The Graduate: Michael Lavery

Michael Lavery was not supposed to go into cheffing. He had a degree in engineering from Sheffield University and a job lined up in heating, ventilation and air conditioning. He deferred it for a year, went to Canada to snowboard and ended up working in a barbecue restaurant that did over 3,000 covers a day.

‘I was hooked on the energy of it,’ he says. He came home, moved to London and enrolled on the Leiths Culinary Diploma.

After graduating from Leiths, he spent seven years cooking at the Boundary Hotel, the Terroirs group and the River Cafe, before taking his first head chef role at a pub in Hampstead. Then came Forza Wine, and in the seven or eight years since, the business has grown into something he admits he didn’t see coming. ‘I never thought we’d have three restaurants,’ he says. ‘Especially not a big Soho one.’

The third site, on Manette Street, opened recently. The approach is the same as it’s always been at Forza. ‘We want our food and wine to be exciting without being intimidating,’ Michael says. ‘Lots of restaurants take themselves very seriously. We don’t do that. We want everyone to feel comfortable. It’s not cheap, but it’s not expensive either. We want to be accessible and crowd pleasing.’

The Leiths training runs through everything, even if it doesn’t always announce itself. In the kitchen at Forza, there’s a ten-point list that sums up the ethos. The first point is ‘do everything properly’. ‘That’s what Leiths teaches,’ Michael says. ‘To do everything properly, to deeply consider even simple processes and how they work, to think about every ingredient and question if you need it or not. That now informs every part of what we do in and out of the kitchen.’

The decision to open a third site was, in large part, about people. ‘The biggest reason was to keep our best people with us, give them a new challenge and allow them to grow within the company,’ he says. Roughly half the opening team were already known to Forza, whether current staff from Peckham and the National Theatre site, or others returning after time elsewhere. ‘It’s great to know people want to stay and to give them the space to stay.’

Among them, several Leiths graduates. More than ten or twelve have come through the Forza kitchens since Michael joined, and five are there right now. ‘Holly, Issy, Ella, Scarlett and Luke are showing us that Leiths grads are always worth hiring,’ he says. What does it take to thrive in a restaurant kitchen? ‘All anyone needs is to work hard, listen and remain calm under pressure. If you can do that, you’ll fly.’

As for the new site: ‘So far it is stressful, fun, exhausting and exciting. People are coming to try it and they’re leaving happy.’