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.
“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. “There are hard days where I’m like, ‘I’m done. 20 years is enough.’ But, actually, the longer I’ve done it, the more incredibly and immensely grateful that I am that I found myself with the opportunity to fall into it.”
Today, Boxer has his hand in multiple restaurants, although he never went to culinary school or studied cooking. He began with Brunswick House, which he initially launched as a 10-seat counter at the age of 23 with his brother, Frank. In 2019, he expanded to Orasay in Notting Hill and, more recently, French bistro Henri in Covent Garden. He also collaborated with the Experimental Group, who he partnered with on Henri, on the dining program at Cowley Manor.
Although Boxer has never worked in Paris, he has many memories of eating there as a young chef.
“In my early 20s, you could get a very cheap Eurostar [from London to Paris], so you could go out at 6 a.m., and you could come back at 10 p.m., and in the space of that you could fit in breakfast, lunch, sometimes a second lunch, then an afternoon in a wine bar eating small plates and drinking extraordinary things and then a quick early dinner,” he remembers. “The amount of eating I fit into those days was a lifetime’s education in not just the fundamentals of really good food and living, but also everything that’s wonderful about small, creative and inventive Parisian bistros.”
Henri, which debuted in the Henrietta Hotel in June, is a celebration of these memories and the French culinary tradition, as well as British produce and ingredients. But while Boxer wanted to stay true to French cooking, he also wanted to add his own spin to classics like escargot. Henri reimagines the traditional snail dish, which is typically served in garlic butter, as grilled skewers accompanied by veal rice.
“I liked the idea of looking at some of these very comforting and familiar flavors and dishes, but then thinking about how we could invest a certain amount of care and love and wit into them,” Boxer says, “to represent them in a way that maybe showed them in a new light.”
For the snails, Boxer wanted to showcase the ingredient with a less overpowering cooking method that embraced the “rich, earthy flavor.” Instead of baking them in their shells, he slowly grilled them over charcoal while delicately brushing them with garlic butter. It results in a smoky, aromatic character that still feels slightly nostalgic. At first, many of Boxer’s collaborators were skeptical of the dish. But now, it’s become one of Henri’s most popular signatures.
“That has been very rewarding,” Boxer says. “There are dishes that we knew would always do really well, like the roast chicken with glazed turnips and morels. We wanted to provide those delicious, comforting, reassuring and familiar flavors. But at the same time, it’s thrilling for me how some of our more cerebral ideas have been received so well, and have been appreciated for their considered nature, not just their rigorous adherence to classicism.”
Elsewhere on the menu, guests will find more contemporary offerings like a carrot râpée salad served with sesame and seaweed canelés garnished with trout roe and sour cream. But the aforementioned roast chicken, which arrives in a complexly rich sauce dotted with morels, bridges the gap between the more innovative selections and what diners might expect from a British-French bistro. The menu displays Boxer’s affinity for the technical side of cooking, including sauces that take three days to make.
“One of the things I love and admire about French bistro cookery is that it’s always very approachable and democratically priced,” Boxer says. “London has become incredibly expensive, but people in London have had less money to spend, so as a chef, I am trying to figure out how to stay true to the things that I really love in cookery, which is very involved.”
That means not cutting corners while also emphasizing less pricy French dishes, like sausage or bavette steak. “You may as well make these things beautifully and properly with the right reverence,” Boxer notes. “The more time and care you invest into the fundamentals of your food, the more rewarding it is. Food has a metaphysical property, which is that when we consume it, we taste the attention that’s been given. I wanted to remain true to the rigorous approach to cooking that I like to take, while also working within a language that could be very approachably priced.”
All of Boxer’s modern British cuisine embraces that balance between comfort and innovation, mainly because he’s aware that people are “reassured by food.” That can happen by serving something familiar or something less conventional.
“When I go to a restaurant, it’s lovely to be shown something familiar, but I don’t necessarily find it particularly exciting or enlivening or stimulating,” Boxer says. “I tend to be more reassured by the prospect of novelty. By the fact that as I age and see more of the world, there are ever more new experiences to be had and ever more beautiful, delicious things to be enjoyed.”
One of the most exciting meals he’s had recently was, in fact, in Paris at Maison, helmed by Japanese chef Sota Atsumi. The menu features immaculate French produce, but with a hint of imperfection. “Everything is cooked in front of you with the same level of attention as you would expect from the highest pinnacles of three-star fine dining, but when the food is placed in front of you [it has] this profound simplicity, minimalism and humility,” Boxer says. “Which makes it somehow so much more delicious.”
Although Boxer has dined at many of the top restaurants in the world and says he has “huge admiration” for the craft and discipline of that level of cuisine, the older he gets, the less that speaks to him. “It requires so much rigor that it has to iron out a huge amount of the imperfections that I think of as being innately human,” he says. “Whereas this experience of everything being cooked directly in front of me; there was this profound connection between the produce and the cook and the diner that was beautiful to me. I found it very inspiring. This approach felt like a very radical gesture.”
Most recently, Boxer teamed up with his brother Frank, who runs Peckham hotspot Frank’s Café, on the Soho bar Below Stone Nest. They initially opened during the pandemic, but have retrofitted and relaunched it with a new license that allows for a dynamic food menu alongside the drinks. These include a frozen white Russian presented like a bowl of soft serve—an offering that is sure to become Instagram famous.
In between his many jobs, Boxer spends most of his time at home with his wife and kids, although his children are perhaps his fiercest critics.
“They figured out quite young that the way they are able to exert the most power over me is by withholding their approval of my food,” the chef says, laughing. “And the irony is the more trouble I take over making food for them, the more they delight in telling me that I’ve got it wrong.”
Now, of course, Boxer’s parents are proud of his career path, especially with two sons as chefs making waves in the London food scene. Even more proud is Boxer himself, who is grateful he found the right way to channel all of that energy he didn’t know what to do with when he was younger. He recognizes the importance of being a chef, both for himself and for his guests.
“I find it very meaningful that, fundamentally, what we’re concerned with is spreading human happiness and joy through our work,” he says. “My sole purpose in my job is to cook things that make people happy. And it’s not just the food. The food is almost just an excuse that gets people to sit at a table and spend time with each other, which feels like a rebellious act in today’s world. The act of sitting down and taking time to enjoy each other’s company is a beautiful thing and assertive of all the best things about humanity.”
