We spoke to Scott about creative shifts, the philosophy behind Albers, and why restaurants, much like art, are really about connection
Did you always know you wanted to work in food, or did it happen gradually?
Not at all – food arrived sideways.
I grew up in north-west Cumbria in the 90s, which wasn’t exactly a culinary education. Dinner was practical: mash, cheese and beans, Fray Bentos pies, turkey drumsticks – usually alongside more mash and beans. Eating out wasn’t really a thing. A café trip for ham and lentil soup felt like an occasion. What we did have were pies – huge slab pies, trays of meat and potato made to feed families properly.
My granda loved food, mostly the eating of it. If my grandma wasn’t looking, he’d quietly dismantle whatever was on his plate and stuff the whole lot into a big white bun – roast dinner, gravy, the lot – collapsing rules into something instinctive and joyful. Looking back, that probably stayed with me: curiosity over correctness.
As a teenager I started experimenting, digging out years-out-of-date spices from the back of cupboards and adding oregano or curry powder to fried bacon just to see what happened. No training – just intuition and boredom.
The real shift came much later. I was working as a tree surgeon when winter work dried up. My partner at the time was on a film project in Margate and someone said, “Scott can cook.” Suddenly I was feeding thirty people, three meals a day, having never done anything like it before.
That first breakfast was chaos – too many dishes, too little sleep – but once everyone had eaten, something clicked. I realised it wasn’t really about cooking. It was about care. About bringing people together and changing the mood of a room.
I started cooking regularly on film sets, turning up with suitcases of ingredients and gas burners, feeding crews and artists alike. Somewhere along the way I understood that what I’d found wasn’t just cooking – it was hospitality. Nurture, connection, looking after people. Food just happened to be the language.
You previously had a life as an artist – was there a defining moment when you realised you wanted to shift into hospitality?
Art has always connected me to something deeper, but it’s an internal process. It asks you to sit with ideas for long periods – questioning, excavating, trying to understand something complex about yourself or the world. It can be solitary. You spend a lot of time making sense of things before anyone else encounters the work.
Hospitality felt like the opposite, but also strangely familiar. The exchange is immediate. You cook something, place it in front of someone, and the response happens in real time – people relax, talk more freely, feel looked after. There’s a directness to it that I found incredibly powerful.
There wasn’t a single moment where I left art behind. It was more a gradual realisation that what I’d always been searching for through art was connection. Cooking and hosting allowed me to access that same emotional space, but in a living, shared environment rather than a private one.
I didn’t really change direction – I changed medium. A restaurant still involves composition, atmosphere, narrative and emotion, but instead of observing the work from a distance, people step inside it. They participate in it.
In many ways, Albers is still an artistic practice – just one that feeds people at the same time.
Do you see parallels between art and cooking?
Very much so – although cooking has the decency to vanish once it has made its point.
Art, as I practised it, was an inward act: interrogating systems, questioning authorship and truth, stripping things back to understand what was actually real. Hospitality operates in public. You make something and within moments people are engaging with it emotionally and physically, whether they realise it or not.
Structurally, though, they are the same pursuit. Both are ways of teaching perception – placing elements beside one another and quietly asking people to reconsider what they thought they knew.
At Albers we serve a Taleggio panna cotta with compressed melon and white balsamic, a dish Ania developed that sounds slightly absurd on paper. Taleggio is dense, feral, almost argumentative; melon is clean and optimistic. Together they recalibrate each other. People taste it and there’s a small moment of adjustment – expectation shifting in real time.
That moment is the point.
In art you guide someone toward an idea; in cooking you guide them through sensation. I’ve realised I’m still doing the same thing – creating situations where people experience a philosophy rather than being told one. The difference is that now the lesson arrives disguised as lunch.
Who or what has most influenced your cooking style?
My granda, probably – not in any codified culinary sense, but in attitude. Food for him wasn’t aesthetic or performative; it was earnest, generous, entirely without self-consciousness. Eating was serious business, even if nobody would have called it gastronomy.
I’ve never subscribed to food heroes. Restaurants can sometimes become echo chambers of influence. That said, I admire how Jackson Boxer manages to smuggle finesse into comfort – dishes that appear familiar but reveal quiet precision once you’re inside them.
What interests me is that tension between memory and surprise. At Albers the aim isn’t to impress through complexity, but to gently destabilise expectation – something recognisable that shifts slightly beneath you. Food that meets you where you are, then persuades you to reconsider what you thought you liked.
Were there any experiences that shaped your perspective on food?
