Ian McAndrew’s memoir, Just Call Me Chef, traces over five decades in professional kitchens, from a working class childhood in County Durham to Michelin starred success in London. With wit and honesty, he reveals the pressure, sacrifice and joy behind a life spent cooking at the very top.
The kitchen isn’t just a place to work; it’s a place to live.
From dodging metalwork class to running Michelin-starred restaurants, Ian McAndrew’s career has been anything but conventional. In Just Call Me Chef, McAndrew offers a candid, warts-and-all account of over five decades spent shaping the face of modern British cooking.
This autobiography invites you behind the hotplate, chronicling the journey of a scruffy lad from Seaham, County Durham, who rose to become one of the UK’s most respected culinary figures.
Just Call Me Chef is more than a food memoir; it’s a journey through the evolution of the hospitality industry, revealing the relentless discipline, unexpected humour, and sheer passion required to build a lasting culinary legacy.
The Salt Spectrum is a professional guide to understanding salt as a tool of control rather than taste. Written for chefs and serious cooks, it examines how salt affects flavour, structure, and safety, replacing folklore with clear frameworks for judgement, restraint, and deliberate decision-making in real kitchens.
The Mechanics of Oil is a professional guide to understanding how fats behave in real kitchens. Written for chefs, it explains structure, stability, heat, and failure through cause and effect, not rules. This is not a buying guide or nutrition manual, but a book about judgement under pressure.
A straightforward, practical 60-minute audit for real UK kitchens. This digital guide walks you through stock, purchasing, menus, labour, energy, and waste to reveal where cash is leaking and how to plug the gaps quickly. No jargon, no gimmicks, just a simple routine you can repeat weekly to protect your margins and keep service afloat.