By the time he was 12, Jason Atherton already knew he wanted to be a chef. After a brief six-week stint at the Army Catering Corps (“I was the worst soldier on planet earth”), the then 16 year old bought a one-way ticket from the seaside town of Skegness to London and never looked back. The self-taught chef started his career at Boyd Gilmour’s Covent Garden restaurant, preferring the action in the kitchen to the monotony of school. “I respond better to being taught manually than by a book,” he confides.
He worked his way up the food chain, cutting his teeth with Pierre Koffmann and Marco Pierre White, among others. But by 1998, eager to expand his skillset, Atherton left for Catalonia, Spain to work at El Bulli. His tenacity got him a job in legendary chef Ferran Adrià’s kitchen despite not speaking Spanish. “No one had ever taught me how to be creative, and Adrià was that person for me,” he explains. He joined Gordon Ramsay in 2000, where he spent 12 years as executive chef at Verre and Glasshouse in Dubai and later Maze in London, which earned Atherton his first Michelin Star.
His next venture was his most ambitious yet: his own restaurant group, the Social Company, and flagship restaurant Pollen Street Social. “Any creative person asks themselves, ‘Am I going to die not knowing if I can do this myself?’ I had to know the answer to that.” He and his wife remortgaged their home and invested their life savings into the company. “It was very scary. Everything was on the line,” he recalls. “Our life was good, but we took the gamble.” The restaurant opened its doors in 2011 and was an immediate success, receiving 7,000 calls for reservations within its first 48 hours and earning Atherton another Michelin Star. Since then, he’s opened 15 restaurants, including Kensington Street Social in Sydney and Aberdeen Street Social in Hong Kong.
Unsurprisingly, Atherton’s skyrocketing career caught the attention of Ian Schrager. On the third attempt to recruit him, the chef and his wife finally acquiesced and made the trip to New York to meet the hotelier and his EDITION team. Atherton was blown away by their plan and design for the London EDITION restaurant. “I got goose pimples,” he says. He knew he couldn’t turn down the opportunity to work with Schrager. Berners Tavern opened in the London EDITION in 2013, followed by the Clocktower in the New York property two years later, earning him his fourth Michelin Star. Most recently, he opened three new F&B outposts in the Shanghai EDITION.
“Ian taught me a lot about the restaurant business—about what he looks for in a restaurant, about design, and how to create buzz around opening,” says Atherton. “He’s a genius about it, and a father figure to me. When restaurants are a family affair, you feel it. When you go to a restaurant, you feel [who’s behind it]. You just feel it.”
