Dress code: Smart with jacket preferred

Capacity: 70

Smoking is not permitted in the restaurant.

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Marcus Wareing
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Marcus Wareing Interview
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Marcus Wareing Interview
Darius Sanai, interviews Marcus Wareing, the crown prince of British cooking, about his rise to success.

Marcus Wareing is sitting, rod-backed, in the lobby of The Berkeley, occasionally whipping his head around like a fox to observe people coming and going.

Wiry-thin, intense, serious, he doesn't look like a chef, and he doesn't really look like a boxer either - the only other activity he embraced with any dedication.

'Boxing instilled a lot of discipline in me,' he says. 'It was tough but I loved it, because it was one-on-one aggression, and it kept me off the streets.'

Wareing is very much a chef. Once known chiefly as a protégé of his great friend and mentor, Gordon Ramsay, Wareing is now basking in a limelight of his own. As Chef/Patron of Pétrus at The Berkeley, he is the brightest young thing in British cuisine. Wareing's achievements speak for themselves, all the louder because of where he came from. He is a working-class boy from Southport, Merseyside, one of the most economically depressed areas of Britain and many worlds away from the glamour of central London. 'No one from Southport ever came to work in London or made it as a chef in London,' he says. 'It was inconceivable. No one would even know where to start.' Yet Wareing, who left catering college in Southport at 18, had a Michelin-starred restaurant, Pétrus, in St James's, the heart of Establishment London, by the time he was 30. Another Michelin star followed, and earlier this year he moved Pétrus to The Berkeley. He already had a reputation for technical brilliance in the creation and execution of French cuisine.  'It's simple,' he says. 'Don't camouflage food with unnecessary flavours. Let the flavour come out on its own, just enhance it.