Growing up with a dad who was both a home cook and a pilot means that most of Jamie Smart’s early memories involve the best of combinations; food and travel. Meals were a focal point for the Smarts, but it didn’t inspire a conscious decision to go into cooking – instead, Jamie says, he fell into it as he wrestled with what to do for work. He explains it casually, but his thought process as a then-teenager shows an awareness which is particularly impressive for someone fresh out of school. ‘Initially I was trying to figure out what to do with my life, and I liked the idea of dedicating my life to mastering a craft, or at least attempting to master a craft,’ he says. ‘That seemed like a life lived with purpose. But then I got into cooking and honestly now every year there’s more and more reasons why I fall in love with it.’

As he figured out what, exactly, that purpose might be, he worked in the kitchen at Combe House Hotel on the north Devon coast – not far from where he grew up – starting as an apprentice and spending a day a week at college in Exeter. ‘That’s where I learnt the basics, worked with some incredible people and learnt about the industry and what it means to be a chef,’ he says. ‘It was a good foundation before I moved to London – I felt very at home.’ Having found an affinity with the kitchen, after a year he made the 200-mile trip to London aged nineteen, though admits it wasn’t the most positive of starts; despite securing a role with Gordon Ramsay Restaurants, it was an unsettled period (or, as he summarises, ‘a grim time’) of adjusting to the capital’s pace while living in hostels. Jamie briefly returned to Devon and spent a few months in an office job, before giving it another shot, joining the team at the Michelin-starred Club Gascon at Smithfield Market. Thankfully, it was a case of second time lucky and he settled into a short spell there, before heading across the market to knock on the door of St John.

‘I walked in and asked to speak to the head chef,’ he says. ‘I told him how much I loved the restaurant and asked if I could stage there. He said no, but you can do a trial.’ Jamie impressed, and landed the job. It proved formative, and Jamie says that he has viewed everything since through the lens of what he learnt there. ‘There is a philosophy and ethos at St John – they don’t just give you recipes, they explain why something needs to get to a certain point, why you catch garlic just before it colours, why you use a certain amount of salt,' he explains. 'Those things were a foundation, rather than just working in a kitchen, cooking recipes and doing a section.’ Three years later, he joined James Lowe’s one-star Lyle’s in Shoreditch, an ‘incredible experience, an impressive kitchen’ and, he admits, a steep learning curve. ‘The standard of cooking, the techniques and the handling of produce that I’d never handled before; it was just another huge schooling,’ Jamie says. A stint at Brawn, a Mediterranean small plates spot in Bethnal Green, followed, and saw Jamie cook carefully considered, ‘culturally-rooted dishes’ which he says ‘almost contextualised all the cooking I’d done before’.

But when the urge to cook his own food won out, Jamie left Brawn and set off on a European adventure with friend Felix Reade – a year running guesthouse Auberge de Chassignolles, nestled in a tiny village in rural, mountainous France. It was, he says, ‘the rawest form of living, let alone cooking’; staying where they worked, feeding the pigs, visiting local markets and designing ever-changing menus from ingredients on the doorstep. It sounds idyllic, I say. ‘It was, but it was also unbelievably challenging,’ Jamie laughs. ‘It’s open six days a week and you cook the rest of the stuff on your one day off. The challenge for me was being so isolated, as well as the pressure of it – cooking guests a different five-course meal every night with the same four ingredients.’ There, he says, his lessons from St John around simple celebrations of produce shone through. ‘We were picking radishes from the ground and dipping them into butter that we had churned from the cows down the road,' he smiles.

When their year was up, Jamie joined Pamela Yung in Borough Market at the now-closed Flor, Lyle’s sister restaurant (‘she shows the most humility; for somebody so talented to be so humble and aware, as well as mind-bogglingly creative – I learnt a huge amount’), before moving on to man the kitchen at Hackney wine bar and restaurant P Franco (now 107 Wine Shop and Bar). It's clear that Jamie has cherry-picked his roles; many of his previous kitchens share mindsets around seasonality, stripped back, ingredient-led cooking and natural wines, wrapped up in neighbourhood settings. ‘One hundred per cent – [my roles] were very consciously decided by where I felt like I needed to be,’ he says. ‘Partly because of an ethos that I love and agree with, but also by noticing gaps in my knowledge or things that I wanted to expand on. It’s been a very, very conscious CV.’

In 2022, those decisions culminated in a call from wine importers Tom Beattie and Francis Roberts, who were, with charcutier George Jephson, embarking on a new project. Enter Cadet, a wine bar and Parisian cave à manger-inspired restaurant in north London’s Newington Green. ‘I think I accepted on the spot,’ he says. ‘I knew it was going to be an incredible opportunity; I knew from the get-go, even not having worked with any of them before, that it was going to work.’ He was right – tables remain tricky to come by, with reviews singing the praises of the charcuterie, excellent wines and, of course, Jamie's cooking. Having initially helmed the kitchen and its daily-changing, small plates menu solo, he has since been joined by sous chef Julie Hetyei, who he is keen to highlight. In Cadet, it feels like Jamie has found the perfect environment to cook his food, his way, treating well-sourced ingredients with the respect they deserve. When I ask him what defines his cooking, he pauses for a moment before answering. ‘Care is something I’ve been obsessing about,’ he says. ‘That’s at the root of everything – the cooking itself comes naturally from that. If you care about your suppliers, the produce you’re getting, how you cook it, how you serve it; if there’s a general mentality of care behind it, it all comes from there.’