Frog chef Adam Handling lets loose on MasterChef, TripAdvisor and vegans

Outside one of his restaurants, Adam Handling points up: “And there’s the flat.”

This is the easiest way to understand Handling, to know he couldn’t live any closer to work if he tried, and that it likely rankles that he can’t sleep in the kitchen itself. The 29-year-old chef is single-minded, hard-working to a fault (he is visibly exhausted when we meet) and forthright about his ambitions; remarkable, given he is chasing dreams that came about by chance.

“I actually got the feeling that I wanted to be a chef about a year into being a chef” he says, over coffee – what?

“So, my Mum’s old-school. Everybody has to go to university and in Scotland it’s free, so you’d be stupid not to go to it – but I just really didn’t want to. I didn’t like school.

“After annoying my mother so often, she said to me ‘If you get an apprenticeship – in a high-end establishment – doing whatever the hell you want, you can leave school.’”

Handling, then 16, went straight to his teachers, who told him Gleneagles, Scotland’s most famous hotel, were on the look out for their first apprenticeship.

“I was like ok cool, let’s go for it, I like to eat” – a wry smile – “There were about four interviews; I wore dad’s suit and I looked like a proper disgrace.” After five months, he heard back; he’d got the gig. It was as simple as that?

“It was the first option I had. If there was one for a plumber, one for a painter, I would have applied for them as well. I would’ve done anything not to stay in school.”

It followed a military childhood. Handling left Dundee at four and “travelled all over the shop”, including five years in Germany. He says the upheaval was fantastic for learning to interact with strangers and making friends on the fly, though he got suspended four times in one year from one school which, in a roundabout way, put him off following in his father’s footsteps.

“Dad had to take me to his work. He was a Sergeant Major in the army at that point. I was sitting in the conference room, he was at the end of the corridor, and I heard him rip the sh** out of some people.

“I’m like ‘oh my God, I can’t handle that, being shouted out all day’. I say that, but then I became a chef and it was pretty much exactly the same – !”

Is his father still as strict? “He’s completely changed since retiring; now he’s the biggest teddy bear you could ever think of. He comes down about once a week a month just to help me. He’s an incredible incredible person.”

In the Gleneagles kitchen, with its 110 chefs, training was done the old-fashioned way. “A year veg cuts, I had to make 10,000 omelettes to understand eggs” which, he says, pushed him to tears a dozen times in three years but “taught me to never f*** up.” Here, too, was where a tendency toward obsession began: “When I finally came to do night services and weekends that was it, I lost all my friends, which I didn’t care about because I was so engrossed in what was going on.”

After Gleneagles, the next hit was as Fairmont’s youngest ever head chef at St Andrews, then time leading a team of more than 20 at St. Ermin's Hotel in St James's Park. “I understand the politic, shall we say, of how hotels operate.”

What does that mean? “I got told the new MD wanted to change the restaurant into an American grill bar thing and I’m thinking 'we’re in bloody St James’s Park! Right next to Westminster and Winston Churchill Hall is the next building – and you want to change this iconic bloody building into an American steak restaurant?!'

“The thing that p***** me off is when I was told they wanted to change, I said, ‘we have a contract together – you know it’s my name on the door’ and the exact words back to me were ‘I don’t care, I own the hotel’. That was it. I’d put in so many hours in that place, I’d built the team up and really worked hard, and it was like: ‘Well I’m terribly sorry but that’s not how it’s going to work.’”

In print, the words sting with bitterness, but Handling is more upset than anything in person. He describes how he was forced to open Frog E1 early, lasting only until the end of the week at the hotel, and what it meant for the team. “The fact is I had 27 chefs. Sitting them down and telling them ‘I can only take six of you’ – f*** me, man, I broke into tears. That was the worst experience of my f****** life. But as soon as I opened this place [the second Frog, in Covent Garden], every single one of them came back to me. Every one of them.”

Masterchef came after the hotels. Handling is typically blunt and, as seemingly with everything, has held the memory up to the light and looked at it from all angles. “That was the key in the door to people knowing who I was”, he says, calling the show “bloody incredible” and piling high praise on Scott Davies and Steven Edwards, who he shared the finals with, but (there is always a but) “you’re surrounded by chefs that basically have tiny d****”.

And, of course: “Am I tired of being told I’m a Masterchef finalist? 100 per cent I’m tired of it. I don’t like to be a finalist, I like to be a winner.”

In fact, the show was a return to the BBC, after he’d earlier competed for Young Chef of the Year, meeting Matt Campbell, the chef who passed away this year running the marathon, at 22.5 miles. The Frog E1’s head chef, Jamie Park, is running the last 3.7 miles of the marathon in Campbell’s honour this Sunday. “He was really out of the box but an incredibly nice person. I was devastated to hear of his loss.”

Since Masterchef, there’s been considerable success, with his two Frog restaurants both largely acclaimed, even though the first opening, in Shoreditch, was a rush job (“we painted the walls, we put the handles on all the doors and the bathrooms, that’s why they’re on back to front”).

For all his plain speaking, which can seem bullishly buoyant, Handling clearly takes any criticism to heart. There was a row over TripAdvisor, where he swore his head off at one customer who left a bad review. “I shouldn’t have done what I did,” he says now, “I’m just a little person who vented, but it became news. Social media is such a good tool and a bad tool.”

Handling keenly feels any opinions, good or bad, especially from the country’s restaurant critics. He remembers an early write-up from Richard Vines fondly, but tells me that Marina O'Loughlin’s lukewarm response was pinned up on the kitchen wall. “Every bloody review, whether good or bad, matters. I actually stapled the Marina review to our wall in the kitchen so that everybody could read it and never make the mistakes that she said were there.”

It wasn’t a one-off.

“I changed the menu every time I got a bad review. It wasn’t until Steven, our head chef upstairs, said ‘Dude you’re killing us, we’re changing and changing, look at all the good reviews we’re getting’ that made me realise ‘what am I doing?!’ Get the music back up loud, let’s cook the food back to how we did it and if they don’t like it, they don’t like it.”

There’s also a bar, Eve (as in Adam and Eve - geddit?) and zero waste coffee shop Bean and Wheat. Remaining schtum, Handling promises something new “in the next couple of months” and plans to go global “within the next five years”.

He won’t be following trends, because despite the restaurant’s dedicated vegan and vegetarian menus, “my personal opinions [on the matter] are quite blunt”.

“I don’t understand vegans whatsoever. I understand it for medical reasons – you know don’t eat this whatever, but just eating it because they want to save the cows or any of that stuff it’s a little bit taking the piss. You know, that’s silly.

“I think it’s a fad. I think people are just doing stuff for stuffs sake, and I don’t think it’ll be around for very much longer.”

In the meantime, he’s gearing up to cook at Ascot, which he calls “an honour”. For all his confidence, his drive seems steeped in doubt. “I was amazed they’d work with someone so young”, he says, “but I’ve always got my mother in the back of my head saying ‘I told you so’ if I fail. It’s always been that kick up the arse, that I don’t ever want to hear those bloody words.”

For now though, he’s busy. This week a son, Oliver, was born, with Handling showing an uncharacteristically soft side on Twitter. A cute photo, a shout-out to his wife. Heart-eyed emojis, too. Maybe Adam Handling isn’t as tough as he seems.

Adam Handling’s Balmoral restaurant pops up at Ascot, June 19 - 23, ascot.co.uk