By David Crowe

Copyright theage

Graham is the son of a mechanic who owned a small business selling and repairing farm machinery. He helped his mother in the kitchen with simple Australian meals, but ate out rarely. He went fishing on family holidays on Nelson Bay, north of Newcastle, and he thought about being a vet. At one stage of his teenage years, to deal with his asthma, he took up swimming and competed in national championships. Many paths lay ahead of him, and none passed through a kitchen.

But he remembers going with his grandfather, who owned a farm at Tomago, and buying cattle at the Maitland market. And he recalls a neighbour who put on barbecues with the very best beef from the local area, rather than the ordinary cuts from the supermarket. He learnt to kill a chicken and prepare it for a meal. Those experiences put him on course for a lifetime in food.

If there was a turning point in his life, it was the moment he arrived at a Newcastle seafood restaurant, Scratchleys, for work experience when he was 15. Other kids went home as soon as they could, but he stayed in the kitchen into the night, and the owner, Neil Slater, offered him a job within days. (They stay in contact and caught up in London only weeks ago.)

Three years later, he moved to Sydney to work at Banc, a restaurant that made reputations. He laughs about the night he complained to the chef about the sheer exhaustion of the job, only to be told to change careers if he could not cope. There was no sympathy, just more pressure. He kept at it, and won The Sydney Morning Herald’s Josephine Pignolet Young Chef of the Year Award. That gave him the money to try London.

“I was clueless,” he says of his early years. But he was also ambitious. He worked long hours and impressed the chef and investors at The Square, the restaurant in Mayfair where he worked. They backed him to set up The Ledbury when he was just 26 – and the new venture had a Michelin star one year later.

He met his wife, Natalie who is English, and chose to stay in England. They have a daughter, 9, and a son, 6. “My wife is beautiful and my kids are adorable,” he says.

The phone rings. One of the children may be a little less adorable: there’s been an accident at home with a child and a pencil, so Natalie will need to get to an emergency department. Graham will drive across the Thames, then back through jammed traffic to The Ledbury to work. It will be a busy night.

In an age of celebrity chefs, good food can seem glamorous and effortless. Graham has done his share of television appearances – Top Chef in the UK, Masterchef in Australia – but his story is mostly about hard work and perseverance.

He owns The Ledbury now, but he says one of the great motivators was his anxiety about letting down the friends who backed him. “The fundamental thing was caring about something and making sure that you do your best all the time. I didn’t want to fail for them because I felt like they put so much trust in me.”

It’s a universal story and not really about food at all, I tell him.

“It applies to anything,” he says as the meal comes to an end. “I sometimes say to people: you’re in hospitality, you just don’t know it.”

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