From Michelin star kitchens to a village pub... chef Gary Usher's new spot is a gem

Gary Usher, the multi award-winning restaurateur who’s worked under some of the most influential chefs in the world and now has a string of successful restaurants to his name, didn't have much fun at school.

“I hated learning and I hated school,” he says. “Probably dyslexia had a big part to play in it. You were just 'thick' if you had dyslexia back then.” It wasn’t identified until he was around 11, but by then, he’d lost interest in school entirely. “I didn’t get any support at all,” he goes on.

It was when he took a job at a pub in North Wales after leaving school with no qualifications that a final attempt was made for him to at least get some kind of paperwork saying he’d been formally educated. He was sent to college for a day a week as part of his apprenticeship, but he hated that too.

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“I think I went twice,” he says. “And I just said to the pub ‘Look, I f**king hate it’. It was like school to me. I didn’t want to listen to a teacher. I’ll listen to a head chef or sous chef and I'll do anything that they tell me. I respected the chefs, I think, which sounds stupid, but at the time, they spoke to me on a level.

“So they were asking me to mop the floor or make them a club sandwich or whatever it was, and it was almost like your mate asking you to do something. Plus I thought they were cool. My sister is a teacher, I should say, and a very good one!”

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