Growing up in south London, Jackson Boxer remembers having “a huge appetite for existence and a lot of creative energy” from a young age. But he was never quite sure what direction that would take him. Although he liked cooking, his parents quickly vetoed the idea that Boxer might become a professional chef.
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“They said, ‘Absolutely not, you’re going to be a lawyer or something like that,’” Boxer tells Observer, speaking from his office at Brunswick House, one of his London restaurants. It was ironic because his father is a writer and his mom is an artist (the pair later opened the Italo deli in Vauxhall when Boxer was 22), not to mention his grandmother is renowned food writer Arabella Boxer and his grandfather was Tatler editor Mark Boxer. “They’ve come from quite traditional, bourgeois families where all of their siblings’ kids went to medical school, and so on,” he adds. “I think even though they lived a happy, free, bohemian existence, they didn’t want the stress of having that for me. I’d always had this initial sense that this [career] was something my parents didn’t want for me, which made it very attractive.”
Boxer, who began working in kitchens as a teenager, appeased his parents by enrolling in university to study poetry, which he loved despite its distinct lack of practical use, but he continued to work in restaurants while studying to make a living. After he graduated, he stayed in kitchens, which, he says, allowed him to become more confident and less introverted. He liked the excitement and camaraderie of being on a team, and the physical aspect of the job appealed to him because it felt like an outlet for all of his energy.
“Being quite stuck in my head and quite trapped in my own thoughts, and then doing something that was very non-linguistic that just involved working with my hands on a tactile and mechanical level was very liberating,” Boxer says. “I could release myself from being trapped in the vortex of my own self-referential ideas that spin around and slightly inhibit me from action. I found this environment to be incredibly stimulating and rewarding.”
It took a few years for Boxer to take the idea of a professional culinary career seriously, and actually commit to it. And, he affirms, being a chef is a process of daily renewal. “I have to commit myself to it every day,” he says.........