Laurie Gear
Laurie Gear
Laurie Gear knows hard work and set back, but his dedication to creative, seasonal cuisine, – beautifully executed with precision and restraint – remains undimmed. Together with his wife Jackie and their team, they have built, then rebuilt, The Artichoke into a highly regarded neighbourhood restaurant, but one with serious ambition and the accolades to prove it.
Laurie Gear grew up in Lyme Regis in west Dorset, raised on “wholesome home cooked food”. His father was a baker when he was young, and his mother a school cook, but it was an exchange trip to Creully in Normandy, France, that left the greatest impression: “It was a new experience for me having French food and really discovering their passion for food and wine. It was a totally a new environment to what I was used to.”
As he grew older, his parents accepted jobs as stewards at the local golf club, so by the time Laurie Gear was preparing to leave school, he was fully immersed in the hospitality industry, helping out his parents where needed: “I was helping mum in the kitchen and dad was behind the bar and their whole trade, their whole employment at that time, was food and drink related. I helped them and worked with them, so that kept me going within that field.”
Propelled by a need for pocket money – “if I wanted any money to do anything, I had to earn it” – he also washed dishes at The Mariner’s Hotel during his teenage years and continued in this kitchen while he completed catering college, working under Leo Featherstone, a passionate seafood chef. By this time, a career in the kitchen was starting to hold more appeal and he says: “It was hot and there was lots of noise, but I just weirdly always felt at home in that environment.”
Keen to see and experience more than The Mariner’s Hotel could offer, he accepted a place at Combe House Hotel, a beautiful Elizabethan country house and hunting/fishing lodge in Gittisham, Devon. Unusually, says Laurie Gear: “The kitchen was dominated by girls, they were all public school girls that had gone off and done their Cordon Bleu. I was one of a couple of blokes in the kitchen and of course I had a broad West Country accent then and they all took the piss out of me.” He continues: “It was very daunting, being thrown in with these young girls. When I say young, they were a little bit older than me actually. If I’m being honest I actually quite liked it. These girls were tough and feisty, they weren’t lazy in any way. Even though they came from a moneyed background they were tough and knew how to work. I think when they saw that I could graft, we had a common link and I became friends with them. They were good times.”
Combe House Hotel was at that time owned by Terry Boswall, a wealthy ex-cook and model, and it was Laurie Gear’s first experience of the French partie system. He says of his six years there: “It was just another world, and of course, the produce was just a level up from what I was used to. It really opened my eyes – Terry was a mentor. They had more sections, you had a pastry section, a larder, a sauce section – it was much more organised than what I was used to. It was an amazing experience.” It was also here that he met his future wife and business partner, Jackie.
A spell working at Gee’s Brasserie in Oxford followed, a busy restaurant serving modern European food of the era. He told us: “There was a head chef there called Graham Corbet. He taught me a lot, you had to be fast, you had to listen and work quickly and cleanly. That excited me. They would get things like crayfish that had been taken from the local rivers. It was interesting, it was super busy and I learnt a lot there.”
By this time they were very much preparing for their own restaurant – a dream of Jackie’s “right from being a little girl”. For the next few years they catered for Pinewood Film Studios, providing meals for actors and film crews while they saved money for their planned venture. Any free time they had went into researching their future restaurant, with Jackie working part time at The Fat Duck, and Laurie taking shifts at Clarke’s in Notting Hill which he describes as “nice simplistic food that was done very sharply”.
In 2002, Jackie and Laurie Gear finally opened the doors of their own restaurant, The Artichoke, located in the market town of Amersham in Buckinghamshire. Over the next six years they worked as hard as they could to build their perfect neighbourhood restaurant – the kind of place that they would want to eat in – a place that you could dress up and celebrate in as well as have a casual weekday lunch. Just as they had begun to establish themselves, building a good reputation along with a trusted kitchen brigade, tragedy struck. A fire that started next door ripped through the building, gutting the entire restaurant. He told us: “It was a huge setback. It is very cavalier to say that every cloud has a silver lining, because it was such a heinous experience. Given the choice, even with all we’ve achieved now, I would never want to go through that again. I could have been sleeping there – I was lucky to escape with my life.”
In 2019, The Artichoke earned its first Michelin star, which it has held onto since.
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