Lunchman

A Cordon Bleu Chef’s Year in a School Canteen

A brilliantly funny memoir by a former cordon bleu chef, as he moves from the world of champagne and caviar to creating shepherd's pie in a school kitchen.

In a bustling London school kitchen, where lunch may be the only proper meal a child eats all day, a former fine-dining chef now serves fish pie instead of foie gras. Known to the pupils as ‘Lunchman’, Jack Faulkner once worked in some of the city’s most prestigious restaurants, cooking for celebrities, prime ministers and the elite. Now, his daily service is shaped by tight budgets, cultural diversity and the quiet reality of food poverty.

Following the course of the school year, month by month, Lunchman explores the changing seasons through the meals prepared for both wealthy diners and hungry children. Alongside memories of restaurant excess – pigs’ heads, sweetbreads and smoked eel sandwiches – are moments of meaning in the school kitchen: a dinner lady sharing her recipe for Jollof rice, or a child asking about their right to belong. These two worlds, though starkly different, are bound by the same essential need: to feed people well.

By turns heartwarming and shocking, Lunchman is a celebration of food’s power to connect – and a rallying cry for seasonal, nourishing food to be a right, not a luxury.

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