Lloyd Hayes
2005 graduate of Fifteen
Lloyd, 24, is a chef de partie at the award winning Acorn House restaurant in Kings Cross. He left school at sixteen having drifted through, bullied, turning up for the odd lesson. “I bummed around for most of my teens.” He started offending, getting into fights, and picked up numerous suspension orders, fines and weekends at attendance centres. He started selling cannabis and by 20 was making £800 a week profit. “I had four mopeds and spent my days answering the mobile and riding round to drop the weed”. He had a couple of jobs as pot wash and prep chef in cafes in Brixton and London Bridge. “All I could do was cook and sell weed.”
He decided that he should go to college where he believed there would be a ready market for his cannabis. Around this time - 2003 – his auntie got him the application forms for Fifteen. He got through to the final residential selection weekend in Wales. “I didn’t make the cut. I was seen as a bit of a trouble maker.” He was put on the waiting list and offered a place at college. At college he surprised himself by really knuckling down. He feels a great debt to Denise, one of the tutors at Hammersmith College. “She saw I could cook and made me work double hard. I was smashing it. I didn’t even sell weed at college.”
Someone dropped out of the Fifteen apprenticeship and Lloyd was offered the place. He sold his mobile phone for £500 and decided to draw a line under the dealing and crime. “You make money but what do you do with it? Phone ringing all the time. It’s going nowhere. Fifteen is too much work for not enough money so you’ve got to have the passion for cooking.”
Lloyd discovered he had a huge passion for making pasta. He styled himself the Pasta Masta. Mentored by chef Mario Magli and Fifteen graduate Aaron Craze, he progressed quickly.
He had to completely cut himself off from his old networks. “The only friends I had were the people at work. People on the estate would ask me if I’d left. I hadn’t but all I did was work and sleep so they never saw me. I couldn’t have anything to do with any of them. It was just me, my girlfriend, my job, my dog.”
Lloyd graduated in July 2005. He was taken on at Fifteen and was a natural role model and mentor for the new apprentices. “I love teaching, passing on my knowledge. But not it all. You’ve got to keep some back!”
Helped by Fifteen, Lloyd spent a season in Val d’Isere cooking for a chalet. “Going to France was the best thing I’ve ever done. I realised how good I am at cooking. Thinking up starters, desserts, getting it all out.”
When he got back to London in March 2007 he was offered a job at Acorn House, whose founder Arthur Potts Dawson had been executive head chef at Fifteen during Lloyd’s apprenticeship. “I’ve been running a section. Running pasta. Experimenting. Growing stuff in the roof garden. I’ve learned about recycling. We only throw away half a bin bag a day.”
Longer term, Big Lloydie wants to be a trainer. “I want to teach. I don’t want to be a hardcore head chef. I want to see my son grow, to be there when he walks and starts talking. Not to hear about it from my girlfriend.
“I’ve got so much love and time for the people I met at Fifteen. I learnt how to get along with people that I don’t get along with. That’s something you have to do to get along in life.
It’s not just about me anymore, is it?”