Stu Deeley: Smoke brings ‘Michelin-star experience to a casual setting’

Stu Deeley admits the initial feeling of needing to meet lofty expectations diners had of eating at the restaurant of a MasterChef champion made things “tricky”.

But fast forward three years and things could not be going much better for Stu and the team at Smoke at Hampton Manor.

Proud Brummie Stu took the reins of the new restaurant in Solihull in September 2021, on the site of a hotel retreat which also includes Michelin-starred Grace & Savour.

Previously, he worked with renowned chefs such as Steve Love, Luke Tipping, Alex Claridge and Adam Brown, before winning MasterChef: The Professionals in 2019.

Now operating seven days a week, Smoke is packed out, with Stu’s menu of ingredients elevated by being cooked over coals proving to be a hit.

At first, James Hill, owner of Hampton Manor, had a different role in mind for Stu, until he was convinced a restaurant could be viable.

“James reached out at the time looking for a sous chef. I said I'll come over and do that role for a little bit,” Stu explained.

“He said ‘rather than offering you sous chef, I'd like to offer you development chef’. For anyone that doesn't know, a development chef within a restaurant, it's like being a songwriter. So you write all the lyrics, you just don't sing them.

“That was a very different role for me. I just felt like my opportunity with MasterChef and everything else was a little bit wasted.

“So I had the chat with James, we sat down, he introduced the idea of the barn that was on the estate that that was called the Smokehouse at the time. James had looked at wine taps, slow cooked food, kind of big family style servings. He talked to me about the idea of coming in here.

“I went away, I stayed up till three in the morning writing a business model to basically say ‘let's turn this into a proper restaurant’.”

He continued: “We started off a bit like a pop up. We had a bit of a makeshift kitchen, cobbled floor, brick walls, all the rest of it. So, a proper Oliver Twist story and we kind of just made it good.

“We had a bumpy first year I think, with just finding our feet, finding where we were in the market.

“The first three months of opening, fully booked, great. But when you come from something like MasterChef, people have that level of expectation and hitting that expectation was always going to be tricky.

“So there was a lot of self-doubt and there was a lot of hardships in that first year. Then the second year everything just seemed to level out.

“We (initially) opened four dinner services only. We then grew that to five dinner services, to five dinner services, two lunch services.

“We’re now at seven days a week, we're open for dinner throughout the week. We're open for lunch Friday, Saturday, Sunday. We’re max capacity 36 covers.

“Luckily, touch wood, and in a time where you can't be complacent, you can't sit on your laurels, we're filling that capacity and we're seeing return guests. We're seeing happy, smiley faces and we're seeing all the right things and everything that we hoped for at the beginning.

“If I had to sum Smoke up, it's good food, good wine, good music, although the last one is questionable!”

Before lunch service, the space is occupied by a bakery, which helps entice potential customers in.

Among the menu offerings at Smoke are Orkney scallop and Hereford côte de boeuf, given a little extra boost of flavour the smokiness of cooking over fire offers.

“Every chef within this kitchen, from me right down from the apprentices, we've all had a classical education,” said Stu.

“All of the apprentices are part of the Royal Academy of Culinary Arts. So the food is deep rooted in classical cooking.

“But then we just add smoke or barbecue as an additional technique that brings out flavours. Like with scallops, when you get a scallop that's perfectly cooked but it's just licked over the fire, the flavours are just next level. It's just an enhancement technique.”

Smoke is listed in the Michelin Guide, but as yet has not been awarded a Michelin star.

But with the quality and pedigree of the chefs in the kitchen, Stu feels diners are getting a good offering when they visit.

“I think at Smoke we bring Michelin-star experience to a casual setting,” he said.

“We bring the years of experience and time that we spent in these restaurants and we bring it to somewhere where you feel like you're sat in your living room, that you're just eating good food, drinking good wine, having a good chat with your friends, listening to Led Zeppelin, and just having a good time while you're doing it.

“We offer value for money. We know that prices have gone up considerably. It’s tricky and you need to find that balance.

“It's a balance of staffing, of ingredients, of everything. For me, our food is approachable.

“It's somewhere that you can come on a Monday night and eat a steak between two people, you can come on a Saturday night and eat a tasting menu, you can come back on Sunday and have a Sunday roast. So we've got multiple avenues that you can go down.”

And Stu remains forever grateful to the opportunity MasterChef gave him.

“What an operation, what a platform, what a voice it gives people,” he said.

“I can't speak highly enough of all the top people at MasterChef. It was just incredible.

“Everything about it is so mind blowing. To go over to Portugal and cook at two-Michelin star restaurant Belcanto, to cooking at HIDE with Ollie Dabbous, and just everything, the whole opportunity.

“To say now that I've got Marcus (Wareing)'s number in my phone book and I can just text him and be like ‘chef, what do you think of this?’ That's all through MasterChef.”

He added: “I think as a chef you never achieve what you want to achieve. You're always grinding the axe. You're always looking at what's next.

“One of the biggest drivers for me is having a goal, something to aim towards.

“That goal for me is it isn't necessarily accolades or anything else, it's having a full restaurant of happy guests that say to me, we'll be back again. That's what matters.”