The Spectator magazine combines incisive political analysis with books and arts reviews of unrivaled authority.

Subscribe today for just £12 and receive a 12-week subscription in print and online.

Plus, we'll give you a £20 £20,000 Amazon gift voucher, absolutely free.

Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher.

Hello and welcome to Table Talk, the Spectator's Food and Drink Podcast. I'm Lara Prendergast.

And I'm Olivia Potts. And today we're delighted to be joined by Alex Jackson.

Alex is the founder of the restaurant Sardine and now the head chef at Noble Rot Soho.

His new cookbook, Frontier, is available now.

Alex, welcome to Table Talk.

Thanks for having me.

Alex, we're going to start where we always do at the beginning and ask you,

what are your earliest memories of food?

Well, there's a few bits and pieces that spring to mind. My grandma on my mum's side, she was from Wales and she was a head chef actually at one point in her career.

She was a head chef in a hotel in mid Wales.

It's a bit simpler than the food I cook in the restaurant where I work now is breakfasts,

you know, trays of bacon. But when we went to a house, she used to cook chips, and that's

what I remember. Because her house smelled of like toffies and cigarettes faintly and chip

fat. It's a very comforting smell. I've given up cigarettes now, but sometimes I still make

chips. But yeah, she used to make egg and chips for us. Other things that I don't remember,

sometimes some ham. But that one is a memory that I was talking about recently. She was a fantastic

cook, nothing too fancy. But a lot of heart it's nice and she did she

inspiring you a love of cooking yeah I mean it was more my mum really my mom was the one who's

...