The Rebel Chef: My Restaurant Revolution: Gary Usher takes his rebellion up north

Ex Africa semper aliquid novi, reckoned the Romans. Always a new twist on a cookery show, say we. The novel inflection of The Rebel Chef is that our rebel is rebelling by opening his restaurants far from London. Up North, indeed.

Gary Usher has had quite a career as a chef, including a stint at Chez Bruce in Wandsworth and with Angela Hartnett in Camden but he has deliberately created his own restaurants elsewhere, not because he doesn’t rate the food scene here but rather the reverse. He seems almost intimidated by it. A few months ago he conceded: “Right now, London is not only the best place in the UK for food, but perhaps the best in the world.”

When the critic Marina O’Loughlin proposed a visit to his first place, Sticky Walnut in Hoole, Cheshire, he tried to put her off, saying: “Please don’t travel to eat here, it’s just a bistro — better ones where you are — we are not worth the 400-mile trip”. She went anyway and loved it, saying, “If I could clone Sticky Walnut, I would — I’d plonk its like the length of the land.”

That’s not quite happened yet but Usher has opened six restaurants in the North, mainly using crowdfunding. This documentary tracks the creation of his most recent one, Pinion, in Prescot, a town of 14,000 people 10 miles east of Liverpool, where, it seems, no restaurant has opened for 30 years.

Gary raises £86,000 in a few hours, demolishes a former betting shop and reconstructs the place stylishly, complete with bentwood furniture and a big chandelier. There are hitches — a delayed shopfront, a leak from the roof, a scratched floor — but it’s always pretty clear that he is going to succeed with this improbable venture.

Usher, heavily tattooed with an octopus on his arm and a diamond on his neck, is a force of nature (and a better swearer than Gordon Ramsay, which might account for the late hour). He needs to be. Prescot, which boasts eight chippies, is not necessarily crying out for bistros.

“We’re set in our ways, we just like Chinese and Indian and that,” says one local. “I couldn’t go all fussy with squiggles and stuff,” says another. “What’s truffle? Is that chocolate or what?” One man looks frankly incredulous when it is explained to him what celeriac is.

The Rebel Chef is jocularly narrated by Ricky Tomlinson, in the redundant style favoured by these programmes, offering a resume of where we’ve got so far after every commercial break. It’s a story that could have been told concisely, in a quarter of an hour max, for the busy — but all such programmes exist to genially use up as much of our time as possible, not make us value it.

To work up tension, it is not quite clarified that Usher has already opened five other restaurants, making it seem that this might instead be make or break for him — and, again as ever, there’s no acknowledgment that the enormous favourable publicity being generated by the programme itself as we watch it more or less guarantees the success of the business, however risky it might otherwise be.

But never mind. Usher is a charmer as well as being a good cook. “I’ve made a f****** big effort to make friends here and Prescot has made a f***** big effort to make friends with me”, he concludes. Way to go.

The Rebel Chef: My Restaurant Revolution airs on Channel 4, tonight at 10pm.

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