Michelin star chef Stephen Harris on starting over at nearly 40 and the nostalgic meals of his childhood

Stephen Harris remembers feeling ill one day and craving the comforting childhood memory of cream of mushroom soup. And being bitterly disappointed with a can from a shop.

“I opened it, the smell was horrendous. I couldn’t even eat that,” says the Michelin-star chef, who owns The Sportsman near Whitstable, Kent.

“So I felt, right, I’m going to improve this recipe and make it as good as my memory. I fried up some mushrooms, added a bit of soy sauce – because that brings out the mushroom flavour – I made a stock by putting some milk in a pan, dried cep mushroom, a bit of thyme and a clove of garlic” – along with extra raw mushrooms blitzed up, the stock strained into the blender.

“I just got this gorgeous mushroom soup, that exactly matched the memory I had of it as a kid. I also made cream of tomato and cream of chicken,” adds the 64-year-old. “Oh my God it’s simple but it’s better.”

Homemade tomato soup (the best tomatoes he can find, cut, blitzed until liquid, boiled off in a pan to lose a third of the water, salt and sour cream) is Harris’ lunch once a week. “Everybody can do that”.

Don’t talk to him about the word nostalgia though – “I’m not a fan, I find it slightly empty,” he notes – despite it being the tag line on his latest cookbook, The Sportsman At Home: Flavoursome Recipes for Nostalgic Eating.

His vision is more about “improving the food you remember”, he says, in a way that works for home cooks in their kitchens. Think cullen skink, cottage pie, and homemade digestive biscuits. As well as a thousand island sauce – this time accompanying baked salmon, rather than the Seventies prawn cocktail.

His acclaimed gastropub has held a Michelin star since 2008, but Harris is a bit of an anomaly in the culinary world – previously a financial consultant with no formal food training. At the age of 37, as a self-taught amateur cook, he quit corporate life to pursue a dream of opening his own restaurant.

“I’d lost 15 years of my career, to be honest, if you’re not a head chef by the time you’re 40 you’re probably not going to get anywhere,” he says. “I was late to it.

He’d take himself for lunchtime deals at top Michelin-star restaurants. “It wasn’t too expensive, they used to do nice £25 lunches, and I taught myself to cook by eating a dish and then going home and trying to cook it, often with their recipe book. It was quite an unusual way of cooking but it’s quite logical, if you think about it.”

Having a complete career change decades after most chefs start their training was a risk, but Harris says, “I didn’t have any children, I’d split with my girlfriend of many years, I didn’t have any ties, I didn’t have a mortgage. So I was in a really good position to just say, ‘Right, sorry, I’m going to start again’. And I literally started again, from zero.

“I just wasn’t cut out for going into an office every day wearing a suit. I just love the freedom of being a chef, even though I was going to have to work long hours, it felt like freedom to me straight away.”

He did “six months here, six months there” in restaurants, to learn how they worked – “I wasn’t arrogant enough to think I could just open a restaurant” – and then found a seaside run-down pub five miles outside of where he lived in Whitstable, and bought it with his brother, Phil.

“I can remember people thinking, ‘What are you doing? It’s so horrible’. Now people love it.

“The area now has the benefit of being known as ‘bleak chic’. The idea that an out-of-season seaside town could have a beauty, if you can see it. There are some caravans around, but what’s wrong with that?”

Since its opening in 1999, The Sportsman has become known for its simple use of quality locally sourced ingredients – and attracted many famous faces to its unpretentious setting.

“I wanted it to be like a three Michelin-star restaurant that you’d get in London or Paris, but with all the extraneous stuff left out. So you wouldn’t have 40 people walking the floor… I would leave anything out that wasn’t essential to the flavour of the dish. But I would source the best ingredients.

“I just love good basic food. Give me like, chicken, roast potatoes, vegetables that came out of the ground within recently and a beautifully made gravy. And that’s it – I’m happy.”

“And I just thought, that’s a palace, that’s everything I need. I don’t really need to look any further than what’s around me.”

He grew up in Whitstable on his mum’s “fresh, properly cooked food”, and eating healthily has become even more important recently. “It’s age – I’m 64 now, that’s quite old but I don’t feel it. I eat a lot of olive oil,” he says.

One of his favourite nutritious dishes to rustle up is ratatouille. “It’s basically whatever vegetables cooked in olive oil for a long time, “you buy a few extra things like soy sauce, a knob of ginger, dried wild mushrooms and dried ceps – you need them to make stock. When all the vegetables are cooked, pour over the stock and reduce it right now and it gives your vegetables this really intense [flavour] – it tastes of what it’s supposed to.”

The Sportsman at Home by Stephen Harris is published in hardback by Quadrille, priced £30. Photography by Kim Lightbody. Available now.