Andrew Sheridan
Andrew Sheridan
Ambitious, inventive and completely dedicated to his craft, Andrew Sheridan is one of the finest chefs North Wales has ever produced.
The end goal for ambitious chefs is almost always to have their own restaurant where they have free reign to cook exactly what they want. It’s taken Andrew Sheridan fourteen years of steely determination to get to that point, but now his intimate, immersive and inventive restaurant 8 in Birmingham is a pure distillation of his maverick cooking style.
Born in Liverpool but growing up in North Wales, Andrew was essentially pushed into the world of professional cooking by his dad, who convinced him to get a job in a local pub to keep him out of trouble. There was no real interest in cooking before that – he admits his own mother was a terrible cook – and the food being served at the chain pub he worked at was nothing special at all. But when he moved on to work at a slightly more upmarket restaurant something clicked; Andrew began reading about famous chefs, watching TV series like Boiling Point and realised if he started to work hard and dedicate himself properly, he could turn cooking into a serious career.
With a drive to learn how to cook at a much higher level than he’d been exposed to so far, Andrew took a pay cut and upped sticks to Chester, to work at the new Michael Caines’ ABode hotel restaurant in 2010. Initially put in the brasserie rather than the fine dining restaurant, his work ethic and willingness to learn got him noticed, and after he won North West Chef of The Year in 2011 the head chef at the time Stuart Collins offered Andrew the position of executive sous chef in the fine dining operation at the hotel.
This was a shock to the system for Andrew, who was only twenty-one years old and had to quickly master things like plating purées and making stocks for sauces from scratch, but he credits Stuart Collins as the mentor who helped set him off on the path to becoming the chef he is today. Eventually, he decided to leave ABode to return to North Wales. After initially struggling to find a job, he worked at Chateau Rhianfa in Anglesey and got to grips with wedding catering, before a stint at Bodnant Food Centre’s River Room restaurant as head chef. After eighteen months he found himself becoming complacent and not pushing himself as much as he wanted to, so he decided to move down to South Wales and start to create his own style of cooking at Sosban in Llanelli.
Whilst trying to figure out what kind of chef he wanted to be, Andrew would regularly switch up menus and experiment with techniques and flavours. After being invited to compete in Great British Menu in 2018 but losing out to Chris Harrod, he realised he was trying to put too many elements on his plates; after stripping back his cooking style to become more confident and concise, he won the Welsh heat when he returned to the show the following year.
By this point Andrew had made a name for himself as a ‘maverick chef’, but one who had now grown into his own style and produced food that was inventive but assured and focused on the plate. So when Sosban suddenly closed, it threw a huge spanner in the works for Andrew’s trajectory. Wanting a fresh start, Andrew took his entire team with him down to Cornwall to work at The Stargazy Inn in Port Isaac, but soon felt things weren’t working out. Luckily, he was introduced to Sam and Emma Morgan, who had opened the ambitious Craft Dining Rooms in Birmingham’s International Convention Centre. With a huge space to fill, the restaurant offers a vast range of all-day dining options, plus the alfresco Craft English Garden. When Andrew got on board as executive chef of the whole operation, he certainly had his work cut out for him. However, never one to stop pushing, he also set about creating a chef’s table experience housed inside Craft Dining Rooms unlike anything else that’s come before.
That concept – simply called ‘8’ – is an immersive, theatrical, slightly bonkers 16-seater chef’s table that combines light, sound and food into a multi-sensory evening. It’s Andrew’s career on a plate; dishes that encapsulate his cooking style and reference parts of his life and career. What’s more, everything is themed around the number eight; from the titles of the dishes to the price, opening time and number of courses. In spring 2023, 8 moved from Birmingham to Liverpool city centre. It’s clear that Andrew has never really stopped working to improve his skills and offerings, and while 8 is the culmination of all that graft, the restaurant itself is going to continue to evolve and shift over the years. It’s certainly an experience like no other, but the food is what people will remember. Simple on the plate yet inventive and technically complex – with a mad brief and theme thrown in for good measure. What more could you want?
In May 2022, Andrew launched Black and Green, a modern British neighbourhood restaurant in the Worcester village of Barnt Green. It has since been joined by Restaurant OXA in Merseyside's Oxton, The Garrity in Worcestershire, The Bracebridge Bar and Grill in Sutton Coldfield and, most recently, small plates restaurant Dishes in North Wales.
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