Thomas Straker became famous for his TikTok recipes, although he doesn’t like it when people point that out. He protests that he’s a serious cook – he has worked at Elystan Street, Dinner by Heston Blumenthal and The Dorchester – but most people know him as the butter guy. It’s hard to avoid that label when his flavoured butter recipes have led to a following of 2.1 million people. His TikToks are perfectly constructed using schizophrenic jump cuts and ASMR narration and he likes to make viewers salivate over his Bloody Mary butter, Biscoff butter, tequila butter, and bone marrow butter. Here’s him doing something indecent with chicken skin:
Straker Industries was all going perfectly. His restaurant, unimaginatively named Straker’s, has become something of a West London hangout. It received an excellent review from the Times restaurant critic Giles Coren and then ended up in the top 100 in the National Restaurant Awards. And he has just started a dairy division called All Things Butter (his range of flavoured butters will be in supermarkets soon) and last week he opened a second outlet Flatbread in Battersea Power Station. He told the Times he is set to launch another site in Notting Hill later this year. This handsome, motorbike-riding chef is ‘making West London cool again’.
In a show of resistance, Straker told everyone to ‘calm down’
Then he posted a picture on Instagram of his chefs at Straker’s and got pilloried. All eight of the cooks are white men. Ah, the optics, the optics. Thousands of commenters said things like ‘oh dear’, ‘are you afraid of women?’, ‘do some reflection’ or simply ‘be better’.
In a show of resistance, Straker told everyone to ‘calm down’, adding that ‘if you feel so passionately please go and gather CVs of any chefs you think we’re missing in the team. Solutions not problems. Thank you.’ But inevitably, a couple of days later, an apology was posted, again on his Instagram. It screams ‘written by someone else’. Thomas, we are led to believe, has had a change of heart. He said that he was ‘absolutely committed to ensuring diversity in my restaurants… this is an area I know I need to improve on’.
But this diversity argument is only going to run in one direction. Few suggest chucking some English guys into a Chinese kitchen to make sure that those making sweet and sour chicken balls are representative. Not that it matters when you have an industry that often boasts about its own toxicity. There are tales of angry chefs slashing each other’s jackets with carving knives, iPhones being deep-fried for mucking up, and interns left plucking feathers from ducks in freezing rain. All this to the sound of shouting and smashing pans and all of it medicated by extreme amounts of alcohol. Some chefs insist that it’s not really like that anymore, but they should probably say it a bit louder.
Is it any surprise that it is men who fill our nation’s kitchens? Only one British woman – Clare Smyth in 2021 – has ever received three Michelin stars. A female chef told the Times that ‘in my entire career I had only three women apply to work in my kitchen team’. Listen to interviews with Straker and you’ll realise he’s one of these macho, autocratic chefs; the restaurant’s seven kitchen staff are there to implement his menu. His vision has worked so far. What he would really love in his kitchen is seven clones of Thomas Straker.
Anyway, there’s something far more troubling about the butter man. I went to his restaurant in February and had a really good meal but, crucially, he doesn’t advertise the prices on his website. A friend and I sat down and shared four small plates of food: a delightful burnt chilli and mussel butter flatbread (£12), langoustines (£24), roasted sweetbreads (£24), and a pork belly that’s crackling was made into something approaching a shard of glass (£38). Add a bottle of wine plus service and the bill comes to something around £160. Perhaps that’s normal now, but at least give me a heads-up.
Straker will probably ride all this out: appetite trumps outrage. In any case, he has a role. One critic imploring him to change his hiring process reminded the chef that Notting Hill is ‘historically a black/Moroccan/Spanish/Portuguese community’. That’s true, but it’s also a place for Richard Curtis enjoyers to hyperventilate about the latest spot, before forgetting all about it and moving on to the next one. That’s the Notting Hill of Thomas Straker. Thanks to this TikTok butter star, at least I feel represented.
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