Rebel with a cause: meet London chef Tom Sellers

Then there are the trolls. In 2016 Sellers, who comes from a close-knit, working-class Midlands clan, told The Caterer that he was regularly bombarded with messages, ‘like, “I hope your family get Aids”; “Your restaurants are s***”. I get this stuff daily — “You’re a fake chef”; “It’s all publicity”; “You can’t even cook”; “Go back to Nottingham and live with your trampy family”.’ Does he still get a lot of that, I ask? ‘Um, yes, I just don’t look at it any more,’ he says. ‘Because I’ve changed as a person.’

Restraining his urge to hit back must be hard. His dad, a welder and ‘a man’s man’, taught him and his brother to look after themselves (his mother works in pharmaceuticals). ‘I had a lot of scuffles in the playground and ultimately they turned into bigger scuffles,’ he says. Made to feel a failure at his school, he channelled his energy into sport: he was a decent football player and even better at ice hockey. ‘I am one of the most competitive people you are ever likely to meet. If someone said, “You couldn’t lift that table” [he points at a table for six in Story’s dining room], I would be like, “Yes I can”. Even playing pool with my mates, or darts, something I am not even good at, I want to win and I want there to be a prize.’

On leaving school, he discovered that restaurant kitchens offered the same blend of immediacy, camaraderie and pressure as sport, and ‘fell in love with food’. En route to Story he worked with many top chefs, including Tom Aikens, René Redzepi and Thomas Keller. The fiery Aikens is ‘probably the biggest influence on me, because he had me as a boy. I remember watching how much he cared about things and being completely overwhelmed.’ Sellers was also inspired by Redzepi’s culinary expression of identity — both personal and national — at Noma to try and do something similar with modern British food at Story. The chefs he admires are a generation or so older, rather than his contemporaries: Aikens, Redzepi, Claude Bosi, Clare Smyth, Brett Graham. ‘I always had this vision of making my idols my rivals,’ he says. ‘I don’t think there is anything wrong with that.’

That he didn’t win a second Michelin star this year clearly rankles. ‘Am I happy with the accolades Story has so far? No,’ he says. He remains deeply engaged in Story as well as his West Sussex pub, The Lickfold Inn: not just in making them desirable, prize-winning foodie destinations, but also useful enterprises. His staff work four-day shifts to counter the tendency towards overwork in kitchens. Sellers is also allied to an anti-bullying charity and is speaking to The Prince’s Trust and some of the brands he works with, including Mercedes, about setting up a foundation to provide training or scholarships to those like him who are failed by the formal education system.

He is also planning a third outpost. ‘It will be 100 per cent mine, and it will be in London,’ he says. ‘All I can tell you is it will be called 13 and it will be aimed towards the youth of London, and not just in food; in art, in culture, in music.’ It will therefore be somewhat cheaper than Story, where lunch costs £80 and dinner £120, without wine. Sellers already has the numbers 1 and 3 inked on his fingers, and further illustrations scroll up his hands and arms and under his chef’s whites. ‘My mother was born on the 1st, my father on the 3rd,’ he explains. ‘The butterfly on my hand is about transformation, changing as a person. The doves signify that you shouldn’t be alone: a dove never flies alone. I guess I am an emotional person underneath the shell of bravado.’

Sellers’ success means he has managed to buy his sister and brother a house each in Nottingham, and his own place near Blackheath. He won’t tell me whether he is in a relationship, but says that the industry, and the fact he works 120 hours a week, makes it ‘hard to maintain one’. Still, he seems to be learning to live a less monastic existence since getting his dog, Boss. At the height of Story’s success, Sellers went down with flu, and his agent came round to the flat he then rented ‘to bring me f***ing Lemsip or whatever, and I basically just had a bed. I didn’t have a kettle or a toaster or even a bin: she was like, “What the f***?”’

He’s got a bin now, and a dog basket, and also a social life of a calibre he could never have imagined in his teenage years in Nottingham. ‘Have I found myself at parties that I never thought I would attend?’ he says. ‘Yeah, of course. And there are a few people I have managed to cook for several times and have a relationship with.’

Famously, he is an acquaintance of the newly engaged Meghan Markle, who is, it seems, something of a foodie. She said in 2014 in an interview with V Studios that they had even ‘talked about doing a food show together where we travel and eat our way through a country, much like Gwyneth Paltrow and Mario Batali did for PBS with Spain: on the Road Again’. Sellers, perhaps unsurprisingly, won’t comment on their friendship but is happy to talk about others. ‘David Schwimmer is an amazingly kind man. Tinie Tempah is someone I relate to. I met Rudimental and we just became mates.’ There is an affinity among those who become well-known in any creative field at a young age: a shared awareness of fickleness and madness. But though Sellers clearly wants recognition and respect, proximity to celebrities has made him wary of fame.

‘I remember going shopping with Professor Green: he needed to get some gym stuff,’ says Sellers. ‘For some f***ed-up reason we went to Nike Town on Oxford Street. He only wanted to buy a T-shirt and trainers but [he was stopped by fans on] every single floor and we came out of that place an hour later. I have cooked for the super-famous, the Leos [DiCaprio and his ilk], and that becomes a journey, just getting them to the restaurant and getting them out. To have to live your life in that mindset must be a lonely place. I get noticed in Sainsbury’s once a week and that’s fine.’

It’s time for his staff briefing. Sellers shakes my hand, murmuring ‘genuine pleasure’ with an almost old-world courtesy. Perhaps I’m not one of the f***ing dickheads.