Gary Rhodes

Few chefs have done more to make British cooking feel exciting than Gary Rhodes. With his famous spiked hair, his enormous grin and a voice that could make a bowl of custard sound like the best thing you would ever eat, he spent three decades insisting that faggots, fishcakes, braised oxtail and bread and butter pudding belonged on the finest tables in the world. He turned out to be entirely right, and the proof arrived in the shape of six Michelin stars, a long shelf of bestselling cookbooks and a whole generation of home cooks who suddenly wanted to braise things properly.

Born in London and raised in Kent, Rhodes went from a commis chef job in Amsterdam to running a Michelin-starred hotel kitchen before he was thirty. He then built a restaurant group that stretched from the twenty-fourth floor of a London tower to the beaches of Dubai, all while presenting some of the most watched food programmes on British television. He died in Dubai on 26 November 2019 at the age of fifty-nine, and the tributes that followed came from just about every kitchen in Britain.

TL;DR

• English chef and restaurateur, born 22 April 1960 in Camberwell, London, and raised in Gillingham, Kent.
• Champion of modern British cooking: braised oxtail, faggots with onion gravy, fishcakes and the bread and butter pudding that became his calling card.
• Credited with six Michelin stars across his career, at restaurants including The Greenhouse, City Rhodes, Rhodes in the Square, Rhodes Twenty Four and Rhodes W1.
• Presented Rhodes Around Britain, Gary Rhodes New British Classics, MasterChef USA, Hell’s Kitchen and the travel series Rhodes Across India and Rhodes Across China.
• Appointed OBE in 2006 for services to the hospitality industry, having won an Acorn Award back in 1988.
• Moved to Dubai in 2011 and ran Rhodes W1, Rhodes Twenty10 and Rhodes 44. He died there on 26 November 2019, aged 59.

Gary Rhodes key facts

Gary Rhodes: career timeline

From Gillingham to a Michelin star before thirty

Gary Rhodes was born in Camberwell in south London on 22 April 1960, the son of Gordon and Jean Rhodes, and the family soon settled in Gillingham in Kent. He went to The Howard School in Rainham, and by his mid teens the kitchen had comfortably won out over every other possible career. He enrolled at catering college in Thanet, where he absorbed the classical French grounding that would quietly underpin everything he later did with British food, and where he met Jennie, the woman he would marry.

His first professional job took him to the Amsterdam Hilton as a commis chef. It was a formative and occasionally bruising apprenticeship. He was hit by a van in Amsterdam and badly injured, and he came back from it with the sheer stubbornness that colleagues would recognise for the rest of his career. He worked his way around Europe, then returned to London as sous chef at the Reform Club in Pall Mall before joining the Michelin-starred Capital Hotel in Knightsbridge under Brian Turner, a mentor whose influence he happily acknowledged for decades afterwards.

The Castle Hotel and the confidence to cook British

The turning point came in Somerset. Interviewing for the head chef job at the Castle Hotel in Taunton, Rhodes was asked by managing director Kit Chapman what he thought about putting Lancashire hotpot on the menu. He was, by his own cheerful admission, horrified. Then he thought about it properly, and the answer he arrived at helped change British restaurant cooking. Hotpot went on the carte alongside braised oxtails, steak and kidney pie, calves liver with onions and bacon, and boiled leg of mutton with caper sauce. The Michelin star stayed exactly where it was. He retained it at the age of 26, and in 1988 he was named among the very first winners of the Acorn Award, the industry prize for the brightest young talent in hospitality.

That period also produced one of the loveliest pieces of archive television in British food. Keith Floyd, filming his series on Britain and Ireland, dropped into the Castle kitchen and watched the young Rhodes roast oxtail. Two very different men, one shared conviction: British ingredients, treated with respect, could stand up against anything cooked anywhere.

By 1989 he was already making the argument in print. British chefs, he told The Caterer, had forgotten how to braise and stew, while French chefs never lost sight of their traditions. It sounds obvious now. At the time it was close to heresy.

The Greenhouse and a very British revival

In 1990 Rhodes came back to London to run the kitchen at The Greenhouse in Mayfair, and this is where the legend properly took shape. The menu read like a love letter to food that fashionable restaurants had spent twenty years pretending to be embarrassed about. Faggots with onion gravy. Fishcakes with a soft poached egg and buttery spinach. Braised oxtail, slow and sticky and unapologetically rich. And, unforgettably, bread and butter pudding, made with such care that critics wrote about it the way they usually wrote about truffles.

