As long as Will Holland can remember, he wanted to be a chef. Although he came from a more academic family, it was one which shared an appreciation of good food: 'When me and my sister got home from school and my mum and dad finished work, cooking dinner was a family thing. We were all in the kitchen cooking and we’d sit down at the dinner table to have dinner and we would all wash up afterwards. Me and my sister were never allowed to eat in front of the television or anything like that. That kind of appreciation of food and the importance of eating was in me from a young age.' His first experience eating Michelin-starred food, at two-star Lettonie with Martin Blunos, came aged twelve – an experience that still resonates today. 'I still remember the grandeur; that food is a serious thing. That was twenty-five years ago, or something like that, and I can still remember it.'

Keen to learn anything he could about food, at twelve he secured a job in the local family butcher – 'really renowned, one of the best butchers in Bristol' – staying until he left home aged seventeen. 'Ten percent of my job was actually getting my hands on the meat. I remember mincing meat and making sausages and making faggots, taking the wings off chickens. It was amazing, just to have that experience from that age. I stood there with my eyes wide open, fascinated about learning where brisket comes from on the animal, where this came from, where that came from. There’s lots of chefs these days, if you ask them where brisket came from on a cow, they wouldn’t have a clue where it’s from and I was learning that when I was twelve or thirteen years old.'

By fourteen he was completely sure that he wanted to be a chef and arranged for his secondary-school work experience to be with Michael Kitts at the Swallow Royal Hotel in his hometown of Bristol. 'It was the best place to eat, in the best hotel in Bristol. I applied there and turned up and that was the first commercial kitchen I stepped foot in.' When asked what appealed about this life he says: 'It was the camaraderie and the brotherhood that’s in a kitchen and the real team effort.'

Two years in catering college followed, then his first professional kitchen job at Homewood Park in Bath, working under Gary Jones (now executive chef at Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons) who had earned the restaurant a Michelin star and four AA rosettes. 'Gary was a fantastic mentor and he was what I needed. I soon realised I’d got a lot to learn and if I wanted to be successful, I needed to start from the bottom up. And that’s what I went about doing.'

His next job was at Gravetye Manor, a luxury hotel in the Sussex forest with an enormous Elizabethan kitchen garden in the grounds. He worked here for five years under Mark Raffin.