Like an ascendant sous chef perfecting an exemplary French onion brisket, the UK has had to patiently wait for its bite of The Bear season two. But as Carmy and co prepare to open a new restaurant in Chicago, the smash hit comedy-drama has landed on these ashen shores – and nobody is more excited than the new gods of the capital's finest kitchens. The culinary class love Carmy, and the indentured son of the South Side has become a style icon proper: as our transatlantic GQ colleagues put it, The Bear is actually a menswear show.
But our chefs aren't going all in with $100 T-shirts from niche German brands (Merz b. Schwanen, if you were wondering). Just as the idea of fine dining relaxes in London, so too has the idea of what a chef in London looks like. They're a lot cooler, for one. They tend to have tattoos, and baseball caps are de rigueur. They like Rolex a lot. It's a far cry from the stiff, standard restaurant issue of the ’90s. And yeah, that’s kinda the point.
It's these same guys that've opened their doors – and their wardrobes – to GQ in a bid to answer a burning question: what big fits are being served up in the most accomplished kitchens across the land?
Francesco Sensati, Senso London
Francesco Sensati loves tailoring. But, as a north Italian native, he just loves pasta more. After stints at Bob Bob Ricard and some of the best gastropubs, he's launched Senso London: a travelling pop-up that's winning hearts and minds with the salted romance of a huge bowl of boar ragu.
“I still love clothes, though,” he says on his way to a fourth double shift in a row. “I'm into classic streetwear and then just like the actual classics, stuff like Levi's and all the staples. I like both of these worlds.” And while he does share Carmy's affection for a basic white or black T-shirt on the job, his own signature comes in a pair: there's some aviator reading glasses for work, and Persol sunglasses for outside. “I've had them for ages - just a really good Italian brand.”
Daniel Martensen, It's Bagels
Daniel Martensen is a photographer and a filmmaker who knows “too many people in the restaurant business not to know better about opening a London bagel store”, and yet that's exactly what he's doing with It's Bagels, which is due to open this September in Primrose Hill. But just don't call him a chef. “I wanna underscore that I'm a first-time bagel shop owner. You couldn't even possibly put me in the same category as Jackson Boxer,” he says over the phone from his hometown in New York City. “I wouldn't trust me with a flambe or anything remotely cheffy.”
You can trust him with a workwear brand though. “I discovered Universal Works before I'd moved to London permanently. I don't really like wearing tight stuff, and as I've got older I've completely phased out denim. So now I have about 10 pairs of Universal Works trousers in various states of… patina, shall we say. I'll wear them till they're beaten to death.”
The Bear's not so fictional to Martensen: he's tight with Matty Matheson, the chef-turned-producer who plays Carmy's childhood friend Fak. “He's a buddy of mine and we're talking about doing a project together. He's an amazing chef and speaks for a whole generation. We look at Matty as so legit on so many levels.”
Marvin Jones, El Pastor
Marvin Jones, executive chef at perma-favourite Mexican El Pastor, didn't want to be a chef. “I wanted to be an electrician but I was colourblind, so I thought ‘right, what do I do then?'” he says. “My PE teacher said his friend had a restaurant and wine bar on Cannon Street, and he asked me to do it, and I said no. Then he said it pays. So I went down.”
What followed was a trajectory that is objectively impressive: five years with chef Gary Rhodes, two years with Raymond Blanc, a tenure with Michel Roux, Gaucho, and even cooking dinner for the president of Azerbaijan. And even though he doesn't always wear his chef whites, Jones still remembers the epiphany that came the very time he put them on as a teen. “I didn't know why they didn't wear normal clothes. I was only small, and it was 20 sizes too big and I looked like a little Michelin man, but you feel a little superior y'know? I felt part of a team. I started cooking pan fried duck livers, glazed with sherry vinegar, and I thought: this is what I want to do.”
The subsequent salaries have afforded Jones the London chef special, a Rolex Daytona ("It was a 40th birthday present to myself – I wear it every day in the kitchen and people think I'm nuts") and a smattering of bracelets that he's worn for years. Oh, and a Fitbit "because chefs need a tracker to make sure you're not killing yourself.”