The point was never nostalgia. Rhodes cooked these dishes with the precision he had learned from French classical technique, and the combination of humble subject and immaculate execution was genuinely thrilling to eat. In January 1996 The Greenhouse was awarded a Michelin star, and later that year The Caterer gave him a Cateys Special Award for his work as an ambassador for the industry, praising the way he had persuaded a new generation to look at catering as a career. He was thirty-six, and he had made British food aspirational again.

A television natural

Rhodes first appeared on screen at twenty-seven, on Glynn Christian’s programme Hot Chefs, and the camera adored him immediately. The spiked hair helped. So did the fact that he talked about food the way other people talk about their favourite record: fast, delighted, and completely without condescension. In 1994 the BBC handed him Rhodes Around Britain, and a chef who had been famous inside the trade became famous everywhere.

A remarkable run of series followed. More Rhodes Around Britain and Open Rhodes Around Britain kept the format going, Gary Rhodes Perfect Christmas arrived in 1998, and in 1999 came Gary Rhodes New British Classics, a landmark BBC series with a bestselling book to match that put shepherd’s pie, jam roly-poly and properly made gravy back into ordinary kitchens. He crossed the Atlantic to host the original MasterChef USA on PBS for two seasons in 2000 and 2001, presented MasterChef at home, and fronted the British version of Hell’s Kitchen in 2005. Later came Saturday Cooks on ITV1 and Local Food Hero on UKTV Food.

Rhodes Across India and Rhodes Across China

Two later series showed a different side of him. In Rhodes Across India he travelled with a small group of apprentice cooks, and in 2008 he made Rhodes Across China, working alongside sous chefs Melissa Syers and Teresa Tsang to unpick a cuisine he freely admitted he was still learning. Watching a chef of his standing ask questions rather than hand down verdicts was refreshing then and is part of why the programmes still hold up now.

He was also a very good sport about the sillier end of television. He submitted himself to Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer on Shooting Stars, where he was invited to express fire through the medium of dance, and in 2008 he took to the floor with professional partner Karen Hardy on the sixth series of Strictly Come Dancing. For a chef whose whole argument was that food should be fun rather than forbidding, it was all completely on brand.

Building the Rhodes restaurants

In 1997 Rhodes opened his first restaurant, City Rhodes, in partnership with the contract catering group Sodexo, and followed it in 1998 with Rhodes in the Square. Both won Michelin stars. The partnership also produced the Rhodes and Co brasseries in Manchester, Edinburgh and Crawley, an attempt to take the same cooking to a wider audience at a friendlier price.

His most celebrated London room came in 2003. Rhodes Twenty Four opened on the twenty-fourth floor of Tower 42 in the City, with a view across the capital that made every table feel like an occasion. Asked what he hoped for at the launch, he said he would be very disappointed never to win a Michelin star there, but what he really wanted was customers. He got both. The star arrived in 2005 and stayed until the restaurant closed in 2014.

In 2007 he opened Rhodes W1 at The Cumberland Hotel in Marylebone and surprised almost everybody by pointing it firmly at France. There was no bread and butter pudding, no jam roly-poly, no cottage pie. Instead there was the classical French technique he had been taught as a student and had loved ever since, with British produce wherever he could get it. He named Guy Savoy in Paris and Le Gavroche in London as his two favourite restaurants in the world, and said he wanted to give something back to a cuisine he adored. Michelin awarded the restaurant a star within a year, taking his career total to six.

There were plenty of other ventures along the way: Rhodes South and Kings Rhodes in Christchurch, Rhodes D7 in Dublin, Rhodes at the Dome on Plymouth Hoe, Rhodes Calabash in Grenada, and Arcadian Rhodes and Oriana Rhodes aboard P and O liners. Few British chefs of his era stretched the reach of their cooking quite so far.

Dubai and a second act in the Gulf

In 2011 Rhodes moved to Dubai, and rather than easing off he built an entire new career there. He headed Rhodes Mezzanine at the Grosvenor House Hotel, later relaunched under the Rhodes W1 name, and opened Rhodes Twenty10 at Le Royal Meridien Beach Resort and Spa. Rhodes Mezzanine was named Restaurant of the Year at the Time Out Dubai awards in 2010, and Rhodes Twenty10 took Best Newcomer at the BBC Good Food Middle East awards the following year. In 2013 he opened his first Abu Dhabi restaurant, Rhodes 44 at The St. Regis.

