Jordan Brady has been impressing judges on a new cooking contest on Channel 4 but his life wasn't always so glamourous. The 29-year-old has come a long way since his teen years.
He doesn't have any formal chef qualifications and is mostly self-taught. He got into cooking when he was younger and often had to make his own dinner.
Jordan claims to have left school at age 11 and "went off the rails" as a teen. He admits he into trouble with the police a lot as a teen and was arrested regularly for things such as anti-social behaviour, breaking cars, and stealing motorbikes.
He said: "I didn't really have any direction. Then I got involved in lots of drugs and crime, not because I was a bad person, it was more that I was trying to fit in."
In search of a fresh start he ended moving 50 miles away from home to a small village. It was here that he start getting into cheffing getting a job in the restaurant of a country house hotel when he was 18.
"I'd always been interested in food. I've always cooked for myself as I had to make myself dinner. So yeah, it's something that just came naturally to me. I've obviously got no qualifications or anything like that," he told The Mirror.
At the tender age of 18 Jordan wasn't quite ready for the demands of working in a professional restaurant. "Being 18 years of age I got with a girl and you know, I thought I was madly in love, and cheffing at that level requires a lot of time but I wanted to go out."
When he lost his job he found himself being homeless as he didn't have a job to support himself. "I was homeless because I don't speak to my mum and I was so far away from home," he said.
"It was s**t and looking back I wish I had stayed [at the hotel] but it did set me on my path to figuring the rest out." Jordan says he was homeless for six months from the end of summer and through the brutal winter months in 2012.
He built a shelter in a secluded wooded area and claims he was catching and cooking rabbits to eat most days. Eventually, he managed to find another restaurant job but had to continue living in the woods so he could save up some money.
"I used to snare rabbits in the morning and then when I went to work, I'd cook them in the ground over the day," he reflected. "So then when I finished work I'd go back and the rabbit would be done and I enjoyed it. People often ask if I was eating rabbits to survive, but I just knew they were there and I was a chef, so I was quite well-suited to sourcing food.
"I often make light of it, but it was a hard time." Jordan claims the local council couldn't offer him housing unless he didn't have any income, but he didn't want to give up his job at the time as he was enjoying it, and even though staying in the woods was far from ideal, he's glad that he didn't quit.
He kept on at it and worked his way up through different kitchens, working for both chain restaurants and independent businesses and learning new cooking skills as well as kitchen management. Now, 29, he's the proud owner of his very own restaurant, JB Kitchen, in Birestall in Leicester.
He's owned the restaurant for 18 months and it was born out of a lockdown passion project, as he was cooking meals for the public from his own home. The meals were delivered and became incredibly popular within his local area, with him cooking as many as 1,000 meals in one night on New Year's Eve.
"We just built and built and then lockdown finished and we had to make a conscious decision of you know, what do I do now as a chef? Do I go back to a pub or do I carry on and take the dive and yeah, I opened the restaurant 18 months ago." Jordan now has a team of 10 staff and the restaurant, which serves modern British cuisine, has already won several food awards in the local area.
And if that weren't all enough, the chef is now working up a storm on Five Star Kitchen and can't believe how his luck has changed. "The first day on the show completely changed my whole outlook on being a chef because I came from virtually nothing," he admitted.
"I remember walking into the Palm Court [at the Langham] and seeing all the chefs, hearing where they were from and who they were, and there was me who's cooking from my home kitchen and I felt so out of my f***ing depth. I thought I was done, I didn't think I'd even get through. But getting through the first week and then the last few weeks, it's like, you know what, I've actually got what it takes to do this.
"And Michel Roux Jr made that very clear, he said you know, yes, we expect five-star food but you don't have to be a Michelin star chef to make star five-star food. And he really put me at ease. He was probably the reason that I felt so confident in myself. It was like I wasn't in competition with anybody, you know? Yes, it's a competition, but I was just there to prove to myself what I could do and see what happened."
He added: "I think it just goes to show that anybody can do it. I get messages now and people say 'I can't believe you've done what you've done'. I was at the bottom of the list to do anything, but it's easy to be told you can't do something. You've just got to have a positive outlook in life."
Five Star Kitchen: Britain's Next Great Chef is currently airing on Channel 4 on Thursdays at 8pm
