Winning Masterchef was really amazing ( but Gregg was a bit of a pleb )
THE first thing you should know about Jamie Scott is that he laughs a lot. This may come as a surprise, given that the 26year- old Arbroath sous chef spent a fair amount of time sobbing his heart out on MasterChef: The Professionals.
There was the disastrous Chef’s Table, where he burst into tears after committing the heinous sin of serving up cloudy consommé to 30 of Britain’s best-known chefs. Then there was the trip to legendary Spanish restaurant Mugaritz, with distinct lip-trembling after head chef Andoni Luis Aduriz pronounced his peach half spiced with green peppercorns, cloves and coriander seeds ‘outrageously beautiful’.
Even when Scott won the show after eight gruelling episodes of slicing, dicing, foaming, frying, roasting and remoulading, his response was to screw his eyes up, hug everyone – even scary Marcus Wareing – and announce: ‘I want to cry a little bit, I’m so happy.’ Bless.
Now back in his kitchen at the so-busy-you’llbe-lucky-if-you-get-a-table-before-March Rocca Restaurant at Rusacks Hotel in St Andrews, Scott is happy as a clam cooked sous vide, not least because he can at last talk about his great victory, broadcast just before Christmas but filmed back in August. ‘I can breathe, finally,’ he says. ‘It’s feels like it’s been hanging over my head. My wife is the only one who knew. I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone at all.’
On the night the final was broadcast, Scott was working in the restaurant kitchen, finishing up just in time to change out of his mucky chefs’ whites and run along to the hotel bar to watch himself scoop perhaps the most prestigious professional cooking prize in Britain, with a menu that i ncluded Arbroath smokie doughnuts, beef short rib, and a cunning twist on a lemon meringue pie.
‘When it was announced I was the winner, there was a football roar in the bar,’ he says. ‘It was absolutely incredible.’
Incredible is not a bad word for Scott’s food, actually. Judge Marcus Wareing, the fearsome chef with the shark-like eyes, called his dishes ‘stunning’, while Monica Galetti, senior sous chef at the two Michelin- starred Le Gavroche in London, was so impressed she wanted to go and eat at his house. Not bad for a young man from Arbroath who five years ago was making bar food in his mum and dad’s pub.
Meanwhile, veteran MasterChef presenter Gregg ‘ buttery biscuit base’ Wallace, who in the Professionals version of the show often sounds like a child allowed to stay up late to eat with the grown-ups, declared of Scott’s winning starter: ‘That’s the best use of a turnip I have ever seen.’
Scott is openly disdainful of Wallace’s presence on the show: ‘I don’t know what he does, food-wise. I know he’s had a couple of restaurants and he was a greengrocer, but that’s all he is to me. I don’t know. He’s a bit of a pleb.’
Ouch. And he continues: ‘ Monica and Marcus are there to critique you. Genuinely, if Gregg were to go “that was absolutely amazing” and Monica and Marcus said it was just OK, I’d be gutted. I’m sure he knows a lot about food, and he knows his veg, but it wasn’t him I was trying to impress.’
So how easy was it to impress Wareing – a man so sneery in his disdain for badly cooked f ood that he once reduced a respected restaurant chef to tears on the Great British Menu, and told a previous MasterChef semi-finalist his food was ‘ appalling in every way’?
Wareing replaced Michel Roux Jr in this series of the show. Scott admits he was terrified of his reputation and felt ‘a shiver’ the first time he saw him in the flesh.
‘I didn’t want the new chef to be him,’ he says. ‘I remember watching him on shows like Great British Menu, giving these one Michelin-star, two Michelinstar chefs a really hard time and thinking, “How hard is he going to be on us guys – the ones who are aspiring to be that?”’ But in the end, and much to Scott’s surprise, Wareing turned out to be something of a sweetheart: ‘He was lovely. Really nice. Very genuine. He was always very fair, and he wanted to help everyone.
‘He wasn’t there to destroy people and make them quit their job. He wanted to make them better. He took me aside, spoke to me, had loads of advice.’
The Professionals has always felt like the most po-faced member of the MasterChef family. The chefs are young, hungry in both senses of the word, and serious, and the cooking
involves a lot of foams, gels, dry ice and temper tantrums.
Its most terrifying round is the Chef’s Table, essentially the world’s most intimidating dinner party, where 30 of the country’s top chefs line up, forks poised, to judge the young chefs’ offerings.
PERHAPS, then, it’s no surprise that Scott buckled under the pressure and on the day delivered – horrors! – a less than perfect pig’s cheek ravioli with octopus carpaccio and pickled watermelon with spare rib consommé.
‘You know what? That dish works,’ he says now. ‘ But I didn’t let my consommé cool down quick enough and my pasta was a little bit dry, and as soon as a l i ttle thing happens in that environment, when you’ve got five hours and 30 of the best chefs in the world, little things affect you.’
