Interview: William Curley, chocolatier

His name, William Curley, offers a couple of clues. The surname is part of one of the Cadbury corporation’s famous confectionery items. The first name is shared with factory owner Wonka and 19th-century prime minister Gladstone who, by reducing the tax on imported cocoa beans, made chocolate affordable for most of the population.

Curley is a chocolatier and patissier, one of the UK’s finest, with two outlets in London and a concession in Harrods. Should you be in urgent need of a passion fruit and mango entremet (it’s an elaborate layered sponge) after an exhausting retail trawl of Belgravia, Curley’s Ebury Street dessert bar is poised to help. In Richmond-upon-Thames, Curley’s first shop has been serving hot chocolate (house blend, Aztec or gianduja) and brownies to the kind of mums who would not dream of going to Iceland since 2004.

He is at the top of the dessert trolley, acclaimed by his peers as well as his customers. Curley’s trophy cabinet contains more bling than Ibrox and he has been the Academy of Chocolate’s Best British Chocolatier every year since 2007. Pierre Koffman, the Michelin-starred chef’s chef, said of him: “During my 25 years in the business, only one or two like William have ever come along. He is a fantastic pastry chef and chocolatier: perfect.”

Curley is using next week – National Chocolate Week – to spread some high-percentage cocoa solid-based joy and convince traditionalists there is life beyond Dairy Milk. “If you grow up in Belgium or France, you take it for granted that there are fantastic chocolatiers and patissiers selling wonderful things,” he says. “We are only just starting to appreciate that here. When I started at the end of the 1980s, there were three types of chocolate: white, milk and dark. It has evolved massively since then.”

Young William did not spend his childhood dreaming of mixing his own ganache and making cakes that look like fascinators. His mother is a mince and tatties cook, although his grandmother was an accomplished baker who went around private houses, preparing afternoon teas. “I remember going up there at the weekends,” he recalls. “She made her own jam, there would be Swiss rolls, scones. Maybe a little seed of something started there.”

School did not much appeal and, aged 15, having failed the few exams he sat, Curley found himself unable to leave until Christmas. He was packed off to technical college in Glenrothes where the options were metalwork, woodwork or cooking. “I didn’t much like the look of metalwork,” he recalls. “There were a few big tough blokes in there.” Cooking, on the other hand, was all pretty girls and clouds of icing sugar. “I thought, I’ll go in there.”

For the first time in his life, Curley had found something he really enjoyed. “I felt so happy at college that I didn’t want to bunk off.”

It wasn’t all caramel and whipped cream: the young Curley was marched through the City and Guilds syllabus: meat, poultry, stocks, all the standards. But there was a former baker who taught the basics of the craft who caught his imagination. “We did breads, tarts; I was taken by him. I still didn’t know you could be something called a patissier but whenever we did meals, I would do the dessert.”

Nothing Curley learned in Glenrothes, or in the local restaurants where he’d been putting in shifts, prepared him for his first day as an apprentice at the grand Gleneagles Hotel. “I didn’t realise what a big kitchen was. There were 60 or 70 chefs, it was a different world where all you could see was white and lots of hats.”

What, they asked the apprehensive new boy, would he do? He volunteered that he liked baking. “I didn’t look back.” Curley spent three years moving between ice-cream, afternoon tea, desserts and petits fours. “It was at that point that I realised I could specialise,” he says, the 20-year-old relief still audible in his voice. “Prior to that I thought that, at some point, I was going to have to bone out rabbits and make big pots of stock. I had worked for a guy in Fife who liked shooting. He would come back to the kitchen with pheasants and we would have to pluck them all.” Curley shudders. “Even then, I just wanted to make cakes.”

In search of inspiration and exciting new things to do with meringue, he began visiting France and Belgium. Gazing in the windows of the specialist chocolatiers and patisseries, he realised that, one day, he could have a shop like this. In the meantime he pounded the Michelin-star circuit, working for Koffman at La Tante Claire, Raymond Blanc at Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons and Marco Pierre White at The Oak Room.

They have all, he claims, influenced his work, although the layperson might need a PhD in pastry to spot the specific references. But, as Curley wrote in a recent blog: “My millefeuille is a classic in the style of Koffman, my couture chocolates are sophisticated in the style of Marco Pierre White and my passion fruit and chocolate financier [a kind of French sponge] is contemporary in the style of Raymond Blanc.”

