Chef Jackson Boxer on hedonism, fatherhood and falling in love

Don’t get Jackson Boxer started on oysters.

Or Tabasco. Or radishes. Or any gastronomic topic for that matter. So filled with enthusiasm is the man currently being lauded as London’s hottest chef that even a casual mention of a foodstuff can trigger a soliloquy about foraging for molluscs or lead to a back-of-your-hand tasting of a special-edition hot sauce. It might even lead to a Proustian reverie about the ‘fiery, intense excitement’ of the first radish he grew himself on his granny’s farm.

Strutting around the poured concrete floors of his rhapsodised-about new restaurant, St Leonards, in Shoreditch, in brown leather workmen’s boots, turned-up Uniqlo jeans and a white T-shirt, whistling along to Prince ‘sex jams’, 33-year-old Boxer seems in his element. He’s all double entendres, jovial winks for the make-up artist and jokes about when the naked part of the photo shoot will begin. Were it not for his grey oilcloth apron, he could be the lead singer of an indie band: Alex Turner with an Aga. But when we sit down to chat at one of the putty-coloured suede banquettes, there’s a real sense of shyness to this award-winning chef.

Boxer says that the idea for the restaurant, a collaboration with Andrew Clarke, his friend and former chef at Brunswick House, came about, like all the best ideas, over a ‘very drunken lunch’ at his artist mother, Kate’s, farmhouse in West Sussex. ‘Andrew and I were both incredibly run-down and feeling like we needed to find the joy again,’ he recalls. ‘We were very hungover thanks to bottles and bottles of tequila after dinner service the night before. We dragged a sirloin of beef we’d aged for 60 days and a four-kilo brill and turbot down on the train to my mum’s for lunch. My brother [Frank, owner of Frank’s rooftop bar in Peckham] also turned up rather worse for wear, along with my godfather and dear friend, Jeremy Lee [the chef-patron of Quo Vadis]. We fired up my mum’s 13th-century bread oven and got a fire going outside and roasted everything with some herbs we picked from the garden and we just felt so inspired again.’

Boxer is quite the raconteur. Despite the initial reticence, his stories are all seasoned with wild gesticulation, a filthy laugh and a sprinkling of famous names. Given his family tree, that’s hardly surprising. His grandmother is the legendary food writer Arabella Boxer who, having written more than a dozen books, still lives in London aged 84, while his grandfather was Mark Boxer, editor of Tatler, who founded The Sunday Times Magazine in 1962. His father, Charlie, owns the much-loved Bonnington Square deli, Italo (former employees include Tom Adams and Jamie Berger, who went on to set up Pitt Cue).

‘Growing up, my parents were formidable cooks,’ he says. ‘We were raised vegetarian and an amazing feast would materialise from nowhere, effortlessly. One of the greatest things I learned from them was to not take food too seriously.’ His upbringing in Stockwell sounds the epitome of bourgeois bohemia. ‘We lived quite communally in a big house with lots of my parents’ friends, so my brother and I had a very carefree existence,’ he tells me. ‘There was always an adult around to read to us or talk to us or play with us.’

After a stint at his local primary school in Stockwell, he was a boarder at Christ’s Hospital in West Sussex. ‘I was quite badly bullied there but it was intensely character-building,’ he says. ‘I learned what I’d let people knock out of me and what I’d hold on to.’ At 16 he came back to London and joined the sixth-form at Camden School for Girls. ‘It was exceptionally good fun,’ he says with a smirk. ‘That’s also why I’ve really forced a mixed gender environment in my kitchens. Boys and girls are good for each other.’

It was around this time that Boxer started babysitting for the children of influential chefs Margot and Fergus Henderson (as you do). ‘Margot would wake me up at 2am and drag me into the kitchen for a whisky and round the table you’d have Sarah Lucas and Michael Clark and Mark Hix. It was just this wonderful blend of art and fashion and dance and food. I’m not very creative but I’m very turned on by other people’s creativity.’

It’s an ethos he cultivates among his own social circle, which includes Florence Welch and Benedict Cumberbatch (he cooked for the actor’s 40th birthday feast), gallerist Jay Jopling and fashion designers Simone Rocha and Molly Goddard. McMafia star James Norton is an old friend from Cambridge — Boxer studied English and philosophy — and he was one of the first through the doors at St Leonards.