All of which is true, but when he was shown on the programme after his critique, his face the same colour as the pickled watermelon, sobbing his heart out and wiping his eyes, the nation’s collective heart melted like clarified butter on a freshly boiled langoustine.
‘I could have taken two or three elements off and served a perfect dish, but I wanted to impress them – that’s my young stubbornness,’ he says.
‘As soon as it finished, I remember just throwing pans and thinking: “I’ve completely blown it. I’ve been an idiot”. Afterwards, I said to Marcus, “I’m really sorry, I’m stubborn, I’m still young, I’ve got a lot to learn”,’ and he completely understood.’
In case you hadn’t realised by now, Scott cares – really cares – about food.
‘I genuinely believe that, if you’re unhappy, your food will not be good,’ he says. ‘I do the job I love. There’s no other reason anyone does a job that’s 90 hours a week for not the best money. And when you’re at your happiest, your cooking will be the best.’
Cooking is in Scott’s DNA. His mother Winnie was Britain’s first female sous chef, working as the number two i n the restaurant kitchen of the Caledonian Hotel in Edinburgh, in the days when such places were solely the preserve of male chefs. His father served in the Black Watch and his grandmother, a ferocious baker, often travelled with the family.
During a sojourn in Berlin, his mother worked as private chef to the British ambassador in Germany. When his father left the Army, the couple bought a golf club in Hamilton and Winnie became head chef, while gran made all the desserts.
‘I’d help her roll the rum truffles and bend the brandy baskets and wrap them up in tinfoil with a rolling pin – all these little things that made me just love baking and cooking,’ he says.
At home, he served as commis chef by his mother’s side, and as a teenager he started doing breakfasts at weekends in the golf club. When his parents bought a pub in Arbroath, he left school and started working in the kitchen in earnest.
‘Ten hours a week turned into 20, then 40 and into 60. I was loving it and making a bit of money as well,’ he says. A stint at Byzantium restaurant in Dundee followed, before he joined the team at Rocca in St Andrews in 2012. His col- leagues are pleased ass punch f or him, andd owner Adrian Pierac- cini, who was savvyy enough to promptly place Scott’s winning dishes on the menu, confirms the phone has been ringing off the hook with reservations vations ever since the final episode aired.
HOW long Rocca will be able to hold on to him, however, i s another matter. Scott says his dream is to open a destination restaurant in Scotland – the sort of place that does a 20-course tasting menu. But it’s plain he’d love to experience a few more restaurant kitchens before he does so.
‘ My l ong- t erm f uture is in Scotland,’ he says. ‘ But I think I need to go away a little bit and do a month here, a month there and see what happens. But until then I’m happy working with Rocca and I’ll see what happens here.’
He also has plans for a book – ‘chef comfort food,’ he says – which he hopes will be out before the end of the year, and plans to travel a bit with his wife Kelly. They married in September, in front of friends who had no idea he’d just been crowned MasterChef. ‘It was amazing,’ he says of his wedding day, before i mmediately l aunching i nto a description of the barbecue he cooked on the night before the ceremony – a feast of l obster, scallops and steak. His wife wisely banned him from doing the wedding catering itself (‘I did ask!’), but he still managed to nip in and make the chocolate favours by hand: ‘Rolos, Turkish Delights, raspberry and white chocolate truffles, little Milky Ways, marshmallows... I just made them after work each night.’
Cooking, it seems, is both work and pleasure. On a recent and rare night off, he invited friends round for beer and a video game and made his own version of Nando’s chicken – ‘Jambo’s chicken, I call it’ – with some triple - cooked chips and home-made garlic bread.
‘I wasn’t having them eating something frozen,’ he says with a shrug. ‘Particularly when it’s my friends, the food has to be the best.’
His mother is now head chef down the road at the Castle Course Clubhouse, just outside St Andrews, and is proud as punch of her talented son, declaring: ‘ He still doesn’t know how good he is.’is ’ Today, back in the kitchen and with his trademark puppyish enthusiasm, he is cooking up a new dish he recently dreamt up – Scrabster turbot with caviar, cauliflower and various herbs foraged from around the local seashore in St Andrews.
‘Here, try this,’ he says, proffering a stalk of sea fennel, sautéeing several cauliflower slices and placing a piece of turbot in a rice steamer all in one fluid motion. He watches my reaction with ferocious concentration. ‘Isn’t it amazing?’
Observing him assemble the dish is a bit like getting your head round one of those magic- eye pictures: big, meaty hands delicately plating up elegant food that looks like a work of art. It hardly needs to be said that it tastes exquisite.
Jamie Scott may well be the future of Scottish cooking. He’s smart, modest, passionate, and endearingly in love with the food that he cooks. And with all that on his plate, who cares about a cloudy consommé?