Ian McAndrew

Ian McAndrew was one of the first of the new British wunderkinder – that breed of under-3Os who startled the culinary scene at the beginning of the 1980s. However, unlike several of his promising contemporaries at the turn of the decade – chefs who either fell as casualties of the revolution or simply drifted into obscurity – McAndrew, still well short of his fortieth birthday, has lasted the course and looks primed to hit top billing in the 1990s.

Nevertheless, in spite of his hard-earned celebrity over the past ten years, he is an enigmatic individual; a bit of a loner who appears to maintain a safe distance from the mainstream of his trade but who is, in fact, riding hard on the inside track. Most of the chefs in this book offer some semblance of logic to their progression, no matter how eccentric. In McAndrew, there is no such logic. His position today was born out of an early life which was strangely empty and lacking in direction. After he left school, it took eight years for his aimlessness to work itself out and only when he went to the Dorchester – an experience which swept over him like a religious conversion – did the blindfold come’down and his career, take off.