Where the Chefs Eat asks your favourite chefs for their top restaurants in cities across the world. For this edition, we sit down with Xavier Bramble.
As a student studying psychology at Nottingham Trent University and with no cooking experience at all, Xavier Bramble was an unlikely star just a few years ago. Fast-forward to 2026, and he has over 850,000 Instagram followers, has appeared on MasterChef, and has a hit cookbook.
Bramble admits that the speed at which his star has risen “is all pretty surreal, to be honest. It just started with a concept and then having [my book] out there and then having it hit number one and having it on TV and in bookstores and in different countries, it’s all very crazy, really.”
Lockdown provided the time and space for Bramble to “literally just learn how to cook for myself. It just quickly turned into a passion, and I was soon spending up to eight hours a time in the kitchen cooking.” He has, he tells me, “quite an obsessive personality about anything that I do. I had some basic cookbooks that my mum gave to me, and I was also watching hours of YouTube videos to see what other chefs were doing. I learned a lot, but I also made a hell of a lot of mistakes. I got the fundamentals down, and then I started travelling when I could, and it opened up so many avenues for me.”
Six months into his self-taught cookery quest, Bramble cooked for a friend. The next day, six more showed up wanting the same recipe – and offering to pay him for it. “I realised at that point that I could monetise a passion, so I decided to make a menu and advertise it through Snapchat and get it out there to other students in Nottingham. I hit a gap in the market with students who didn’t want to cook but also didn’t have the crazy money to spend going out to eat. I had that business for about a year.”
As with all modern-day success stories, he then took things online and posted his first video in March 2022. It immediately went viral. “I’d been posting for about six months, and then MasterChef approached me to go on the show. One of the talent scouts had seen my TikTok and decided I’d be great.” He admits that getting knocked out in the first round was a setback; “it was tough actually because I’d really put a lot of expectation into being on the show. And it felt like a really big stumbling block at the time, but I just worked harder than ever after that moment. I then went off to Spain in September 2022 to study abroad for a year. That was just amazing; it opened up my culinary eyes in a way.”