Endo Kazutoshi, Endo at the Rotunda
Endo Kazutoshi's menu at the Rotunda – an ever-changing, seasonal tribute to the Japanese spirit of ‘omotenashi’, a sense of hospitality that's “rooted in empathy towards one's guest” – is very much the chef's own. So is his style. He is almost always wearing a pair of Windsor glasses ("I go to Alain Mikli or Mykita Berlin"), a pair of traditional geta Japanese sandals ("usually from Tokyo-based designers") and a fistful of boisterous jewellery ("Crazy Pig Designs").
It tracks that a man who gets creative with his food is just as creative with his menswear. And Kazutoshi's influences are sourced far and wide. “I'm a third generation sushi master, so my father and grandfather inspired me, but so have the places where I've worked in Tokyo, Spain, Italy and the UK.” But despite his global approach to style and food, the chef's tools are a source of national pride. “My knives are either Shodai Masayoshi or Kyoto Aritsugu, two Japanese specialists. I think they're the best.”
Dom Fernando, Paradise
There's a precision to the concrete haven of Paradise, a Sri Lankan restaurant founded by Dom Fernando. Its lines are clean without being clinical, and the chef matches his surroundings. “My style in general is the same aesthetic as Paradise. I love Cos, A Day's March, and Nordic-Japanese brands,” he says. “And then I've got the Carhartt apron to go with it. It's kind've become my signature; in all the photos of me that are out there, I seem to be in a Carhartt apron. They're practical, they're brilliant and they've got so many pockets. I need those.”
And despite leaning into Sri Lankan cuisine and his own heritage, Fernando (and Paradise, which seems inextricable from its founder) wants to reflect London down to the very last lamb fat paratha roti. “In London, there's a real intersection between culture, fashion and food. We definitely have that. And a lot of other cities are so old-fashioned in terms of fine dining, but in London with Mangal 2, and us, and Kiln, we're bringing that all together.”
After selling his flat to fund Paradise after 14 years in the hotel game, Fernando's taken a huge swing. It's been a clean hit.
Phil King, Pophams
The executive chef at Pophams, an East London institution of the highest order, can't keep away from baking. “I started in kitchens when I was about 13 in a local pub, and I've always been in and out of the industry. I kept coming back, though," he says. “I worked in theatre as a professional dancer, and that kinda work is always so intermittent. But I was always really drawn to this.”
Since sliding into Pophams DMs when the place was just two months old ("I realised it was 20 minutes away, they had about four posts on Instagram and I asked if they wanted a new baker"), King rose through the ranks to head up the bakery's restaurant at London Fields.
It's perhaps the reverse story of The Bear. And yet, like Carmy, King is a fan of the classics: “I wear a lot of Levi's. I don't look at any other brand for jeans. I like Adidas Originals, and Onitsuka Tiger, and I always wear a plain classic T-shirt.” If you needed further proof that King belongs to the new gen of London chefs, simply look south to a pair of junked Birkenstock Bostons. “They've become cool since they've been worn in kitchens. I'm the kinda guy that changes out of my Birkenstocks into my Birkenstocks. Just makes life easy, y'know.”
Ignacio Garcia, Barrafina
At 16 years old, Barrafina is the sort of high level stalwart of consistency to which Londoners take out-of-towners (and frequent for dinner themselves). You know what you're getting: modern updates of traditional tapas. Ignacio Garcia, the head chef at Barrafina Adelaide Street, is conscious of that rep. “There are high standards, and we want high quality in the restaurant,” he says. “Aside from the chef’s jacket, I am lucky to have a little more freedom at Barrafina, but everyone here makes sure their clothes are in keeping with that level.”
While other London chefs have ditched the whites altogether, Garcia sees a power in them. “The first time I wore them, I was 17 in the family restaurant, El Crucero, in a small town called Corella in northern Spain. I remember feeling so many emotions – enthusiasm, and nervousness, mostly – but I felt great knowing that I was doing what I really liked.”
He's perhaps more a traditionalist, then. But that's kinda romantic. It's also practical: Garcia is all but aware of the occupational hazards. “I like the way the guy in The Bear dresses, but I don't know if the white T-shirt is really the right thing to do. His arms are very exposed to possible burns.”