Given that Boxer wrote his first cookbook aged six — ‘I had a recipe for half a strawberry stuffed with edible flowers and chives’— starting his own restaurant, Brunswick House, at 23, in an ‘insane antiques shop’ on a Vauxhall roundabout, probably didn’t seem that precocious. ‘I had no idea what I was doing,’ he admits. ‘Loads of people told me I was bonkers. You kind of have this audacity of f*** it. I was basically the only member of staff at first, but we only had about 20 people coming through the doors every day.’ Ten years later they regularly do more than 200 covers. In 2012 he set up Rita’s, the Hackney cocktail bar and diner that was madly popular for a time but has now closed, and before St Leonards he was devising the menu for Mayfair members’ joint Chess Club.

Boxer says that his relationship with his brother, who initially ran the bar at Brunswick House, has always been close but competitive. ‘Frank is 18 months younger and at school he was athletic and good looking and popular, whereas I was introverted and bookish. He started his Campari bar at 22 and financially it’s exponentially more successful than Brunswick House will ever be. He’s much better at splitting his work and personal life than I am.’ As ‘lapsed Gunners fans’ they regularly get together to watch a match or have dinner together. Current favourites include Bright in Hackney and 40 Maltby Street. ‘Frank is the first person who’ll tell me when I’m being an a***hole and expecting too much from people,’ he says.

The notoriously rock ’n’ roll chef lifestyle meant that Jackson’s 20s were ‘pretty excessive’. ‘This is an industry notorious for its self-abuse and obviously a small amount of that can be very good fun. In your 20s you thrive off that repetitive adrenaline, but then you think, “Do I want to do this for ever?” Andrew and I, like many of our peers, have struggled through some very dark bouts of depression. There was a lot of reckless hedonism and it was about ego and I wasn’t looking after myself.’ He won’t be drawn on the details — ‘I’ll leave it to your imagination!’ — but reveals, after a bit of prodding, that he would ‘quite frequently get girls sending phone numbers to me over the pass and things like that’. He also admits that ‘cooking for someone and being cooked for is very sexy’.

It was at Brunswick House that he first met his partner, Melissa Thompson, then a stylist working with industry legends Alister Mackie and Katy England and now a designer who co-founded the shoes and accessories brand Atelier Bâba. He refers to her as his ‘wife’ even though ‘we’re not married, but only because we haven’t had time’. The story of their first weekend together is typically long and fantastically romantic, and involves a screening of the ‘psychotically violent’ film King of New York under the Hungerford Bridge, ‘getting kicked out of the Savoy for being basically barefoot’, ‘drinking expensive brandy at Racine in Knightsbridge’ and ‘screaming and crying at each other in the street’. ‘I thought if this is what life is going to be like with you — it’s crazy but I’m all in.’

Two years later their daughter, Roma, now five, was born and 18 months ago they welcomed their son, Ruscha, to the Boxer brood. ‘It did seem young [to settle down] as we were in our mid-20s, but I didn’t want to keep falling in love,’ he says. ‘It was like, “I love you, let’s see if we can make this work.” It’s been challenging but I feel so lucky to have this extraordinary, clever, beautiful person to share parenting with. They went on holiday for a few days without me last month and the feeling of emptiness was profound.’ He says he can imagine having a large brood like fellow chefs Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsey. ‘I love having children, I could go on having children for ever,’ he says. ‘But I’m intensely aware that I’m not around for a lot of the heavy lifting because of work. I’m very hands-on when I’m around, but I’m not always around.’

Home is a ‘beautiful if somewhat ramshackle house’ in Stockwell with his dad, Charlie, living in the attic. He says that being away from his children has been the hardest thing about opening St Leonards. ‘For the last year I’ve been able to get up in the mornings with them, take my daughter to school, sleep-train my son, but since opening this place I’ve been working six days a week and on Sundays I just sleep, so it’s been a real wrench. Even in the last few months I’ve noticed my son’s not as close to me, which is painful.’

Although Boxer admits he still likes a drink to wind down after a busy service, today he claims the extent of his social life is the swings in his local park. ‘We hang out with the kids with a cold bottle of white wine, some cheese and some crackers,’ he says. ‘Or we get the paddling pool out in the garden — heaven!’ He’s writing a book — ‘recipes and long-form essays about food and the way it entwines with the rich experience of being human’ — and it sounds like only a matter of time before he has his own TV show. ‘I’ve shot a few pilots but it hasn’t happened yet,’ he says. ‘I think TV is a great medium for food.’