Chef Tom Sellers interviews former England player Joe Cole
For our Chef’s Table series, Michelin starred chef Tom Sellers has lunch at his restaurant Story Cellar with former England player Joe Cole. They talk fatherhood, friendship and the future
Tom Sellers: We’ve known each other for years now, do you remember when we first met?
Joe Cole: Yeah – I came into Restaurant Story and we got chatting. It was a meal out to celebrate Gareth Southgate getting the England job. I was a year before retirement, which tells you how long ago it was!
Ts: Yeah, we just really struck it off. It sounds a bit cringe but I was a big fan of you as a football player. I wasn’t a Chelsea fan but I was a huge fan of the way you played. So when one of my investors wanted to cash out, you invested in the business. But it was a friendship first. I still play in the Sunday League team you started.
JC: I started playing Sunday League when I retired. I got all my mates involved, my agent, a couple of the school dads and some former players like Jamie Redknapp and Wayne Bridge. Someone once said to me, never stop playing the game – and I also hate the gym!
Ts: It’s the one thing I always make time for, playing football on Sunday mornings. It’s good for my mental health. Over the years, the club made me captain and we’ve got some younger players now and you feel like a mentor to them, not so much on the pitch, but just in life.
It doesn’t matter what’s going on personally and professionally, we just get together on a Sunday to play football and enjoy it. It’s important to have people to talk to – everyone’s got their own shit going on, right? That’s the reality of life. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, you know?
JC: I think it’s crucial for modern men – you get so much out of joining a sports team, you learn so many life skills. As you get older and have children – I’ve got three, you’ve just had your first – you naturally detach from your friendship groups. And I think it is really important for your mental health to make sure you keep those in your life in some way, shape or form.
Because I’ve played football all my life, I can see people’s personalities by the way they play: whether they’re insecure or nervous or overconfident. And straight away I could see you were someone who wanted to learn and had a capacity to learn really quickly. Some people you could tell them something 10 times and they won’t get it but with you, you only ever have to say something once, so your growth and rate of improvement has been massive.
Ts: I love to learn generally, across the board. So for me there’s nothing better than being taught by somebody that’s played the game at the level you have. I also don’t like to lose, right? Generally, I’m a winner. So it was nice to win the league this year.
JC: Did I ever tell you that yours wasn’t the first restaurant I invested in…
Ts: No you did not!
JC: Me and a bunch of the lads at West Ham put in £25,000 each into this restaurant in Chelmsford, just for a bit of fun really. Total disaster. It lasted about five minutes, everyone there was on the take. Stupid really. So when it came to investing in your business, everyone who advises me told me not to do it.
So many people invest into restaurants because they like the idea of it but have no idea about the reality of how precarious it is and how difficult and how much of an expert you have to be to run it. But when I saw you operate, watching the way you speak to your people and your attention to detail, I thought ‘I think this guy’s got something’. You know how to win and how to get things done. You have your eye on that third Michelin star, which is an amazing thing to aspire to.
Ts: That was always the goal, from the moment I stepped foot in the kitchen, in the same way your dream was probably to win the Premier League. I want to finish that journey. But it takes investment and it takes 100 per cent commitment, every single day. But I’ve worked hard my whole life and I’ve done it the hard way. I opened a restaurant very young, I took on a lot of debt personally, I’ve sweated all that debt away. I knew I wanted to grow the group and open more restaurants like the one we’re in today.
But for me, it was about making sure that the people I was doing it with had the same level of integrity and understood the longevity of what we’re doing. And you understood all of that. We had some hairy moments over Covid – it was the first time in my life when the thing I’ve done every day since I left school was taken away from me, which I found very challenging. We basically had to hit pause for not only the 18 months we were locked down but the 12 months after that when the country was really slow to recover. But you were always super supportive, not only from a business perspective but as a friend, and that’s really important to me. They say ‘Don’t go into business with friends and family’ but I think we’re the anomaly – it’s very rare that we’re not on the same page.
JC: One of the ideas we’ve spoken about is opening a pub, which is a bit ironic because once upon a time as a retired footballer it was either coaching or owning a pub.
Ts: We’ll become a hospitality group with a portfolio that will stretch across different areas, whether it’s a fine dining restaurant, a pub, casual restaurants within hotels… I always knew I wanted to have a diverse business. Have you always been into food yourself?
JC: My wife’s a foodie – she knows far more than I do. We love eating out in restaurants. The problem with working with you is that now I notice all the little mistakes in other places that I never saw before. You’ve ruined it for me!
There’s a bit of an unfair stereotype that footballers have bad taste and don’t appreciate good food but it’s not really true. Some of my football colleagues are the most intelligent people I’ve met – they really know their stuff.
Ts: Even the small group I’ve met through you, they all carry themselves very well. They’re educated, and a lot of them eat in our restaurants, so they must have good taste.
JC: Players at the top clubs are committed, disciplined people. Every one of them had a long journey. They’ve put themselves through pain, gone through a lot of adversity, they’ve had to constantly scrap for their place. They deserve a lot of respect in my opinion.
Ts: We live in a world where everyone has an opinion now and to some extent that’s fair enough – you pay for your ticket at the football or you pay for your bill in a restaurant so you’re entitled to your opinion. But I think how hard people have worked to get to this point gets forgotten. The hours people have put in, the sacrifices people have made. Both you and I sacrificed our teens and twenties. We didn’t go when all the lads were going out, you were playing football and I was in a kitchen somewhere around the world, working 18 hour days. That builds you differently.
JC: How are you adapting to fatherhood?
Ts: I’m just trying to enjoy it – everyone you speak to says it goes by so fast. I’m very fortunate – my partner is already an amazing mum. I don’t mind the lack of sleep, I deal with that fairly well. But we’re just at the beginning of the journey, so speak to me in two years and I might sound very different.
JC: My one piece of advice would be to cherish these moments because they’ll be gone before you know it.
Ts: One hundred per cent. This feels like an exciting phase of my life, there’s a lot of stuff going on and it’s good to know I’ve got you in my corner.
• To book Story Cellar go to storycellar.co.uk