The big interview: Honest Foods London

For a man who fell into film and TV catering by accident, it is more than a little ironic that Leon Rothera’s own early childhood could in itself provide fertile ground for Hollywood scriptwriters. He was raised throughout much of the ‘80s by his Anglo-French family in a cottage at the top of a hill on the edge of the moors in rural Northumberland. There was no electricity and no TV, just the wild beauty of the landscape around him.

His early existence was filled with an abundance of happy childhood memories, helping his father in the barn or garden. “We lived off our garden, and my toys were my tools,” he recalls. “We grew just about everything that the Northumbrian soil would yield, the odd globe artichoke at best, along with other root vegetables and kale. We kept a couple of goats, and my mother would make cheese from their milk and bake bread. We’d get our meat – not too much – from a nearby farm.”

Life may have been devoid of the usual consumer luxuries, but it was rich in what really matters.  “I had no notion of eating in restaurants or of ordering takeaway food,” Rothera says. “We just ate a lot of good, wholesome French peasant food around the table at home or in France with family and friends.”

He was also the first child in the north-east to be officially home-schooled, a fact that strongly resonated with his French father, who rebelled against his own education by monks in a strict Catholic boarding school. Far from feeling lonely and isolated, the young Rothera found the experience highly stimulating. “My tutors involved a very eclectic bunch of people who included a university professor, a builder and another who made guitars for a living,” he remembers.

But this happy band of brothers sadly began to disperse and by the age of 10, Rothera decided to go to school. This resulted in the whole family moving to his maternal grandmother’s house in Newcastle. But school turned out to be something of a rude awakening for the artistic and creative boy, who has only recently been diagnosed with ADHD. He struggled with the level of conformity school imposed.  “I wanted to study both music and art, but my teachers said I couldn’t because those subjects were too closely related,” he says.

However, Rothera already knew the direction that his life would take. “I have never wanted to be anything other than a chef like my great grandfather, who I am named after,” he says.

Food was his destiny. His ancestors from the Massif Central in southern France had been well-to-do farmers and producers of food for hundreds of years. There is still a village bakery owned by his family, though it is no longer operational as a result of depopulation and economic decline in the region.  

Rothera left school at 16 to study catering at a local sixth form college. The course also included placement work, which in his case was confined to working in the college canteen. And Rothera’s ambitions extended beyond microwaving omelettes. “I complained to the head of my year that I was never going to progress in the way I envisaged,” he says. “He said, ‘Okay, I’m going to send you to a restaurant where very few people survive more than three months’.”

However, Rothera not only survived but thrived under the tutorage of the chef proprietor of the Black Gate, Douglas Jordan. “He encouraged me to enter chef competitions and showed me how to remake dishes from college or local restaurants that we had tried, with the aim of improving them,” Rothera says.

Jordan’s legacy has endured to this day. “What he taught me was that you should never serve or cook something you wouldn’t want to eat yourself, a principle that has underpinned my own business, Honest Foods,” Rothera reasons.

He subsequently moved to London to perfect his craft skills, working at the Lanesborough Hotel under the great Paul Gayler and at No 1, Lombard Street, the Michelin-starred restaurant where he became a chef de partie by the age of 20. Rothera also worked with two American chefs of note, Marcus Samuelsson and the late Charlie Trotter at Alison Price & Company. Now part of Eventist, the high-end event caterer’s clients included royalty, heads of state, blue-chip companies and celebrities such as Sir Elton John at the time.

But by the early years of this century, Rothera’s independent spirit yearned for the self-determination that working for others didn’t provide. He began, with his then girlfriend and her brother, cooking for private client dinner parties and other freelance events. It was incredibly hard work, yet it netted little in the way of financial security.  

However, in 2006, Rothera had a lucky break. His former girlfriend’s father, a businessman and lawyer, helped him buy a small café and kitchen in Brixton with a residential flat above. They would run their own deli.

