Joe Laker can’t trace his decision to become a chef back to a single inspiration. He remembers loving food as a child (he lived in Alabama and South Carolina for a time while young), working with produce in a part-time supermarket job and becoming a pretty self-reliant cook as a teenager, but there's not an obvious origin from which it all began. ‘There’s all these things that now, in context, make sense as to how I got here, but it wasn’t clear cut to me,’ Joe says. ‘I’d love to turn around and say I knew I wanted to be a chef, but I don’t have that story.’

Still, as he set off to university in Leeds to study engineering, following in his chemical engineer father’s footsteps, there was enough of a curiosity that in his second year he started looking for kitchen work, landing a job at a local Chinese restaurant. ‘I applied for fifteen kitchen jobs and that was the only one I heard back from – I think they must have been desperate,’ he laughs. By the time the trial shift wrapped up, his name was already on next week’s rota. ‘The head chef there, Robbie, was great – he taught me basic skills and how to behave in kitchens, and I still value his tutorship above most to this day,’ he says. ‘Everyone was so tight knit, but it was the most dysfunctional family and I just fell in love with the intensity of it all.’ He was initially entrusted only with the basics; pot-washing and kitchen prep, before, later, turning his hand to making spring rolls. ‘I very quickly learned I wasn’t as good as I thought I was, but I wanted to become good,’ he smiles.

After university, he immersed himself in restaurants in Leeds, including Water Lane Boathouse, and became a pizza chef, working in a shipping container and travelling to children’s birthday parties. Then he heard that Tommy Banks was opening Roots in York, and landed a job. In the run-up to its opening, he joined the chef’s flagship restaurant, The Black Swan at Oldstead, getting a taste of Michelin-level service and exploring its kitchen farm. Though he was young, Joe is frank about his attitude at the time. ‘It was my first glimpse into a Michelin-style kitchen and I don’t think my work ethic was particularly great at that point,’ he says. ‘I didn’t really understand what it took to get up to speed in a kitchen like that, so I’m not sure I showed my best self. There was a point at Roots where a sous chef told me I needed to sort myself out or I’d be gone. I remember sitting on the steps at the fire exit talking to him; that was a moment where I thought ‘this is serious, I need to get myself up to speed quick’.’

It was a turning point. After a year between Roots and The Black Swan, he moved to London and joined (the now-closed) St Leonards as a junior sous chef. It was a step up in responsibility, one which Joe feels might have, in hindsight, come too soon. ‘I feel like when you move into a Michelin-starred kitchen, it’s almost like your career starts again,’ he says. ‘It’s a huge learning curve, and I feel like I should have stayed at Roots to make sure I had the foundations. Don’t get me wrong, over the years I’ve built those, but I’ve had to learn how to build them a lot quicker.’ Stints at Jason Atherton’s Pollen Street Social and Anglo in Farringdon followed; at the latter, he was promoted to his first head chef role after only a few weeks. It was a rewarding, but challenging time; he reflects on a beef tartare and bone marrow dish which he says was more than a little inspired by a similar one on the menu at The Black Swan, something Tommy himself noticed. Joe was, he says, an ‘arrogant 23-year-old’, and didn’t respond in the way he now wishes he had. ‘It was just completely ripped off and I never apologised for it – maybe this can be my apology,’ he says.