Meedu Saad, Kiln
Meedu Saad looks like he belongs in an ascendant Brooklyn kitchen. Instead, he's heading up Kiln: a restaurant that's lobbed around in every food-centric conversation between Londoners under 30. He's pretty chill too. “I think the realest thing about The Bear is when he gets locked in the fridge at the beginning of season two. A lot of chefs can relate to that, because you want to fix something but the day is so full, and you should've dealt with it earlier and now everything's flooded and implodes, but you just have to overcome all of that with a smile on your face,” he says over the phone on a Friday morning. “My missus and I have binged it non-stop."
The Supreme caps and the XL T-shirts point to a guy that knows his way around a Kith. But for Saad, there's meaning, especially in the clusters of chains and rings. “My dad's from Egypt, and gold jewellery has always been culturally significant,” he says. “The small ring is my late mother's. My dad was a sailor and he bought it on one of his trips, and she left that to me when she passed. The ankh on the chain was something I got when I was really young. It's sort've to show that you have control of your own destiny; I wear it as like a good luck charm.”
Which one might need at Kiln with its never-ending reservations list. But Saad remains characteristically chill. “I've learnt to enjoy hospitality. Making people happy makes me happy man.”
Woongchul Park, Sollip
Woongchul Park is a baker who likes to go against the grain (pun absolutely intended, and we are absolutely unapologetic). “When I was younger, I used to like bread a lot but my parents' generation didn't have that many bakeries,” he says. So, he became a baker despite the traditional Korean palates of his family.
His clothes, both in the kitchen and out of it, are clean and functional in almost clinical proportion: APC, Theory and Time Homme are but three brands he namechecks. But he's still doing things on his terms. “In Korea, it's mandatory to go to the army when you're a young man, and big tattoos are forbidden,” Park says as we shoot the intricate blocks of black and white illustrations to his upper arms. “Which is maybe why I got them. I remember thinking how strange it was when I saw these two women with lots of tattoos, and when I moved to the US, I saw they were an expression of individuality. So, I went back to Korea, and got a traditional ‘irezumi’ tattoo.”
Now, he's leading Sollip, with his wife, in the shadow of London Bridge. It has 25 covers, bangs out some of the best French fusion cuisine in the city, and Park does it all in a look that's as meticulous as his cooking. Not bad for a Korean kid “that grew up traditional”.
Jackson Boxer, Brunswick House
Jackson Boxer is a household name. That means he's a very busy man professionally. And he juggles that with fatherhood and husbandhood and that means there's not so much time for style. “In all honesty, I stopped buying clothes about 10 years ago. I loved it, and aggressively bought the work of designers I really admired, but my daughter was born and the idea of spending excess money on clothes for me felt… absurd,” he says. But he's still got a little thing for sneakers. “OK, yeah, I buy trainers occasionally. My current favourites are a collab between a German designer called Boris Bidjan and Salomon. They're hand dyed, and they're very good.”
The chief of Brunswick House has cooked everywhere from LA to Cheltenham, and The Bear has proved something of a universal beacon for chefs (and non-chefs). “Normally, I refused to watch shows about professional kitchens because they're completely absurd and bear no relation to reality,” he says. “What I loved about The Bear though is that it's really well-observed. There's a litany of things that can go wrong that spin you off into absolute chaos – these small incidental things can throw your whole day off track.”
And like Carmy, Boxer seems to have found his uniform: white T-shirt, black jeans and, occasionally, an oversized jacket with more than a whisper of drill sergeant. Boxer's aversion to shopping starts to make sense: you don't need to buy new clothes with kit like this.
Krismas Charoenpanich, Speedboat Bar
A sports bar homage to Bangkok's famous Yaowarat Road, Speedboat Bar is an eclectic, perennially booked-up restaurant. Its head chef, Krismas Charoenpanich, is of the same cut. He's a sports nut who smiles through a service in the restaurant's signature football shirt. “Our creative director Luke Farrell designed them. They're a tribute to the shirts people wear to cheer along the speedboat racers on the banks of the khlongs [canals], and you see them in the neighbourhood markets and the wok-fired street kitchens.”
Better yet, it chimes with Charoenpanich's love of football. “I'm a Liverpool supporter, and now I often play football with my son,” he says. “We watch matches together but… well, he's sadly a Chelsea fan.”
