About Gareth
Food should make you feel something. That's why Gareth cooks.
Gareth's career as a self-taught chef started with hosting supper clubs out of his flat in East London. Just good food, shared with people around a table.
He worked in restaurants to learn how the industry operated, then spent time in New York cooking soul food in Harlem. He came back to England and headed home to Cumbria, working in a kitchen on a farm in the Lake District, using the produce they grew, baking bread every morning, cooking with their livestock and vegetables from the land.
He got the chance to open his own kitchen in a brewery in Newcastle. Built it from scratch, literally constructing the space in the back of an old warehouse. A small menu grew into something popular - with coverage from The Guardian.
Gareth always had a passion to go back to his roots of the supperclub days, being part of the meal itself and not in the back of a kitchen - telling people where the food came from, why it mattered, what made it special.
So he left and went self-employed. Private dining, pop-ups, takeovers, where he could cook for people and talk about the food as they ate it. He noticed something simple but important: when people understood the story behind what they were eating, they enjoyed it more. It genuinely tasted better.
The Mind-Mouth Connection
Gareth builds dishes in his head before he cooks them. He thinks in flavours, textures, smells - he can actually taste a dish in his mind before it's made. He calls this his "mind mouth." He can take a description, a memory, a flavour combination that interests him, and build it step by step in his head, knowing exactly how it'll work.
He puts this down to being neurodivergent, it's just how his brain's wired to think in sensory layers all at once.
The result is that when he cooks something, there's no guess-work. He knows what he's doing and why.
The Wandering Cumbrian
Through The Wandering Cumbrian, Gareth creates personal and unique dining experiences. He works with your stories, your tastes, your memories - the things that matter to you. Then he cooks something that makes you feel them.
He follows his own instincts too - techniques that intrigue him, new flavour combinations, twists of traditional classics.
Nothing's formulaic. Every dinner is built for the specific people at the table. And Gareth's there to tell the story while you're eating.