About Jonathan Dowling

Jonathan Dowling is a chef who still thinks in stock pots and service times — and a writer who strips cooking back to ratios you can hold in your head. He works under Dowling Media & Hospitality. The brand is Jonny1more.

Home is Yorkshire: cold mornings, good butter, the quiet before the pass wakes up. From there he travels — across the UK, and further when an opening or a brigade properly needs him. Restaurant openings can be supported worldwide, when the brief is real and the kitchen is ready to be used. For consultancy, travel and live-in must be covered by you; the day rate is talked through before anything starts. No surprises on the doorstep.

The cooking leans on local and wild produce — foraging when the season offers it — with a broad international hand behind it. Time in Australia, working with kitchens that championed native and local ingredients (including Magill Estate and Rockpool Bar & Grill, and staging at Quay and Attica), shaped a food philosophy that starts with the land and asks the plate to earn its place. In Sweden, as head chef at Restaurang Äng under Filip Gemzel, that same attention to place met a Michelin kitchen’s pace. At Taka Marylebone he led a contemporary Japanese room — Nikkei cooking, sushi, robata, tempura — technique with heat and calm. Earlier London years at Kurobuta Chelsea sit in the same line. And Dalleth, which he founded, remains the private-dining thread: his interest in human history and home, on the plate, then and now, when a venue has a kitchen worth working in.

What he likes to eat and cook, when the noise drops away, is quieter than the CV suggests. Closest to his heart are mushrooms and shellfish — one the soul of the land, the other the flavour of the sea. A nice oyster. A hot bowl of steamed mussels. Or a foraged parasol mushroom in those braised lentils with the duck. Comfort food that fills a house: rustic and casual when the room calls for it, without losing the craft underneath.

Around those rooms sits a wider working life — hotels, modern British and European houses, temporary cover, openings and training — the kind of adaptability that comes from showing up, learning the house, and keeping service moving. Useful. Not the shop window. The high-end kitchens and Dalleth are what we lead with; the rest is the graft underneath.

What you can book now is practical, and meant to be. A single day to walk the kitchen and see what is broken. Five days to set systems and steady a brigade. Or one day a week, shaped around you, for the longer haul. Temp and relief cover when there is a bed or a sensible stay — quoted as eight hours plus overtime through a costing template, so you approve a clear figure before anyone clocks in. Lessons for one cook or a small group: sometimes built like the books, sometimes tailored to whatever is falling apart on the pass.

And then there is Dalleth — private dinners where the venue has a kitchen you can work in, and Jonathan cooks and serves the same day. The tasting is experience-led: kaiseki for the shape of the meal, plated courses, calm service, guided by shun. Underneath is a personal interest in how people have eaten, and a quiet love of these islands — prehistoric ground to the present, sometimes one age, sometimes the whole walk. The feasts are rustic and home-cooked in spirit — Recipes Ratio’d lanes (British, Italian, Greek, Japanese, Thai), one main dish for sharing, heat and cloth and Sunday fire. Minimum six guests. Dietaries only if the whole table eats the same way.

The books — Recipes Ratio’d — live on Amazon: French, Thai, Japanese, Greek, and more on the way. Not a storefront here; just a door to the page.

Looking ahead, the same kitchen is opening out beyond the pass. Online lessons are on the way — ratios and craft you can follow from home — alongside a strand of humorous commentary: the trade told straight, with a grin. Further down the road sit health and hygiene teaching for real kitchens, and digital tools: apps built for how a kitchen actually moves, not how a spreadsheet wishes it would. None of that is the shop window yet. For now, what you can book is the work in the room.

Dowling Media & Hospitality · Jonny1more