7th August 2026
We swing by Exmouth Market to visit maverick restaurateur Jackson Boxer – of Brunswick House, Orasay, Dove, and Henri – at his latest venture, Vesper, to talk through his penniless-writer dreams, whether London still has its spontaneous spark and the one dish not to miss on the menu.
My job is very real and tangible. It’s all with your hands and playing with stuff. You walk around the room and everyone’s happy and having a lovely time, and that’s joyful and rewarding. When you’re suffering from extreme exhaustion, being in a room full of joyous people is exactly the kind of stimulation you need to find purpose and keep going.
That’s a really good question and one I’m still trying to figure out. I haven't yet figured out what I want to do. As a teenager I loved reading and had dreams of becoming a professional cook, but my parents were firm that I should do a serious degree first. So I did English, which didn’t really qualify me to do anything, and imagined a future career as a penniless writer. Then I left university, realised I had absolutely nothing interesting to say and needed to pay the rent. So I went back to work in restaurants and fell quite seriously in love with cooking.
I love cooking. It’s incredibly rewarding and in many ways harder and more demanding than writing. Cooking is creative but tactile and mechanical: you take raw ingredients and, through thought and manipulation, turn them into something delicious.Writing is more ephemeral. You’re battling with yourself to drag truth out of nothing. I’m also totally allergic to screens. Sit me in front of a laptop for more than half an hour and I physically wither and die. Kitchens are demanding, but I have almost limitless patience and energy for them.
I’m almost 20 years in and it’s been an absolute roller coaster. Starting Brunswick House as a 10-seat cabin counter when I was 24 or 25 was incredibly tough: the first six to 12 months, literally no one walked through the door. Then came the discovery of it. This was pre-social media – Instagram hadn’t been invented – but when Brunswick House got its first mainstream press review, that was immensely exciting. It restored my faith that London is still a city where, with enough hard work and tenacity, you can do anything.
I’m a lifelong Londoner. Come rain, hell or snow, I love this city. London is punishing, expensive, exhausting, overstimulating and anxiety-making, but it’s also this seething mass of people from which culture emerges, and I still find that irresistible. Right now London feels really exciting. There’s a generation of young people whose development was maybe arrested by Covid, and now they’re exploding onto the scene. It gives me faith that this city will always reinvent itself.
I’m a great believer in the democracy of dining rooms. Restaurants, when they’re done right, are where the whole of London gathers together in public, but also in private. I always hark back to St. John, the first grown-up restaurant I went to, when I was 12: well-established old people, dishevelled sexy young people, everyone smoking, drinking, chatting, living. You’re at your table in total seclusion, but in this space where everything is happening around you. With Vesper, I wanted it to be a London restaurant. I wanted to cook food that felt distinctive to London.
I cook abroad a lot – Sydney, Hong Kong, Paris, Rome, New York – and it’s amazing. But London has an incredibly broad palate. Londoners will eat anything as long as it’s delicious. There’s no limit to how much heat, vibrancy, acidity, pungency or seasoning they can take. We have the most sophisticated, cosmopolitan, global palate, and that’s thrilling. At a time when people are being negative about London, I wanted to celebrate it.
I never make things easy for myself. The more challenging something seems, the more excited I am by it. I’m always looking for the opportunity to create something that doesn’t already exist. Food is always comforting and nurturing, but you can comfort by giving people something they already know, or by showing them something new and reassuring them there’s still a big world of experience out there. It’s also a constant battle against cliché. How do you take something ubiquitous, like a burger, and make the first bite feel like the first burger you’ve ever had?
It’s like being an adult, you have total freedom to do whatever you want, but you can’t fuck up.
Yes, but it has to be good. Novelty for novelty’s sake is valueless. To be truly novel, it has to also be delicious. That’s what I love about London, you can really cook anything you want here. People are open-minded and excited to be shown something new, but they also have very strong opinions, and if it isn’t good, they’ll quickly call it out. It’s like being an adult, you have total freedom to do whatever you want, but you can’t fuck up.
It’s something I think about a lot because I have big teams. Unless you’re building a restaurant people are genuinely excited to contribute to, you’ll struggle to attract the right talent. I don’t really think about leading them. I think about building the foundations of something that talented people can come together and organically build something beautiful out of. Vesper is six or seven weeks old, and I feel incredibly blessed by the team. It’s like theatre.
My job means I’m away from home more than I’d like, though I do want to be present for my children. I want them to see the value of hard work: that if you commit yourself to something you truly believe in, you can build it. I also want them to see that it’s possible to have values. In restaurants you can know your farmers, your fishermen, the people who work for you. We’re not saving lives, but I do think you can leave the world better than you found it and spread joy in the process.
The one everyone goes nuts for is the spring onion pancake. We took the archetype of a Cantonese-Taiwanese spring onion pancake and roll hot-water pastry incredibly thinly – filo, see-through pastry. Then we roast spring onions in caramelised butter, season them with salt and white pepper and layer it up in hundreds of layers. It’s super crispy outside but chewy, stretchy and supple inside. On top there’s jalapeño and yuzu jelly, very good raw tuna, a little gordal olive and a Cantabrian anchovy. It’s one bite, incredibly delicious, and the first thing everyone orders. We’ve sold about 6,000 since opening six weeks ago. It looks like a little eye winking at you, and you just pop it in your mouth and it’s good.
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