WELSHMAN’S FOOD PASSION
SPOON in hand, face covered in cake batter, and smiling for the camera, Richard Synan has always felt at home in the kitchen.
Since using his grandmother as a guinea pig for his first creations, he has moved on from the kitchen of his Cardiff home to work with some of the most celebrated chefs in the world and now runs his own restaurant with his wife Natasha.
Gordon Ramsay was his first boss and he also worked for a short time at the world’s best restaurant.
“I have had a love for cooking from when I could stand on chairs and peer into my mum’s Kenwood mixing bowl,” he laughs.
“I was blessed with having a mum who could cook, so I learned a lot from her and I still use some of her methods and recipes today. Every time I make a Victoria sponge I do it the way my mum taught me.
“Mum would always allow me to try out things. Someone would make the Sunday roast and she would always allow me to make the desserts and use my nan as a guinea pig, and my fondness for being a chef grew from there.”
After leaving Whitchurch High School, Richard originally opted for a degree in computing, but his interest in cooking niggled in the background and he made a decision that changed the direction of his life.
“I always had a dream of owning my own business so went to university to study business management and computing, but after about 18 months I realised I really didn’t like the degree I was doing. I thought it was boring and wasn’t interesting to me, and what I was finding I was doing was inviting a lot of my friends over and cooking the meals and I really enjoyed it,” he says.
“I changed my degree halfway through to incorporate hospitality. I can remember the day I said to my mum that I wanted to become a chef and I fast-tracked my course, graduated, and then moved to Edinburgh to study food and wine.
“That is where I really started to learn how to cook and got my passion for it.”
It was around this time that outspoken chef Gordon Ramsay was first on our television screens and his programme Kitchen Nightmares was a ratings hit.
“I was really inspired by what he was doing – going into restaurants and showing people where they were going wrong,” says Richard, whose favourite dish is cawl in the winter.
“It inspired me to want to work for Gordon, so I finished at the Edinburgh School of Food & Wine on the Friday and by the Monday of the following week I moved to London and got a job working for him at Claridge’s Hotel.
“What an incredible place that is! It was nothing more than a machine – we were extremely busy.
“We would serve 300 people every single day without fail, but there were about 40 members of staff working at any one time. People were spending up to £150 a head for food and there were bottles of wine on the menu that were £10,000 a bottle. It was an incredible place to be and an incredible place to work.
“He was an incredibly gifted chef to work with and for. What you see on the telly – it is worse in his kitchens but it is worth it. There is a lot of swearing, a lot of shouting and screaming, but for good reason.
“I spent three years right at the start of my career. To be brutally honest after four days I told the head chef, ‘I can’t do this.’ He said to give it a couple of months to see how I got on and I lasted three years.
“At the time it wasn’t the most pleasant experience, but I look back now very fondly because it set me up for the rest of my career. You learn everything about cooking and I lean back on that experience daily.”
After three years at Claridge’s, Richard moved to work at another hotel in London – L’Atelier De Joel Robuchon in Covent Garden.
At one stage Joel Robuchon had been Gordon Ramsay’s boss and he has the record for most Michelin stars of any chef in the world.
“He died in 2018, but going to work in one of his kitchens was a completely eye-opening experience,” says Richard.
“It was nowhere near as busy as Gordon’s, but the precision was a lot higher. We had to concentrate on what we were doing much, much harder.
“The food was very precisely cooked.
Everything was at different temperatures – 52 degrees for medium-rare, 54 for medium, 56 for well-done. I was the only English-speaking chef there – everyone else was French and they only spoke French, so I had to learn what I call Franglais.”
After a year working there, Richard decided to leave London and follow his dream of working at a restaurant called The French Laundry, in California, owned by world-renowned chef Thomas Keller. At the time Richard was there, Keller’s restaurant in the Napa Valley had been voted the best in the world.
“I went there to work for a week for free – it was called a work-in trial – and it was the most mind-blowing experience of my life,” says Richard. “I have never worked in a kitchen as good as that and I don’t think I will work in a kitchen as good as that ever again.
“The quality of the ingredients, the standard of precision – everything was just immaculate.”
Richard had to come back to the UK before he could apply for a job there as he needed a working visa, and while he waited he went to work in Exeter with chef Ross Melling, who had also worked at The French Laundry.
“That brought me on to the Royal Clarence in Exeter, one of the oldest hotels in the country, where Ross was head chef. It was owned by chef Michael Caines.
“I was working there for a few months and fell in love with Natasha, who also worked at the hotel, and decided to stay in the UK and not go to California.”
The couple left Exeter when Richard was made head chef at the Lucknam Park Hotel and Spa, near Chippenham, working with another celebrated Welsh chef, Hywel Jones, before moving to become head chef at the Old Bell Hotel in Malmesbury.
“Lucknam Park was another amazing experience,” remembers Richard.
“Hywel has been an incredible influence on my career. It was a fantastic experience and I learned a lot there.
“The Old Bell was the first opportunity I had to run the kitchen on my own. It has been a burning ambition to have my own restaurant.”
In 2015 Richard and Natasha realised that dream with the help of their families and they bought their own restaurant – The Weaving Shed in Bradford-on-Avon.
“We spent a lot of time, effort, stress, blood, guts, tears – the lot – getting it to the stage it is now.
“It has been the steepest learning curve I have ever had and ever will have. It is an extremely challenging environment to run a restaurant anyway – and then they throw in a pandemic.”
But Richard, who also appeared on MasterChef: The Professionals, is delighted that they have now been able to reopen after restrictions were eased in England at the start of last month.
“We have been full since we were able to reopen outside and are nearly fully booked up to the middle of May.”