It was a good property, well kitted out, having previously been run as a vegetarian restaurant with a particular hippy vibe that appealed. Rothera quickly set out to establish the best local deli, using the finest seasonal produce. “I made all my pastry, ice-creams and sorbets,” he says.

Yet, despite all this endeavour, he was only earning a few hundred pounds a week and had split from his girlfriend. “I was 25 years old, running this business by myself, with no real understanding of the economics involved,” Rothera admits. “I was already six months behind with the mortgage.”

He decided to turn his business into a café, but he did not have the money required to undertake a professional makeover. “My friend, a carpenter, came down to help me make tables out of plywood and find whatever chairs we could Rothera,” says.

He also operated as a restaurant on Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings, which quickly proved popular. “Things got better financially,” Rothera says. “Instead of pulling in £500 a week, I was making £2,000.”

Despite this success, there was still the uncomfortable question of how he would repay his mortgage arrears. “It was just the hardest time,” Rothera recalls.

But then good fortune returned. A friend who owned a film and TV production company asked him if he would undertake the catering for a PlayStation commercial in Streatham. “I provided them with the very best food and the client was bowled over,” Rothera says, explaining that film industry catering was surprisingly basic in that period, more akin to providing army food.

Further offers from production houses followed. Rothera initially rented out his Brixton premises, which he later sold, while he rented a house in east London with a substantial kitchen and good storage facilities, to focus on his new-found clients in the film industry. His meals were ‘hot-boxed’ in thermal containers and sent to various film and TV locations. He also acquired the first of his eventual four food trucks, a burger van that he converted into a transportable kitchen. His timing was impeccable. “Netflix arrived in the UK along with streaming services and it all went wild,” Rothera recalls.

A typical TV drama for terrestrial TV would normally last six weeks and involve some 70 people a day. However, when Netflix arrived, they expanded to three- or even six-month shoots involving some 150 people a day. “We went from invoicing clients five grand a week to £25,000 a week,” says Rothera. “It just went bonkers and we crossed over into the multi-million threshold.”

However, this meant Rothera was back to working 18-hours a day, with five people on each of his trucks cooking for big productions. “I felt stuck, despite the money we were making,” he says.

Something had to give. “If I carried on that way, it would have been impossible to maintain our standards,” Rothera says.

His solution was to establish a central production unit (CPU) in Bermondsey, where they could prep most of their meals beforehand. The process took three rocky years to perfect, but the end result, he claims, is a ‘go-to’ brand for independent film and TV studios in an industry dominated by specialist catering companies bolted on to larger conglomerates.

“I can honestly say, we don’t get complaints about our food,” Rothera says. “Our reviews on Google are five star, our salads get favourably compared to Ottolenghi’s and all of our desserts are made in-house.”

Such accolades are no mean feat. The film and TV world is notoriously difficult to break into and extremely difficult to get right.  While Rothera maintains that 90% of the Hollywood stars he has cooked for, which include Johnny Depp and Olivia Coleman, are wonderful and appreciative of the food provided, pleasing wider crews can be demanding.  

“There are many things that can go wrong,” he says. For a start, most professional chefs do not want to work on location in the middle of a muddy field. “It is easier to train up people with the right attitude who can produce food with the same level of love as a mum might in her own kitchen,” Rothera adds.

The film industry is not for the faint-hearted. It is also seasonal and work generally slows as winter approaches. For this reason, Honest Foods has recently moved into corporate catering and is also an established supplier to a major contract caterer of meals from its CPU. In order to qualify, Honest Foods underwent SALSA accreditation, a food safety certification scheme for small UK businesses. This level of assurance also helps differentiate the company from other film and TV catering enterprises, which are largely unregulated.

I finish our illuminating chat by asking Rothera what his 20-year career developing his business has taught him. “Do one thing really well, don’t scale too fast and build strong relationships, which is what I’ve always tried to do,” replies the free-spirited chef, whose vegetable sewing childhood bloomed into a flourishing business that nourishes the creative talents of the silver screen.

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