Henry Freestone
Henry Freestone
Having developed his style of food working in an eclectic range of London restaurants, Henry Freestone’s no-frills style of cookery has gone on to win him heaps of praise.
For most young chefs, working your way up the ranks to become the head chef of a restaurant is the primary aim in their careers. Some take years slowly climbing the ladder; others are thrust into the position at an early age. Henry Freestone was a head chef by the time he was nineteen, which might sound too young to be running a kitchen, but he’d already had years of experience behind the stove thanks to his upbringing.
Born in Southeast London to parents both working in the hospitality industry, cooking was always in Henry’s blood. ‘My dad trained at Claridge’s and got onto the Savoy management course, so I was always brought up in kitchens,’ he says. ‘At the same time, my mum worked in Fortnum’s so I always got to go to the food hall up there and get shown around. It just meant that I loved food from an early age.’ Food wasn’t Henry’s sole interest, however; he also had aspirations to play guitar, something which he did as part of reggae band Chainska Brassika until 2020. ‘I always said I wanted to cook and I wanted to play guitar, and sure enough they both happened!’
It was through his father that Henry managed to get his first taste of the industry, when he began helping out at his work aged fifteen, before getting accepted onto the Hilton apprenticeship course a year later. While this gave him further experience working in restaurants, his knowledge from his father’s kitchen meant he felt overqualified. ‘I’d already worked in a big kitchen, so I went into the apprenticeship course already knowing classical techniques like how to make sauces. I was running a section of three chef de parties who were on much bigger salaries than me even though I was just an apprentice.’
After his apprenticeship, Henry dropped out of college without telling his parents (‘I still pretended I was going to work every day’) to begin working in the kitchens of various pubs around London, playing music on the side. By the age of nineteen, he’d got his first head chef position at the Battersea Mess and Music Hall, before ‘bouncing around’ other kitchens across the city. After a brief stint working at Babette in Nunhead, Henry was offered the chance to be part of the opening of a brand new restaurant in Crystal Palace called Salt + Pickle. ‘It was a restaurant based around curing, pickling and preserving things,’ he explains. ‘It was doing pretty well for a short while but then something went wrong with one of the investors and it had to shut down. After that, I took a couple of months off to work out what to do next.’
Luckily for him, it wasn’t a long wait before something even better came along — the opportunity to be the head chef at stylish new Spitalfields joint Crispin when it first opened in 2018. It was here that Henry really began to earn recognition for his cooking, and also continued to develop his style. ‘The two owners at Crispin had a big part to play in my understanding of designing dishes,’ he says. ‘I’d write a menu and then they’d just change it. At the time it really annoyed me but in the long run it developed my approach in how I put a dish together. After all, the only thing that really matters about food is that it’s absolutely delicious.’
Henry eventually left Crispin after eight months in charge of the kitchen, continuing to move from job to job while the coronavirus pandemic hit (‘I think I was the only chef in London who was furloughed by two different restaurants!’ he laughs). In August 2020, however, he took over the reins as head chef of Peckham Cellars. Within four months of leading the kitchen, the restaurant was awarded a Michelin Bib Gourmand thanks to his accessible and crowd-pleasing menu. ‘My food is all about simple, ingredient-led dishes with no frills,’ he says. ‘I want it to be interesting enough that a real foodie would come in and appreciate it, but equally accessible so that someone who wasn’t really interested in food would still find it delicious.’
The ambience of the restaurant was just as important for Henry, who wanted to avoid the ‘stuffy’ cliché: ‘I want to be able to chat to customers, crack jokes with them and help them try new things in an accessible way.’ This friendly ethos also carries through to the way he runs a kitchen too. Henry is determined to help improve mental health awareness in kitchens and break down existing standards within the industry. ‘I’m more than happy to put myself on consecutive doubles but I won’t let anyone else on the team do that because they have lives too,’ he explains. ‘We need to get the hospitality industry as turned on to mental health as every other industry is, and that starts by making people realise that doing an eighty-hour week doesn’t make you big or is something to be proud of.’
Henry left Peckham Cellars in 2022 to pursue other ventures, going on to do residencies in a number of different kitchens. In 2023, it was announced that he would be joining Bambi, a new music-led wine bar in London Fields.
Three things you should know
Henry’s former reggae band Chainska Brassika were crowned world champions at the World Reggae Contest in 2015.
Henry’s ethos of never using ingredients for the sake of it means that he doesn’t use pepper as a standard seasoning in his cooking, treating it instead as a spice which he only uses when needed. Cooking at a wine bar also means wine is used in almost every dish.
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