03/02/2025
Interview with Amber Francis representing the South West region on Great British Menu 2025 – Women In the Food Industry
Great British Menu (GBM) returned to our screens in January for season 20. The BBC2 show puts the nation’s most talented chefs to the test. At Women in the Food Industry we are continuing our series of interviews with the strong female line-up of chefs from across Britain competing to serve their dish at the final banquet. Our co-founder, Mecca Ibrahim, interviewed Amber Francis, She is a Head Chef and Food educator at secondary school Christ’s College Finchley as part of the Chefs in Schools Programme.
Amber was awarded Young Chef of the Year 2022 at the British Restaurant Awards. Originally from Bristol, Amber is representing the South West region.

How did you start working in the food world and where did you train to be a chef?
I met a local cake maker back in the village where I came from and she ran little cupcake making class. It just so happened that she was actually an amazing pastry chef that had worked at Shea to start a business. And she was the one that really encouraged me to consider cooking and being a chef as like a very viable career.
She encouraged me to reach out to some restaurants and to set my sights really high. Rather than just reaching out to local restaurants, she pushed me to get in touch with places that I really admired. So that ended up being Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, Chez Bruce, the Hand and Flowers and restaurants like that and to not take no for answer. I went to Chez Bruce first and then got back in touch with the other places and said “I’ve been here now, would you like to have me at your restaurant.”
My formal training was with the Royal Academy of Culinary Arts. I was then offered a place on the Royal Academy of Arts Scholarship programme at The Bournemouth and Poole College. There was an apprenticeship scheme where I did most of the year at the Ritz and then three months of the year at Bournemouth and Poole. That kick-started my formal training and getting into the industry. It really worked for me because I was quite academic.

This is your second time on Great British Menu, how did you get onto Great British Menu?
The first time around I was headhunted through Instagram. I had a full blown video interview with them. However, at that time I was sous chef and they decided at that point that I wasn’t quite ready for it. What is great about the Great British Menu is the production team really care and they’re not going to put someone in if they think that they’re not ready yet.
Then two years later they got back in touch and said, “we’d love to interview you again”. At that point I was Head Chef & I was far more prepared. So I had a preliminary call and a video call interview. It’s an opportunity for them to understand your personality and more about you & how you react in front of a camera. After a while I found out I was through.
This time around they got in touch with me around the same time and said, “Let’s get the ball rolling”. I still had to wait for the production company & the BBC to be happy with me to be in this series. It’s not definite that once you’ve done it once, you can get straight in. But I didn’t have to do the whole interview process because they knew how I was as a character.
How did you prepare for the Great Britons theme at GBM?
It was a good challenge and all about finding unique characters in history that inspired people, inspired myself, and just were really important parts of the communities they belonged to.
Education now in my role is very big and has always been very important to me. So I was able to be inspired by very different characters to those I may have been in the past. Then lots of research and racking your brains as to how to get the stories of these amazing people onto a plate of food. That is always the hardest thing with Great British Menu

This is your second time on the show, how did it compare with the first time you were on?
It was still just as nerve wracking. It doesn’t get any easier. The guest chefs are still just as awe inspiring as you expect them to be. But what did help was learning from the previous experience the little things like just tweaking my recipes or tweaking how I approached something to make sure that it fitted the brief. So certain things, like I actually very actively chose not to do an ice cream on my dessert. That’s because I knew that lots of people use the ice cream machine during the desserts.
And whilst I felt confident using that bit of equipment, I wanted to create as streamlined an experience for me as possible so that I could let the food shine. There were a few little tweaks that I made to how I would approach the planning and that definitely helped me in the long run and in terms of linking it back to the brief and just being overly prepared.
Which was the hardest course to prepare and research for?
My dessert was really hard to prepare for insofar as the inspiration from my dessert was something that was very close to my heart. And I really wanted to do it justice. So I put a lot of pressure on myself to make sure that everything was up to standard with it. It was a full circle story. And so I wanted it to be perfect.
GBM is very much known for its props, did you embrace the props on the show?
Definitely. I’m lucky that my partner is very creative and was able to help support in making props. What was different, I suppose, was that there was no budget available for me to create loads of props. So we were just really creative, my partner and I. And it is possible to do Great British Menu on a budget, as it were.
We got a lot of things from ebay & Amazon. Some of my plates were from Dunelm. They weren’t fancy crockery. They were things that were accessible to me and created a lasting impact overall. We had to think about things quite differently.

Which chef that you have worked with has given you the most inspiration?
First things first. I think every chef that you meet, whether they are your superior and someone that you’re working with or for, or whether it’s someone that is working for you as part of a team or is an apprentice. I’ve always learned something from those individuals.
And now I’m in an environment where I don’t work with trained chefs, and I’m still learning from those individuals. They give something back to me. As much as I teach them how to cook. I think Abby Moore, who was the chef that inspired me to really commit to thinking about cheffing as a real viable career.
If it wasn’t for her I wouldn’t be doing this job. And equally, my head lecturer at college, Chef David Boland. He is a very prominent figure in the Royal Academy of Culinary Arts and has trained many chefs, including the likes of Adam Byatt & Spencer Metzger. They all learnt under him. He is a huge character for those that have met him. He’s firm but fair. I wouldn’t be where I am without his teaching.

If you were marooned on a desert island, what was the one type of dish you could happily live on?
I love lentil dal. It’s my go to. If I don’t really fancy cooking anything, dal is what I’ll make. You can throw anything into it. I probably make a very inauthentic version, but it is my absolute comfort food. Cheap to make and easy. A bowl of goodness.
Finally, what do you know now that you wish you could have told your younger self when you were starting out?
That there’s not one set career path in the food industry. It’s very easy to think that you do the fine dining route where you go from apprentice to commis to CDP, so on and so forth. I’m so grateful that I did that process and made me who I am today. But I wish more people had told me earlier on that there are other avenues.
You can be an equally talented chef, but working in a more community focussed role or a TV focussed role, or as a food developer or home economist. There are so many different avenues that are not necessarily spoken about very much.
There’s a belief that if you’re not working in a fine dining kitchen, you’re not good enough or you couldn’t ‘make it’. These are antiquated & historical views now. They don’t exist in the current climate.
What shouldn’t put young people off becoming chefs is thinking that they can only become a chef by doing 20 hour days in Michelin starred restaurants. That’s one career path. It’s a great, valid and beautiful career path and so fulfilling. But if that’s not for you, there are other routes and you can still be an amazing chef.
Amber will be appearing on Great British Menu from Tuesday 4th February 2025 representing the South West. Look out for more in our series of interviews with the great women chefs on Great British Menu 2025 – this page will be regularly updated.