However, Adam eventually landed a job as head chef at St Ermin’s Hotel in St James’ Park.
Getting your foot in the door there is always hard, especially if you’re after a senior position like I was, because everyone would say ‘oh, you’ve not done London before, so you have to start as a junior sous’ – even though I was basically teaching the sous chef how to do things.’ ‘After a year I ran out of money, so I came home and looked for a job in London. ‘I know loads of people say you find yourself when you’re travelling and it sounds like bullshit, but it really did help me get some perspective on life,’ he says. Up until this point, Adam had sacrificed his personal life to get a good grounding in his career, so he felt it was time to get out of the kitchen and see the world. I wasn’t sure if being a chef was for me.’ ‘I became pretty nasty and when I realised it wasn’t going to happen I just packed it all in to go travelling. Soon after he was named Young Chef of the Year at the Scottish Culinary Championships, but that wasn’t enough – Adam was after a Michelin star. This led Adam to London and Newcastle for a short time, before he returned to Scotland to become the youngest ever head chef at Fairmont St Andrews. By this point he’d gained the sort of expert training you can only get in kitchens like Gleneagles, and he was ready to move on. But eventually he worked his way up to the grill and ran the section himself. The next few years were tough with over 100 chefs working at Gleneagles, he wasn’t allowed to do anything more than prepare vegetables for the first nine months.
‘I’m brutally honest, very stubborn and I always want to be the very best at anything I do, and I think they liked that.’ ‘I’m a cheeky little bugger and I think that’s why they gave it to me,’ he says. Eventually my mum said if I wasn’t going to sixth form then I had better get an apprenticeship at a place that’s really well respected, and it just so happened that my teacher had heard about Gleneagles accepting apprentices for the first time.’ĭonning his dad’s suit, Adam had to go through four interviews before he was offered the apprenticeship.
‘I wasn’t the most academic person in school, but all my family went to university so it was expected of me – particularly because it was free to go in Scotland. ‘I had experienced a lot of different cultures because my dad was in the army, but I don’t have a story about helping my gran in the kitchen or anything like that,’ he says. Not bad for a thirty-one-year-old especially one who only started cooking so he could escape school. And while there are many role models that encapsulate this in the world of hospitality, few can hold a candle to Adam Handling, who has a plethora of accolades and a restaurant empire to his name. You have to put up with brutally long working hours constantly strive to be better than yesterday and soak up as much knowledge as you can. Drive, hard work and ambition – three things every chef needs to succeed in a notoriously difficult industry.