There’s no doubt that Brighton is home to one of the best food scenes in the UK, despite being within day-tripping distance to London (which tends to suck up all the good eateries within spitting distance). Over the past five years new restaurants, pop-ups, cafés and producers have helped shape the city into a fantastic place to eat out. But when you ask local chefs and owners who’s most responsible for this, most will point to one man in particular – Michael Bremner.

Growing up in a small town called Insch, just outside Aberdeen, Michael got into cooking the same way a lot of chefs do – by washing pots, then moving into the kitchen. ‘This was before the time of Jamie Oliver making cooking glamorous, so it was pretty brutal – especially for the first few years,’ he says. ‘One day a group of Michelin-starred chefs came in for dinner and one of them was Chris Galvin. My head chef Bob Ovington knew I was passionate about pastry at the time and organised a trial shift in London with Chris at The Orrery. I went there but I also wanted to go to Ibiza and work there for a season – when I was offered both jobs I told Bob I was going to take the one abroad, but he convinced me not to so I went down to The Orrery instead.’

London was an eye-opening experience for Michael, who had never been to the capital before. Continuing to focus on pastry, he spent a year at The Orrery before moving onto Seven Restaurant under Richard Turner. After that, he joined the team at Quo Vadis as the sole pastry chef under head chef Curtis Stone and Marco Pierre White. ‘I learnt so much during my time in London, but I felt it was time to leave and go travelling after a while. I spent a year in Australia, a few months in Thailand, then went over to America and Canada.’

Travelling around – and cooking in – different countries opened Michael’s eyes to different styles of cooking, but it wasn’t until he returned to the UK that he really started to discover his own style. After falling in love with Brighton when visiting the city on his days off during his time in London, he decided to go and work at Due South, a pioneering restaurant that focused on local produce. ‘About eighty percent of the ingredients were sourced within a thirty-five-mile radius, which I’d just never heard of before,’ he says. ‘In winter I would ask the suppliers what was growing nearby and they’d say there’s nothing but grass! But it made me think outside the box and start getting really creative, and I got to know the suppliers really well. I still work with a lot of them today.’

It was during his time at Due South that Michael began forming the idea for what would eventually become 64 Degrees. ‘I knew I wanted a bar area where chefs would just create things without any rules or boundaries,’ he explains. ‘At all the places I’d worked there was always some sort of barrier – the food had to be European, or follow the traditions of a certain cuisine. I basically wanted to create the kind of restaurant I would want to work in, so I started to put a business plan together with my fiancé Carla.’

As the concept for 64 Degrees was being put on paper, Michael came across an article in Restaurant Magazine which highlighted the rising cost of meat. It argued that it would be so expensive in the future that chefs needed to embrace vegetarianism, and that most should be ashamed of just doling out boring vegetable risottos and soufflés while focusing on the meat. ‘I was definitely one of those chefs, so I decided to take a job at Food For Friends – a vegetarian restaurant in Brighton – to get better at cooking vegetables,’ says Michael. ‘Coming up with a whole menu based on vegetables was so tough, and I felt like a commis chef when I first joined the team, but we all really pushed hard and eventually won Best Restaurant in Brighton.’