, opened in 2025.
‘I’m prepping another fish,’ he holds up two connected fillets of sea bream, bones removed. ‘You open up the grill and put those skin side down, get them nice and crispy, add a little garlic and olive oil and fish stock. Have it with a green salad or fries, it’s lovely for lunch.’ He will be here for the lunch service, working alongside head chef James Freeman, and for dinner too. Yesterday, he got home at around 11pm, then woke up at 5am to go to the gym (‘I’m really righteous right now’), before a session in the sauna and ice bath he recently installed in his garden. He cooked breakfast for his children — aged seven, four, and one — made some packed lunches, and arrived today at 8am. ‘It’s a long day, and obviously five or six hours of sleep isn’t maximum efficiency, but I’ve done a lot worse,’ he says. ‘With three restaurants there are a lot of people to be there for, at work and at home. I’m doing my best.’
Thomas was born in Washington, DC, to British parents, and his American citizenship is one of the reasons he started looking for premises in the USA. He cooked for a sold-out Straker’s pop-up in New York in 2024, full of customers who were crazy about his unfussy, butter-rich, give-the-people-what-they-want style of food, and that also got him thinking. ‘I love the vibe of New York, and I’ve never lived abroad,’ Thomas says. ‘I mean, I could sit comfortably on the Golborne Road for the rest of my life and keep doing the same thing, but I want to keep learning, I suppose.’ Last year, he found a location in New York’s SoHo neighbourhood, in the space that formerly belonged to Lucky Strike, a restaurant owned by the British chef Keith McNally, until it closed in 2020.
The upcoming New York restaurant, Straker’s NYC, is a larger space and a bigger financial risk than anything he has done before. ‘I built Straker’s [in London] for maybe half a million quid, and New York will be maybe four or five times that,’ he says. At the time of our interview, the interior of the restaurant is being outfitted, the grills are being installed in the kitchen, and a head chef hasn’t been named yet. Thomas is still figuring out his own travel logistics. But the guiding principles of the new restaurant will be consistent with his businesses in London. ‘We’ll lean very heavily into seasonality, we won’t compromise on products, and we’ll cook predominantly over charcoal and in wood-burning ovens,’ he says. Most importantly, he reiterates, his aim is to make sure that people enjoy themselves.
'The plan is for guests to eat and dance and agitate the council on a regular basis'
Recently, Thomas hosted his dad’s 70th birthday in a private dining room next to Straker’s. The menu included flatbread with mussels, Dover sole, rib of beef, and salads. After dinner, dancing got going in the basement club downstairs. The music was thumping, and the guests made enough of a ruckus that someone from the council came to shut the party down. ‘All they could see on the CCTV was a bunch of grey heads bobbing around,’ he says, grinning. ‘But it was fun, you know. It was really fun.’ The private space where the party was held, The Dining Room, is new — Thomas is about to host his own birthday there in a couple of weeks — and the plan is for guests to eat and dance and agitate the council on a regular basis. The venture isn’t remotely as ambitious as the New York opening, but the commitment to a good time feels familiar.
He is chopping celery for chicken broth, carrying it to an off-screen pot. He narrates while adding thyme, rosemary, and garlic, sounding like an easy-going heir to Ina Garten. I ask what he would order off the menu today, and he says the crab tagliolini. ‘It’s just a winner, people really enjoy it, and I think as a chef, sometimes, you’ve got to swallow your pride and cook things that people like.’ He sets his knife down and bites into an unpeeled carrot. ‘When I was younger, I was constantly trying to do things that I thought would make me look more technically gifted, rather than concentrating on what people want to eat, and how they’re going to feel when they leave the restaurant. That’s where I am now, and where I’ve been for a few years.’
The chef moves on to rolling out dark chocolate with salted Marcona almonds, which will become a little chocolate bar, meant to be eaten alongside an espresso. ‘I don’t think anyone has ever left a restaurant going, “God I wish I’d eaten more purée,”’ he says. He turns to James, who is prepping crab to his right. ‘James, have you ever finished a dinner out and said, “I wish there had been more foam on my plate?”’ James’s reply is inaudible, and Thomas looks back down at the phone to translate. ‘He says no. But people probably have said, “I wish I had another slice of beef, that was amazing.” It’s just about serving real food that people want to eat.’
