JAMES SHARMAN

Since my first day as a chef at 15, I'd been fighting this feeling that diners were getting the raw end of the deal.

Not because the food wasn't great, if anything that only made it worse.
For the first time in my life, I started feeling real food in my hands. I couldn't get over the magic of it all.

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The first thing I ever made was jam. Growing up, I’d foolishly thought jam was just jam - nice on toast.

I'd never seen the proud smile of the person who nurtured those raspberries for months.

I hadn’t heard the first few bubbles of sugar as the pan heats up, as the berries melt together like jewels. I hadn’t seen the molten chaos in those final moments before it finds its home in steaming hot jars.

Before kitchens, jam was jam to me, Making it brought it to life -  that most people would eat jam for the rest of their lives without ever having felt that really bothered me. I just knew they could love it so much more if they had.

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It got worse.

At 18, I got a job in a basement kitchen in London. On my first day, I was put on pasta. I'd never made it before and was completely taken by it. My job was to make fresh pappardelle for the evening, and I spent the entire day doing little else.
When the first order of pappardelle went upstairs, I followed it, watching from the top of the stairs as the couple took their first bite  expecting them to mirror my own excitement and rapture.

They didn’t.

They liked it. It was great pasta.
And then they just… carried on.
I remember standing at the top there thinking, that’s it?
After the beautiful drama that had unfolded to make it?

If only they’d been there they'd understand.

If they’d seen the way all those golden yolks broke into the flour,
felt the stubbornness of that firm dough eventually surrender itself into the rollers as it was pressed into a long, smooth sheet. They’d have loved it so much more.
 

But they weren’t there.
 

I carried that feeling through every kitchen I worked in.
The better the restaurant, the worse it became. Noma was the last straw.
We could take these beautiful dishes to the table and explain them ourselves, it was my chance.

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No matter how I described the dish to the guests, they could never really know the sensory drama that had gone into it all. I’d still walk back to the kitchen with that same sense of unfinished business.
 

After Noma, some friends and I travelled the world building immersive dining experiences. We took guests up Everest for us to cook for them, turned carriages of night trains through Vietnam into bistros and floated a restaurant out onto a lake in Kenya on a structurally dubious barge we’d built while we cooked for them. We went too extreme lengths trying to get people as close to it all as we could imagine.
 

Then I discovered film, through it I feel I finally have a way to show the beauty I've felt in food all these years. There’s magic in things being made with care. Food taught me this, but it seems to be everywhere if you're willing to apply the right lens.

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James