The Sportsman chef Stephen Harris: From punk rocker to Michelin-starred restaurateur

Picture this. It's the 1970s. And Stephen Harris is having his friends over for bread rolls and butter. "I baked them myself," says Harris. "And I said to them, 'You've got to taste how delicious freshly baked bread is with butter.' That's such a weird thing to do when you're 15."

Then again, it's also very Stephen Harris. The self-taught British chef with a punk rock heart quit the finance industry in his 30s to work in kitchens and ended up running one of Britain's best-loved restaurants, The Sportsman, in an old pub in Kent.

But for fate, it might never have turned out that way. During the late '70s, the white-hot era of punk, the airwaves radiated with The Jam. The Clash. The Ramones. Blondie. The Buzzcocks. Joy Division. And Harris's own band, The Ignerants.

The schoolboy punks had a recording contract and a couple of singles under their belts. They were getting airtime. But a knockback from a major London label sent them in different directions.

"If I had known what I know now, I wish we had stuck up with it," says Harris. "We got one big knockback, and we thought, 'Well, that's it.' I didn't realise that you just go to the next record company."

So rather than becoming the next Joe Strummer or Iggy Pop, Harris landed at King's College London, studying history. His first job as a young graduate was as a history teacher in Portobello Road, where he worked for three years. By then it was the '80s, in Thatcher's Britain, and teachers were paid horribly. "I just thought, 'Sod it'." And against his better judgment he went into finance.

As soon as I was finished learning where I was, it'd be off to the next thing.

It was a job that saw him eating at London's best restaurants, including Chez Nico on Park Lane, run by self-taught chef Nico Ladenis, which held two Michelin stars at the time. It was the meal that changed Harris's life, stirring him to quit a job that didn't play well to his heart chords, and follow a similar path to Ladenis.

He took a job on the lowest rung in a friend's kitchen, washing dishes and peeling potatoes, learning everything he could from the ground up. And though he says he could have taken shortcuts ("there's MasterChef, but everything about it is bullshit"), his endgame was never television shows or book deals. It was owning and running a restaurant where he'd cook his own food.

You might call Harris cut-throat or driven. But there's no arguing that he's obsessive. Driven to distraction by food from an early age, he's one of the rare cases of a dinner party chef turning his skill cooking for friends into a successful restaurant business. But not without some serious graft at an age when most chefs are running brigades of their own, or thinking about stepping back from the pans.

Within a year he was running kitchen sections. Soon after, he was running kitchens. "Nothing was going to stop me," he says. "I really got brutal. As soon as I was finished learning where I was, it'd be off to the next thing. And that's tough but I was 33, and starting from the beginning. You haven't got time to mess around."

A chance road trip with his brother ended in him taking the lease for the Sportsman, a rundown pub in Whitstable, Kent, in 1999. He knew immediately what he wanted to do with it. "I know it sounds really freaky, but I would go to sleep at night and I could visualise it."

The idea was to create a restaurant stripped back to the elements he considered vital. Harris took a small loan from his brother, and set about renovating the old pub as cheaply as possible.

He tracked down factory seconds from the area's famous potters – plates with slight imperfections that could never be sold to Marco Pierre White or Pierre Koffman, but were perfect for a restaurant that he intended to run like the bands he worshipped. "Let's go back to the basics. You know, guitar player, drums, small club, that's it. What more do you need?" The Sportsman was not to be a stadium show, but an intimate club gig.

At first, the food he was cooking was a pastiche of dishes he'd eaten around London, "copying all the good ideas and leaving all the bad ones behind". It was four or five years before he started to think he could stop copying other people's food, and start cooking his own.

A meeting with an old archeologist friend got Harris thinking about making more of the ingredients in his surrounding area. The land around the Sportsman turned out to be an ancient food production area, once the larder for Canterbury Cathedral, according to the Domesday Book (think of the 1000-year-old tome as the census, only conducted by William the Conqueror).

"I was always into the concept of cooking from the landscape. And it's just became more extreme, because I could cook what was around me. I didn't really have to look further afield for hardly anything.

"For instance," he says, "the village nearest the Sportsman is called Seasalter. And it's called that because in Anglo-Saxon times, they used to make sea salt right outside the front door of the pub on a salt mine. I just thought, 'That's interesting. I'll make my own salt and we'll use it in the restaurant.' "

Harris also churns his own butter, forages and cooks with local seaweeds, and makes syrup with apples from the nearby orchards.

His aim is to create the food equivalent of the ultimate three-minute pop song. "It would be one beautiful three-minute fast, energetic, catchy songs. I'm not a big one on challenging food. I think the big trick is to be able to remain at the cutting-edge, but make it popular at the same time. I just want to cook for people really delicious food that they'll just go 'Wow', and I think that's challenging enough."

And though sometimes he fights with his surrounding environment, wanting to step away from the very food that has helped him earn a Michelin star, he's also deeply involved with it in a way that is inescapable.

"It's a place that you can't avoid. It will never change. It's been like that for over 1000 years, and you have to respect the place."

Stephen Harris's first book, The Sportsman (Phaidon, RRP $59.95), is out now.

Quickfire corner

Music to cook to: The first Fatboy Slim album, Better Living Through Chemistry. I used to cook to that a lot, and it's just great. It makes me do everything really fast.

After-midnight snack: Soda bread with some nice mackerel.

Kitchen weapon of choice: Those Japanese ceramic knives. I know everyone says they're terrible, and everyone else has their knives that costs £500. Mine is a 30 quid little set and that's what it is and I love it.

Formative food moment: The bread rolls and butter with my friends.

Non-cooking ninja skill: Guitar. I've got a new band that I'm forming. But I have a real problem with old blokes with guitars, so I don't know what to do.

Favourite menial task: Washing up. Somebody was saying to me, "I bet you make a real mess in the kitchen." I'm the opposite. When I was on my own in the kitchen, which I was for six months, you have to be really well organised.