Chef Nathaniel Mortley in black chef's clothes.

Photo by Danika Magdalena

Nathaniel Mortley: ‘Hospitality doesn’t judge’

13 Oct 2025

Journalist

Having turned his life around after prison, chef Nathaniel Mortley is poised to open his first restaurant, with eyes on paying it forward and winning a Michelin star

On the first anniversary of his release from prison, on 17 August 2022, chef Nathaniel Mortley prepared a six-course tasting menu for 100 people.

It was a remarkable turnaround for a South London chef whose life had unravelled whilst working in the city’s Michelin-starred kitchens, where he was deeply unhappy and exhausted, often the only Black chef and frequently subject to racism. Noticing rampant drug use amongst the team, he began selling them. He would later serve two and a half years in Brixton prison for drugs offences.

It was also where he lost his passion for cooking, having been pushed towards hospitality in his teens by his mother, who was desperate to keep him out of trouble (being stabbed at 16 had made him “very angry” and had “changed the trajectory” of a “happy-go-lucky guy,” he says).

“I was very, very young and working in environments that, let's say, weren't really the best, and I was tired and constantly grafting. It just really took the fun out of it,” says Mortley of his Michelin-starred experiences. I’m speaking to the chef, now in his early 30s, over the phone while he whizzes around a supermarket, having been let down by a supplier. He apologises when he has to interrupt our conversation to clarify the amount of produce he needs.

That turnaround is now complete with the impending opening of his first restaurant, 2210 in Herne Hill, just a short bus ride from where he grew up in Peckham. With Guyanese and Bajan (and German) heritage, the self-funded 2210 is Mortley’s attempt to take pan-Caribbean food to fine-dining level.

The name is significant: it’s the date his beloved grandmother passed away. He’ll be using her roti recipe, “the best roti recipe about”, which will be served with Scotch bonnet butter, as well as her version of Guyana’s national dish, pepperpot, using beef short rib.

They’ll be cheffy touches too, like the tempura shiso leaf with the pan-seared pimento duck, and plenty of hits from his recent residency at The Greyhound pub in Peckham, like a 28-day-aged jerk ribeye with Scotch bonnet chimichurri, red pepper purée and oxtail jus, a deep-fried apple crumble, and a plantain cake with white chocolate ganache, chocolate snow and pickled plantain.

“I still want it to be accessible for your everyday users who live in the area and can't afford to come out and spend £170 on a tasting menu, but at the same time, still keep it a high enough level that we can afford to get in the top ingredients and the top wines and everything else. That’s the hardest challenge,” he says.

The porridge and the push

Mortley spent his “whole sentence, just cooking,” he says, after securing a role at The Clink, the restaurant inside Brixton prison staffed by inmates. The Clink is a charity which seeks to train inmates for life after prison and reduce reoffending, and has delivered thousands of hospitality qualifications. He says working there was “more like doing a stage”; in fact, when it seemed inevitable that he would be going to prison, he went to eat at The Clink to get an idea of the set-up. He remains an ambassador for the charity.

When Mortley left prison on 17 August 2021, he was astounded to find that being a chef had suddenly become “cool”. He’d always imagined demonstrating his skills on social media somehow; now he had the push to do it.

“It wasn't until I went to prison that I actually got the push and said, you know what? I've just wasted a period of my life. Let's go for this. Because the thing that always held me back was, cheffing wasn't cool, and I didn't want to put myself out there, show personality… and people think, what's this plonker doing?” he says.

Mortley, whose social media handle is Natty Can Cook, currently has over 80,000 followers across his channels, where he shares a mixture of recipe videos, eating challenges and inspirational content about his story.

“I put out my first video on Easter Sunday, 2022. From the first video, it went viral. I went from, considering I only had, I think, 700-odd followers, the video ended up getting 155,000 views in two days. Then I just continued posting three times a week. Within four months, I'd done my first six-course tasting menu, because everyone was like, ‘I wanna try the food.’ And then off the back of that, it just continued growing.”

Michelin ambitions

Ultimately, Mortley has ambitions for a Michelin star and wants to do it whilst also paying forward the opportunities he’s been given and carved out for himself since leaving prison. Hospitality, he says, has changed for the better since he started out, with greater work-life balance available, and as his brand grows, he plans to employ ex-offenders also.

“Food is a place where, yes, you might have made a wrong decision in your previous life, but you can reform and come into cooking. We don't judge. Obviously, it's hard graft, and you've got to want to do it for yourself, so I'm not going to sugarcoat it. It's difficult. But if you want to change your life and you want to achieve, hospitality is a place where they're willing to take on people and willing to accept people for who they are. As long as you come to graft and show yourself, then that's the main thing.

“If I'm able to do something like this, why are you not able to do it as well?”

13 Oct 2025