Our Global Community

As an institution we are so proud of all our people. The collective wealth of skills, experience and expertise, as reflected in the pages of this magazine, continues to amaze and astound. The shared connection of time spent at The High School of Dundee is lifelong, the school will continue to be here for you, and we hope that you will be a support to other members of the community.

So many of us have settled away from home. Some remain a short car journey back, others require myriad planes, trains and automobiles, but wherever you are it is unlikely that you are far from another member of the community.

In the months before the class of ’23 leave The Pillars we want to build the Ambassador Programme so that the community can offer a friendly face, or voice, no matter where in the world someone disembarks.

The only commitment we seek is that you be prepared to answer a call, or an email. We would hold your details and when approached by a member of the community who has landed in your part of the world, give them your phone number or email address. We are not asking that you act as tour guides, provide counselling services, or offer careers advice. Just that you would be prepared to talk.

Please complete this form to indicate interest and we will be in touch to discuss the matter further.

is Comfortable With a Pen in Their Hand

Some folk want to have a hammer, or a knife!

Jeremy Lee has film star quality. A leading man, he carries charisma modestly but has that disarming ability to make you feel important and interesting. Rich vocabulary and storytelling complement an easy manner that make his company as agreeable as his menu.

His stage is Quo Vadis, a restaurant in London’s Soho and whilst this may sound underwhelming when compared to a film set the reality is anything but, it is a sumptuous setting, stylish but not over-ripe.

Continuing the film metaphor is the critic Emily Green, “He serves up flavour the way Oliver Stone serves up violence,” a quote that Jeremy found both incredibly funny and flattering.

I met him at Quo Vadis on a busy Saturday in November, his kitchen a hub of action laced with the heady aroma of freshly cooked pies. But it was surprisingly quiet, everyone knowing their role and absolutely on cue, I watched as Jeremy had a question or comment for everyone, the histrionics of some of his predecessors merely empty echoes from a bygone era.

Jeremy was High School of Dundee class of 1981. Cooking was not the career path he intended to walk.

For some weird reason I never filled an UCCA form out. We went on what turned out to be the last family holiday, with us all, to France and when I came back that awful brown envelope was waiting. Bizarrely I had paaed my exams, three or 4, enough to get me into Commercial College where I could work on a portfolio to send to Duncan of Jordanstone and follow in Dad's footsteps, Grandad’s footsteps and my brother's footsteps. I went to Mum and said, “do I have to go on to 6th year?” She said, “well no darling, not really if you don't want to.” So, I slipped through the net beautifully, I left the High School without having a farewell because it was the middle of the summer holidays, and I just didn't go back. Ad hoc I got a summer job with the Old Mansion House in Auchterhouse, which had just opened, it was brilliant, this beautiful old house just outside Dundee. Sadly it is no more.

It was very unusual indeed (particularly in Scotland) for a white middle class, privately educated kid to go into that realm. I was a waiter first of all, I am such a rubbish waiter, instead of sacking me they actually put me in the kitchen, which gives you a vague idea of the level of respect for cooks at that time.

I started an apprenticeship, which is unheard of now. Tragic and completely ridiculous, you train to be everything else, why on earth shouldn't you train to be a cook? And then the years flew by. It was a very strange, monk-like existence in this kitchen. I had no teenage life but made up for it later when I came to London!

They said when I was going into my twenties, “what on earth are you doing? Pack your bags you’re going to London, we’ve got you a job at Boodles.” That was it, fate sealed.

Sealed indeed! After Boodles he went to Bidendum with Alister Little before heading up a small kitchen in an Islington restaurant. The next move was to the Blueprint Café where he really made his name, staying for 18 years before taking his place at Quo Vadis in 2012.

But despite the stellar names he has worked with and the training he received, there is little doubt his apprenticeship started a long time before he began his ascetic existence in Auchterhouse.

When I was growing up, I was often perched on a stool at the counter with half an eye on the kitchen as I fretted over homework or doodled on a sketch pad while Mum went about the business of cooking for her family, rolling pastry, stirring a pot, dipping fillets of haddock in breadcrumbs, grating a lemon or nutmeg.

Jaws is often described as a cinematic metaphor about masculinity but Steven Spielberg is clear, “it’s a film about a shark.” Jeremy Lee insists he has written a book about cooking and calling it “Cooking” is a heavy hint, but he gives the reader much more than recipes. He has written, in part at least, a love letter to his parents and the childhood they gave him.

Dedications in books are rarely followed up, just a throwaway form of tribute, his is more of a synopsis:

To Mum and Daddy, who put so much into the day-to-day pleasure of cooking, curiosity, shopping and eating

In the pages that follow we are treated to his culinary upbringing, family outings interwoven with visits to collect the finest ingredients; lobsters and crabs from the East Neuk of Fife, sea kale and asparagus from Essie Farm, porridge oats from Cupar, smokies from Arbroath and heather honey sourced from Mrs Braithwaite’s tea and coffee shop.

Each of the short chapters is prefaced with story and description, invariably rooted in his upbringing and the love that he experienced at home. Love becomes central to the book. It is the inspiration, the central ingredient, the seasoning. Without it he would not be where he is now and his work reflects it back out onto the world.

Love frames the words he has for everyone in Quo Vadis, gentle questions and ‘well dones’ are the order of the day because the alternative he will not countenance, if you are tired you are grumpy, if you're grumpy you’re bad tempered, if you’re bad tempered you'll snarl. Rocket science I don't think so, you don't need a gold star badge to work that one out.

We were interrupted by a colleague as he was answering the question “why a book?” A former waiter was asking for a signed copy which was thrust into Jeremy’s hands. His words were generous for a previously errant waiter whose employment was in and out more times than a fiddler’s elbow. But he was brilliant, so we kept taking him back. The page was finished off with myriad drawn hearts and x’s.

Ultimately the answer to ‘why a book’ lies in his view of television. Jeremy’s stage presence was always going to draw him into the world of food as entertainment, but it is not a world he fully embraces.

There were very few Scottish chefs with a profile, and apparently, I had a profile. Pat Lewellyn, the genius who had discovered the Two Fat Ladies and Jamie Oliver said “try him out for Scotland”. I’d dabbled with TV before, but not with any conviction because I always got slightly irked by this nonsense that you were being paraded out for entertainment whereas food should be an education, because then it is brilliant.

The book is out there, having a whale of a time and I’m back in the kitchen making pasta and rolling tart cases. Next is another 10 years at Quo Vadis, I hope. I’ve never been driven by the excitement of adventure, I quite like the lovely thing of cycling from Hackney to Soho every day. Writing is always a pleasure.

Favourite thing to cook?

Depends on the time of year. Cooks are curious and there’s really not much we don’t like except bad cooking. I think game in autumn, we’re just finished with grouse, and partridge is about to come on, I adore wild duck.

My questions exhausted he poses in the kitchen wearing a High School of Dundee apron. The ensemble move around him, delivering their lines perfectly on cue as the leading man smiles, gesticulates and chats away, always a with a story to tell.