Tom Anglesea
Tom Anglesea
An exciting, prolific and incredibly inventive chef, Tom Anglesea's dishes are always a joy to eat.
London’s restaurant scene has, for years, been centred around its most affluent areas. The illustrious hotels that have traditionally housed the city’s best restaurants – Claridge’s, The Connaught, The Dorchester, The Ritz and so forth – all sit in that moneyed hourglass between Belgravia and Mayfair, and over the course of time they formed the foundation of London’s glitzy, glamorous dining scene. But in recent years, the winds of change have blustered from west to east across the capital. A few years ago, you could have dismissed this as a brief dalliance with London’s younger, cooler district, but it’s pretty clear now that East London’s food scene is here to stay.
Until it closed in 2022, The Laughing Heart in Hoxton had been part of that list. Tom Anglesea was head chef at the restaurant-cum-wine bar until, building a steady reputation for the restaurant as a place for inventive, seasonal cooking. He took inspiration from Europe and Asia to create dishes full of unexpected twists and turns. Classic European dishes like Dorset crab, peas and avocado or mutton tortellini with broad beans sat very happily alongside pak choi with Shaoxing brot and the ever-popular Sichuan crème brûlée.
One senses that the food and atmosphere stems back to Tom, who himself is a bundle of affable energy and extremely well travelled. He’s worked at Per Se – Thomas Keller’s three-Michelin-starred New York outpost – and spent years in Australia too. It’s quite a resume for a lad from Durham who started washing dishes at a local bistro in his teens. ‘I might not look it now, but I had a real baby face,’ he grins. ‘I looked about twelve, so when all my mates were trying to get into pubs and going out on a weekend, I just decided to get a job!’
As so often happens, Tom’s dishwashing job soon became a kitchen role, and he found himself fitting lunch and dinner services around his college commitments. He would start his day in class in the morning, then dash to the restaurant to do lunch service, run back to college in the afternoon, then return to the stoves for the evening. ‘I remember sitting in an exam and I just didn't have a clue what the questions were,’ he laughs. ‘I knew something had to give, so I told my parents I was going to be a chef and that was that really.’
A stage at Gordon Ramsay’s Boxwood Cafe soon followed, where Tom worked under Stuart Gillies, who would later become chief executive of the Ramsay empire. Boxwood provided a foundation for Tom’s cooking, and it was Stuart that pulled the strings two years later to get Tom a job in New York. ‘I remember he pulled me in the office and said, 'I’ve got you a job at Soho House'. I was like, 'Fantastic, never heard of Soho House, that sounds great'.’ A month later, Soho House had fallen through, and Tom landed a job at Per Se instead. ‘I dodged a bullet there,’ he grins.
The huge, ultra-disciplined brigade at Per Se was ‘the biggest learning curve I’ve ever experienced,’ says Tom, but it taught him a huge amount about the realities of cooking at the very highest level. Eighteen months later, he was on the move again, this time to Australia, where he travelled all over the country before settling into a role at Rockpool with Neil Perry. Undoubtedly one of Australia’s most recognisable chefs, Neil was at the forefront of Sydney’s world-renowned culinary scene, and his Asian-flecked cooking had a huge impact on Tom. ‘That’s where I started to learn how to cook with Asian ingredients,’ he explains. ‘The Asian food in Sydney is so good – I just used to eat Asian food all the time! I totally fell in love with it.’ Tom’s time at Rockpool was followed by another year and a half at Spice Temple, where he got to grips with the art of authentic Chinese cooking. He was hooked. ‘If I’m honest, I had no interest in working in a Chinese restaurant,’ he laughs, ‘but to learn how to cook in woks and how to season at that level, it was amazing.’
When Tom returned to the UK, he joined forces with a couple of old friends from Per Se – Guy and Brittany Manning – and the trio won a Michelin star, cooking outstanding British classics at The Red Lion in Pewsey. After years of international travel and long hours, Tom found himself living above the sleepy Wiltshire pub with nothing to do but cook, forage and look after vegetables in the garden. ‘It really helped me concentrate on my food,’ he explains. ‘That’s where I learned proper classical cookery, how to break down whole animals and that sort of thing.’
Tom had moved back to London and was working with Nuno Mendes at Chiltern Firehouse when the opportunity at The Laughing Heart came calling courtesy of owner and sommelier Charlie Mellor, who had also worked at Rockpool in years past. For all his travels, it’s the years at The Red Lion and in Sydney that really shine through in Tom’s food.
Michelin has caught onto things happening east of Liverpool Street in recent years, but the award doesn’t quite align with what made restaurants like The Laughing Heart really special. It was the joie de vivre of the place; the stop and chats with staff who actually wanted to talk to you about the food, or the fluid, effortless way that Tom brought his dishes together. ‘I don’t think we really fit their brief,’ Tom previously said of the Michelin Guide. ‘It’s all about consistency, and we’re so erratic in the way we work. I get bored of things so quickly; after two or three services I'll happily change a dish.’
Tom decided it was time to move on from The Laughing Heart, and in 2023 he joined Dovetale, Tom Sellers' restaurant at 1 Hotel Mayfair on Berkeley Square, taking on the position of executive head chef of both. The following year, the hotel was awarded its first Michelin key in the first UK hotel awards.
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