You can’t help thinking that if Jackson Boxer had been named Ian Smith, he might have carved a
different path through life. When your name sounds as if it has been plucked from a 1950s thriller, you can’t simply go and work for an accountancy firm. ‘I still feel like I’m growing into it,’ he says. ‘[In childhood] people were like, “Oh wow, that’s a great name,” and I thought, “Oh f***, I should do something with it.”’
And he did. Jackson is 41; by 24, he’d set up Brunswick House, the acclaimed restaurant in an artfully crumbling, antique-filled Georgian mansion in Vauxhall that made his name, establishing him as a young rockstar chef. Quickly, he received what he now characterises, rather unfairly, as ‘a totally undeserved amount of attention and recognition’. It was a ‘thrilling’ time – a hedonistic time, too. Many people would have burned out having peaked so early and pushed so hard. But nearly 20 years on, sober, and a proud father of four, you get the sense he’s just settling into his stride.
We meet between lunch and dinner service at his latest opening, Vesper, in Exmouth Market, Clerkenwell. The final diners are pouring the last drops of wine and finishing plates of warm chocolate cake. Jackson takes off his apron, rolls up his sleeves and takes a seat at a table outside. Vesper has been open for just three months when I visit, and already it is among the most talked-about restaurants in London. A few weeks ago, it was named Restaurant of the Year in the 2026 House & Garden Awards.
So, why Vesper? ‘There is a poetics to naming,’ says Jackson. ‘You can come up with the best name in the world and if you open a dud restaurant, it becomes a terrible name. You can have the most generic name in the world, but if you make something beautiful, it will take on a lustre. It needs rhythm, it needs metre. Vesper had a nice sound to it, but there was also something evocative in the idea of the evening star. This glimmering Venus appearing in the west as the sun sets, and vespers as the evening prayers.’
He has ‘no aptitude for religion’, but he is evangelical about restaurants. ‘For me, there’s something ecclesiastical about a restaurant in the evening. This ritualised lighting of the candles, this secular sense of communal celebration. It felt like the right thing to be doing – opening something beautiful for everyone.’
And beautiful it most certainly is. Jackson collaborated with interior designer and friend Jermaine Gallacher on the project, and the result is a room that feels simultaneously stylish, of the moment and as if it has always been here, with whitewashed brick walls, an enormous, sculptural stainless-steel bar and high candle sconces that cast a soft glow. ‘I’m fussy about spaces and locations,’ he says, believing that beautiful menus require beautiful dining rooms. There are endless developers in the capital (which he considers to be ‘one of the great food cities’) offering ‘a soulless box’ to chefs who want to open their own place. ‘I find it hard to form a human response to that,’ he says. ‘London is a city of history, it’s a city of amazing overlays on top of a palimpsest of different uses for spaces.’
Hospitality can be gruelling; the industry is only just beginning to bounce back from the Covid years, and restaurateurs are facing rising business rates and food prices. And yet, Jackson says, ‘cities without restaurants would be like barren wastelands’.
‘There’s something about the nature of restaurants – the way their primary function is to restore. It’s not just about feeding people; it’s also a place of genuine conviviality. It’s a place in which strangers live together. You’re surrounded by people you’ve never met, being looked after by people you’ve never met. But these people, they genuinely care about you. They want you to have a nice time.’
If building a layered space is important to Jackson, he takes the same approach to his food. The menu at Vesper is arguably his most enticing yet. On first glance, it looks like indulgent, modern British comfort food: salt-and-vinegar crisps with trout roe; Hereford beef; veal chop with spinach and Tunworth cheese; herb-fed chicken with bread sauce. But the plates that spin from the small kitchen have several tiers of flavour. ‘I like contrast and conflict in my food,’ says Jackson. ‘A lot of my cooking is thinking about familiar archetypes like the burger [every day, he makes 10 off-menu burgers that people queue up to nab], and then thinking about how you can take people by surprise by taking elements of that and investing them with notes which make the whole experience not a cliché.’
The bread sauce on his chicken is a case in point. Entirely untraditional, it’s a smooth, glossy onion sauce imbued with all the flavours you’d recognise from the old favourite. ‘Familiar flavours of my childhood,’ he says. His own children (whom he shares with his wife, Melissa) will, he predicts, likely say the most memorable flavour of their childhood was ‘pasta and tomato sauce. They are a source of joy, inspiration and wonder to me, except for when I have to cook for them and then they become a nightmarish seething snake’s nest of different and ever-changing dislikes,’ he jokes.
It was his eldest daughter, Roma, 13, who helped get his cooking mojo back after Covid. ‘I’d forgotten how to write menus,’ he recalls. Roma said, ‘Dadda, why are you worried?’ He replied, ‘I can’t remember what people like to eat.’ She said, ‘That’s easy, Pizza Express dough balls and garlic butter.’ Few people could go to Brunswick House now and not order the grilled potato bread with green garlic butter, born from Roma’s vision.
At Vesper, the thing to order is, predictably, a Vesper martini. Made with two different kinds of gin, British vodka, an aperitif called Tempus Fugit and a twist of lemon, it is perfectly cold and punchy. A drink you know and love, but done with panache.
How does he feel these days, I wonder, about the rockstar-chef label? ‘I’m now at an age where if I was a rockstar, I would be way over the hill,’ he says. ‘I’d be doing cruise ships.’ It’s a nice try, but there is really no touch of the Saga about Vesper, nor about Jackson Boxer.
Jackson Boxer's recipes from Vesper
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