Chef Michael Caines

“My gift in life is I am a great cook and I want to share that with as many people as I can,” declares Michael Caines but 15 years ago that career, which has seen him become one of Britain’s most acclaimed chefs with his innovative modern European cuisine, was almost over just as it was getting started.

 

After training in France with such esteemed figures as Joel Robuchon and the late Bernard Loiseau, Michael Caines returned to Britain at the age of 25 to take up his first Head Chef position at Gidleigh Park’s Michelin starred restaurant in his native Devon, but after only two months he suffered a horrific car accident.

 

“As always when you start a new job you are burning the candle at both ends and I just physically got very tired,” he explains. “I took some time off to go to a family christening and I fell asleep at the wheel on my way back. Fortunately I managed to survive but unfortunately I lost my arm.”

 

Caines immediately thought that his career was over but with the support of Gidleigh’s then owners, Paul and Kay Henderson, family and friends, and his own belief in his ability to overcome obstacles, he returned to the kitchens after just two weeks. “There was no time to sit and feel sorry for myself, it was just one of those things. I felt that intellectually I had not lost anything, all my ideas were still up there, my taste buds, my creativity.”

 

 

But the unashamedly ambitious chef is not stopping there. “Getting a second star also gives you a belief that you can in time achieve a third. I’m clearly someone that enjoys a challenge and a third star has to be a target,” he says.

 

Although that’s only part of Caines’ future aims. Earlier this year he took over as Executive Chef at Bath Priory, a luxurious town house hotel on the outskirts of Bath, which he hopes to bring up to Gidleigh’s standards, re-launching their Michelin starred restaurant and introducing a new Grazing Menu as well as reviving the traditional British roast with all the trimmings in a bid to woo customers.

 

Caines is also expanding the ABode hotel group which he runs with Gidleigh Park and Bath Priory owner Andrew Brownsword. After opening the first Abode in the former Royal Clarence Hotel in Caines’ home town of Exeter, there are now hotels, with Michael Caines restaurants, in Canterbury, Glasgow and Manchester with new ventures planned for Chester and Salisbury next year and more in the future.

 

Like many chefs, Caines’ culinary interest stems from his childhood. He was born in Exeter in 1969 and adopted at three months old into a large and loving family where gardening and cooking were a big part of life. “We grew our own vegetables and I used to help mum turn the produce into wonderful meals. From a very young age I used to bake cakes and what not and by the time I was 9 or 10 I was making Sunday lunch.”

 

After attending Exeter Catering College, where he was 1987 Student of the Year, he spent a year and a half at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London’s Park Lane before leaving to work for Raymond Blanc at the Le Manoir Quat’ Saisons in Oxfordshire. Blanc became his mentor and got him his first job in France at Bernard Loiseau’s three star Michelin restaurant La Cote d’Or at Saulieu (now Relais Bernard Loiseau). “I was the first English boy in the kitchen - and I was the first black person as well - but they took to me very well and I have absolutely fabulous memories of working there,” he says.

 

 

Caines then went to Paris working with Joel Robuchon, a notoriously stern task-master that he describes as “the Swiss Watchmaker of world cuisine”. “I have to take my hat off to him,” says Caines. “With Robuchon it was all about technique and he was unrelenting in his pursuit of excellence and quality.”

Just under a year later Caines returned to England to take up the Head Chef’s job at Gidleigh. An opportunity that suited the West Country boy down to the ground. “I think quite a few of us like to end up going home so for me to be able to come back here and develop my career has been wonderful,” says Caines who now lives in mid-Devon, halfway between Gidleigh Park and Exeter with his partner Ruth and their two young children Joseph and Hope.

 

As far as Caines is concerned there’s nowhere better. “The natural beauty of the area is fantastic and it’s got such an amazing farming and fishing heritage too. I reckon Devon has the best larder in Europe. It’s a privilege to work with it.”

 

While cooking is, and always will be his passion, the chef clearly also relishes the business side. “I am lucky in that I am naturally talented at cooking so have been able to develop as a businessman, hotelier and entrepreneur alongside that without having to compromise,” he states, whilst strongly countering any suggestion that he may be spreading himself too thinly by heading up an ever increasing number of kitchens.