He loved it there and said so often, telling Gulf News that he had no regrets about the move. The Emirates gave him year-round sunshine, an audience hungry for exactly the kind of British cooking he had spent his life arguing for, and the freedom to keep experimenting. Rhodes W1 still trades in Dubai Marina today, listed in the MICHELIN Guide and led by his son Sam.

Restaurants

Awards and honours

Watch Gary Rhodes

See Gary in action in this video.

Signature dishes

If Gary Rhodes is remembered for a single plate, it is bread and butter pudding. His version, built on buttered bread, a vanilla-scented custard and a lightly caramelised top, launched a thousand dinner party ambitions and is still the dish people quote back at British chefs. Braised oxtail was arguably just as important to his reputation, a slow, glossy, deeply savoury thing that he made fashionable again long before nose to tail eating became a movement. Add faggots with onion gravy, crisp-edged fishcakes with a soft poached egg, Lancashire hotpot, steak and kidney pie, jam roly-poly and the Jaffa Cake pudding he served in London, and you have the outline of a menu that changed how a whole country thought about its own food.

Cookbooks

Gary is the author of books including Rhodes Around Britain, More Rhodes Around Britain, Rhodes to Home, Open Rhodes Around Britain, Short Cut Rhodes, Fabulous Food, Sweet Dreams, New British Classics, At the Table, Great Fast Foods, Gary Rhodes Complete Cookery Year, Hell’s Kitchen Cookbook, Keeping It Simple.

Personal life

Rhodes married Jennie Adkins in 1989, after an engagement that ran for the best part of a decade, and the couple had two sons, Samuel and George. Family stayed at the centre of everything he did. Jennie was closely involved in the business, and Sam followed his father into the kitchen and now leads Rhodes W1 in Dubai. Away from the stove Rhodes was a lifelong Manchester United supporter and a restless traveller, and by every account from those who worked with him he was unfailingly generous with young cooks who wanted advice. He was also a committed supporter of cooking education, campaigning for cookery in schools and repeatedly crediting his own college tutors for the career that followed.

Death and legacy

Gary Rhodes died in Dubai on 26 November 2019 at the age of 59, with his wife Jennie beside him. The tributes came from across the industry and from the millions of viewers who had learned to cook watching him. His legacy is simple to state and hard to overstate: he took British cooking, which in the 1980s was a national punchline, and made it something chefs were proud to sign their name to. The Rhodes W1 name still trades in Dubai under his son Sam, his books are still pulled off shelves every Christmas, and every modern British restaurant serving a properly braised oxtail owes him a nod of thanks.

Gary in context

Gary Rhodes is one of many chefs and food personalities profiled on Pickup Table 4, alongside Delia Smith and Rick Stein.

Gary Rhodes FAQ

Who was Gary Rhodes?
Gary Rhodes OBE was an English chef, restaurateur and television presenter, born on 22 April 1960. He was known for reviving classic British dishes and for the Rhodes restaurants in London, Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

How many Michelin stars did Gary Rhodes have?
He is generally credited with six Michelin stars across his career, earned at restaurants including The Greenhouse, City Rhodes, Rhodes in the Square, Rhodes Twenty Four and Rhodes W1. He held them at different points rather than all at the same time.

What was Gary Rhodes best known for cooking?
Bread and butter pudding above all, together with braised oxtail, faggots with onion gravy, fishcakes and other British classics that he reworked using French classical technique.

What television shows did Gary Rhodes present?
Rhodes Around Britain, More Rhodes Around Britain, Open Rhodes Around Britain, Gary Rhodes New British Classics, Gary Rhodes Perfect Christmas, MasterChef and MasterChef USA, Hell’s Kitchen, Rhodes Across India and Rhodes Across China, among many others.

When and where did Gary Rhodes die?
He died in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, on 26 November 2019, at the age of 59.

Are any Gary Rhodes restaurants still open?
Yes. Rhodes W1 continues in Dubai Marina, listed in the MICHELIN Guide and run by his son Sam Rhodes.

Sources and further reading

This profile draws on reputable references including Wikipedia, BBC News, The Guardian, The Caterer, the MICHELIN Guide.