Growing up, going out meant cafés with my grandparents: formica tables, mugs of tea, familiarity over spectacle. The waiter knew what you were having before you sat down. Food wasn’t performance – it was care.
Later, places like Quality Wines or The Anchor & Hope gave me that same feeling in a different language. Better wine, sharper cooking, but the same generosity and ease. What stayed with me wasn’t a dish but the choreography of hospitality – plates landing at the right moment, a room slowly softening as service unfolds.
That connection between the northern caff and the modern bistro became the blueprint for Albers: familiarity first, always people before ego.
Opening a restaurant is a huge leap. What gave you the confidence to do it?
I wouldn’t call it confidence – more inevitability.
During Covid I was running the café in De Beauvoir Block, which became an accidental canteen for creatives. People came to work, talk, panic slightly about the world, and feel less alone. That’s where the idea of Albers really began.
My dog Albers was there the whole time – anxious, friendly, constantly circulating, greeting everyone whether they asked for it or not. In hindsight he was the blueprint. Hospitality as movement, curiosity, gentle intrusion.
Opening a restaurant afterwards felt less like a leap and more like making that feeling permanent.
That said, you have to be slightly unhinged to open a restaurant in this climate. Rational people diversify portfolios; they don’t sign leases and start buying chairs. But hospitality is optimistic by nature. You do it because you believe people still want to gather.
And I believed that enough to try.
What were the biggest challenges in creating Albers?
Mostly discovering how much I didn’t know.
My only experience beforehand was running a sheltered café environment. Opening Albers meant landlords, suppliers, staffing crises, cashflow – the full reality of daily service. Restaurants don’t begin with menus; they begin with problems, solved publicly while guests eat dinner three metres away.
The learning curve has been extreme. Chef, operator, negotiator, HR department, therapist – sometimes all before lunch.
The biggest challenge wasn’t opening the restaurant. It was growing into the person capable of running it.
Did Albers turn out as you imagined, or did it evolve?
It evolved – though interestingly it now feels closest to the original idea.
The past year has been about alignment rather than reinvention: stripping away noise, trusting simplicity, and building the right team. People like Zac brought structure; Ania’s cooking grounded the food in warmth rather than cleverness.
Early on you feel pressure to explain yourself. Now we cook, we host, and meaning emerges through repetition. The restaurant has developed its own gravity – somewhere people come not just to eat, but to belong for a few hours.
How do you balance creativity with the realities of running a business?
My art practice was never about objects but systems – interrogating how meaning is produced. A restaurant turns out to be similar. You’re constantly editing reality, stripping things back until something honest remains.
My role isn’t to impose vision but to create conditions. Ania’s food, Zac’s drinks – distinct voices inside a shared philosophy. Structure without suffocation.
Service is the ultimate test. Theory meets appetite. If the idea is real, people feel it immediately.
What has surprised you most about being a restaurant owner?
How collective it is.
You start thinking you’re building a restaurant; eventually you realise you’re building confidence in people. When the right team feels trusted, culture begins to carry itself.
I’m not chasing perfection – just a place where people feel looked after, including the people who work there.
What keeps you motivated?
When it works, a room hums. Staff find confidence, strangers relax into themselves. You realise you’re creating a temporary world people step into for a few hours.
Watching people grow – that matters more than any single dish.
How important is neighbourhood and community?
Essential.
The goal is repetition. Someone comes once, then again, then books birthdays, anniversaries – eventually weddings. The restaurant stops being somewhere you visit and becomes somewhere that quietly marks chapters of life.
When you’re not at Albers, where do you spend time in East London?
In theory everywhere. In reality, almost nowhere. When I do escape, it’s usually a pub like the Scolt Head – familiar faces, good craic, nothing performative.
Favourite neighbourhood spots?
If I could, I’d eat lunch at Quality Wines every day. It gets the balance right without trying too hard.
Restaurant you’d travel to tomorrow?
Bistrot Paul Bert, Paris.
Dream dinner guests?
Bob Mortimer, George Michael, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
What’s next for Albers?
Less expansion, more becoming.
In April we’re rethinking the terrace – letting the restaurant spill into the street, becoming more porous to the neighbourhood. Internally it’s about authorship: giving the team space to shape what Albers becomes while holding a clear philosophy underneath.
The aim isn’t scale. It’s durability – a way of working that’s generous, curious, slightly mischievous, and built to last.
Albers, 23A Englefield Road, London N1 4JX
Albers serves lunch Wednesday to Saturday and dinner Tuesday to Saturday