The graduate: Laoise Casey

Laoise Casey still remembers walking into the Evening Standard offices in Kensington carrying an armful of lunch boxes. She had made them at home and brought them across the city on the tube, each one a dish from a restaurant she admired, reworked into something a person could realistically cook on a weeknight. That was the idea she was there to sell: a weekly column, London Lunchbox, taking the food people ate out and turning it into food they could make at home. She had no commission and no contact on the inside. What she had was persistence. ‘I just kept contacting people,’ she says. ‘Looking back now, I literally kept contacting people.’ She had pitched the editor and kept pitching until she secured a meeting, and decided the most persuasive thing she could bring to it was the food itself. The column ran weekly for the next four or five years, built around the restaurants she loved most.

Laoise had not always cooked for a living. She had a good career in HR, and the idea of leaving it felt close to unthinkable. ‘It felt very unsure to say, well, I want to change careers,’ she says. ‘You’ve spent all this money going to university and now you’re working in this career.’ What shifted things was her father. He became seriously ill, and though he pulled through, the experience left her certain that the move was hers to make. ‘I realised that no one’s going to take the chance for me.’

She relocated to London and began looking at the Leiths Culinary Diploma. Changing direction in her early thirties, she wanted something that would let her make up ground quickly. ‘I really wanted something that would give me a kickstart,’ she says. ‘I felt like I was quite behind already.’ She secured a place close to the deadline and enrolled. The Diploma, she says, was one of the happiest periods she can remember. ‘I just remember sitting there and thinking, this is my life.’

Halfway through the course she went looking for practical experience and found it at The Ship in Wandsworth, a gastropub busy enough to give her the itch for restaurant work. When she left Leiths she spent a couple of years saying yes to everything: private chefing, supper clubs, cookery class teaching, restaurant kitchens. ‘At Leiths everything is methodical, you have your recipes written so you can follow them exactly and be really accurate,’ she says. ‘That’s been invaluable.’

It was that same rigour that took her into recipe development. A role came up at Marks and Spencer, working as a development chef across recipes and product development, and the parts of her career so far fitted neatly together. ‘The fact that I had the Leiths Diploma, that I’d been writing the column, that I had the restaurant experience, all played really well into it,’ she says. The work itself felt familiar. ‘It was actually very similar to what we had to do at Leiths on a daily basis.’ The role at Plate Up came next, the app that turns chef recipes into a ready-made grocery shop, adding the ingredients straight to your basket for delivery from the supermarket of your choice, and it is the one she describes as coming full circle. She joined as a recipe development chef and has since been promoted to head of food, where she creates the recipes that sit at the heart of the platform, both for the brand and for its partners, each one tested until it is genuinely robust. It is a high-volume job with weekly targets, and one that draws on everything that came before it. ‘It combines the basics I learned at Leiths with my restaurant experience and my Marks and Spencer experience,’ she says.

She is candid about the parts people tend not to see. ‘People think of recipe development and they think of the food shoots, the glamorous side, which of course is a massive part of it and I love it,’ she says. ‘But you also need to get into the nitty gritty.’ The disasters, she suggests, are part of the training. ‘I’ve had so many disasters in the kitchen, so you know when something doesn’t go right.’ Still, she has no doubt she has landed in the right place. ‘It just feels like exactly where I’m meant to be.’

Her advice to anyone starting out is the thing that got her here. ‘Say yes to everything, even if you think it’s not going to lead anywhere,’ she says. ‘I’ve had the most random connections come back and be favourable.’ She is generous with her own time now, especially with Leiths graduates who get in touch looking for a chat or some work experience. ‘People were really generous with their time with me, so I’ll always give it.’ And the thing she returns to is the simplest of all. ‘Enthusiasm goes such a long way. People really see it when someone is genuinely interested.’

If you’re interested in doing the Leiths Culinary Diploma like Laoise did, find out more here.