By the age of 27, Curley was the Savoy Hotel’s youngest ever chef patissier, working under Swiss master Anton Edelman, leading a team of 21. When a talented Japanese pastry chef joined the crew, the final element in Curley’s business plan fell into place. Suzue, originally from Osaka, had moved to London in 1996 and was an award-winning sugar-spinner.

By the time they were married and ready to leave the Savoy, the couple felt London was ready for the kind of high-end cake and chocolate shop they had in mind. Under Suzue’s influence, Japanese flavours had become an important element in Curley’s confections, and they had to be sure there was a market for chocolates and desserts that featured wasabi, miso, sesame and black rice vinegar as well as raspberries, hazelnuts and other more familiar ingredients. No point in opening a shop selling laboriously made delicacies – in the beginning, Curley himself dipped every single chocolate using a three-pronged fork – if what people really want is a Yorkie.

Happily, by the time they launched in Richmond-on-Thames, the affluent locals were ready for esoteric patisserie with a twist, and willing to pay premium prices for it. Curley may have no interest in the stock pot but he shares the Michelin obsession with provenance and ingredients, and is meticulous in his sourcing. All his chocolate comes from Tuscan firm Amedei, famous for producing the most expensive chocolate bar in the world (Amedei Porcelana, currently £7.50 for a 50g bar). His hazelnuts are from Piedmont, the pistachios from Sicily. If he inspected each individual sesame seed before sticking it on to a sake-infused truffle, no one would be at all surprised.

Not that everything that comes in one of Curley’s cocoa brown boxes is esoteric and full of eastern promise. He is very partial to a bakewell tart. He also does what he calls a ‘nostalgia’ range, basically deluxe renditions of the pocket money favourites he remembers from a Scottish childhood. His version of the Bounty bar – white chocolate and toasted coconut ganache coated in Amedei’s wicked 70 per cent dark chocolate – bears little resemblance to the Mars corporation’s tooth-janglingly sweet original. And there is no mention of Bounty, or Snickers, or Tunnock’s anywhere near these products; it’s generic names only.

Still, it’s not too hard to work out where the £3 Nostalgia teacake – “rich, sweet pastry base topped with blackcurrant jam and marshmallow and coated in 66 per cent dark chocolate” – draws its inspiration.

“They bring back lots of memories,” says Curley, whose Fife accent has survived 18 years in London. “As a business, we want to be the best at what we do. We don’t have to be too serious about it. And we don’t have to be too expensive. Our Jaffa cake [Genoise sponge topped with homemade Seville orange marmalade and chocolate ganache, coated in 70 per cent dark chocolate] costs £3. You don’t need to get a mortgage to buy one and it means you can have the sensation, be thrilled, go on that little journey.”

There is also, he admits, an element of self-interest at work here. “I still love teacakes. But now my palate finds them, in their original form, very sweet. So maybe I’ve made these so I can indulge myself.”

He also enjoys the irony of selling millionaire shortbread (with sea salt caramel) to real millionaires, who haven’t got a clue what it is. “So many people come in and ask, what is that? I had no idea it was such a Scottish thing. But I suppose it must be. My granny used to make it.”

Amazingly, no old friends have taken him to task for recreating these homely classics for the upper classes. “I think people from back home admire me for doing this. Our shops are in affluent areas and people there can afford to spend a lot. It makes it viable. If I charged £1.50 for a teacake, I could still be criticised. I have to take it on the chin.”

Now 39, with a nine-month-old baby, Amy Rose, Curley still has more to do. “I don’t think this will ever be a massive company. I could see two or three more shops, one more in London, maybe one in Edinburgh, so we can maintain the quality. If I wanted to create a big business and then sell it on, there must be easier ways.”

He still puts in seven days a week. Despite having ten chefs. “I don’t want to not be near the product. I want to continue cooking.

“That was one reason I started this business. By the time I left the Savoy, I was looking after lots of other things. The logical next job for me was as a group pastry chef, in the UK or Asia, looking after four or five outlets. That’s not for me. I love being in the kitchen.” n

Couture Chocolate is published on Thursday by Jacqui Small, £30. www.williamcurley.co.uk