The first time I meet Thomas Straker, he’s extremely hungover. The night before, he was at Scarr’s Pizza on the Lower East Side drinking with a bunch of Canadian tourists. When Scarr’s closed, the gang wanted to keep the party going. Straker had just the place: his unopened SoHo restaurant on Grand Street. It was still under construction; ConEd hadn’t even turned the gas on yet. But gas, schmass. About 30 people got piss drunk there anyway.
“I didn’t know any of them. Maybe a few?” Straker tells me as we sit for breakfast the next morning at San Vicente West Village. He’s wearing a Canadian tuxedo, sunglasses, and a camo hat that says “Smile.” His general manager, Brock, who arrived at the restaurant post-rager, is definitely not smiling. In fact, he’s furious: “Absolutely disgusting in here. Food everywhere, cigarettes on the floor.” he texts Straker. Straker laughs manically and texts him back. “How fucked is it?”
Thirty-six-year-old Thomas Straker talks like a degenerate, dresses like a degenerate, and acts like a degenerate—Google his name, and you’ll find more than one scandalous account in the Daily Mail (including paparazzi shots with sceney aristocrats and getting his Rolex stolen). But against all logic and odds, he is not a degenerate. Currently, he operates two hyper-successful restaurants in London: Straker’s, a Michelin Guide restaurant, and Acre, both in Notting Hill. The food is not the primary reason he’s famous. The moneyed and aristocratic crowd that dines there is. Dua Lipa told V Magazine it’s one of her favorite restaurants in the city.
Thomas Straker smoking outside of his New York restaurant, Straker’s. He became a (critically acclaimed) chef after a short stint at military school: “I failed because apparently I was too immature to do the officer training.”
His butter line, All Things Butter, is printing cash. It’s stocked in Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Waitrose & Partners in the United Kingdom, and Whole Foods in the United States. (He owns a stake in a farm in Scotland and is currently looking to snap up property in NY’s agro-friendly Hudson Valley.) A few months ago, All Things Butter expanded into cottage cheese amid the GLP-1 protein boom, and according to Straker, sold around 1 million pots in the United Kingdom this February alone. They recently completed a $7 million fundraising round. Speaking of millions: Straker himself has more than 2.5 million TikTok followers and 2.7 million Instagram followers, who tune in for his cooking videos. Also, he’s hot.
This week, he will open his third restaurant—and first restaurant in the States. He tells me Dorsia is one of the investors, no doubt betting that Straker’s New York haunt will attract the same high-end clientele as his London place. You can make a reservation through them or through Resy. Yet most of the tables? They’ll be populated by whomever Straker deigns cool enough to have the VIP number.
Straker didn’t always want to be a chef. As a teenager, he had wanted to join the army like his father, an SAS officer in the British Army. So he enrolled in the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst—the same military school that Prince Harry and Prince William attended. It didn’t work out. “I failed because apparently I was too immature to do the officer training,” he says, rolling his eyes. “So after that, I was like, ‘Right, fuck that.’ I’m going to do a cooking course.” Growing up in Herefordshire, a rural English county that bordered Wales, he fished with his dad all the time. Afterward, they’d barbecue their freshly caught trout with sausages. He loved it. So why not give chefdom a shot?
Cooking school led to a job at The Dorchester, the five-star Art Deco hotel in Mayfair. Eventually he landed at Casa Cruz, Juan Santa Cruz’s clubby townhouse restaurant in Notting Hill, whose patrons include Victoria Beckham, Prince Harry, and Kate Moss.
Before opening his own restaurants, Thomas Straker worked at Casa Cruz in London. Juan Santa Cruz, the proprietor, describes Straker as “an absolute rebel.”
Santa Cruz discovered Straker in 2015, a few months before he opened Casa Cruz. He’d just returned to London after celebrating New Year’s in the billionaire’s paradise of Punta del Este, Uruguay, when a friend invited him to dinner at a depressing-looking basement restaurant—a far cry from the beach clubs from which he’d come. “It was damp, it was cold. I thought, ‘Oh, this is just awful,’” he says. But then everything changed when the food came out.
Afterward, he asked to meet the chef. A gangly, punkish 23-year-old emerged from the kitchen. Santa Cruz pretty much hired him on the spot. He gave Straker a vision: an elevated Latin American-meets-English haunt, spread out across four floors. Months later, Straker delivered a comprehensive menu—and when the doors opened, Casa Cruz became London’s hottest restaurant. “If it wasn’t for him, the place wouldn’t have been such a success,” Santa Cruz tells me.
Things soon got heated. “He was an absolute rebel,” Santa Cruz recalled, saying they’d get into screaming matches in the townhouse’s club room where they could close the doors away from the customers. He reenacts a typical one for me over the phone: “His face and my face would be inches apart. I would be, ‘Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.’ He’d be like, ‘Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah,’” Santa Cruz says. Yet: “He never failed me on anything.”
Straker says he learned a lot of things from posh super connector Santa Cruz. Like banquettes should be at a height where you can comfortably put your arm around your girlfriend. He had advice about the menu too. “Your food style has got to be so much so that you can take your girlfriend to dinner and she’s not going to be going like, ‘Oh, there’s nothing for me to eat.’ You’ve got to have a bit of steamed fish and some really clean vegetables. It’s not fucking sea bass mousse on top of mushroom thinging and dada dada dada then wrapped up in a bit of sea bass skin,” Straker says.
Then there was the most important skill of all: “I learned from Juan how to raise money.”
During the pandemic, he took on a stint as a private chef to a billionaire. He cooked on their yacht in St. Barths and their compound in Connecticut. All the while, he made TikTok videos. Thanks to his rakish good looks—and his damn good food—he kept going viral. By 2022, he raised enough money to open a restaurant in London. (That billionaire client is now one of his investors.)
Yet New York was always calling. “It’s a fucking vibe. People live outside their apartments. They’ve got energy, they go out for breakfast, lunch, and dinner,” he says of the city. “And it’s competitive. I want competitive. I don’t want to be a fucking biggest fish in a small pond. I want to be a small fish in a big pond.”
The second time I met Thomas Straker, he was 20 minutes late because he decided to get a tattoo. He had time to kill that afternoon, and there’s a tattoo shop right across from the restaurant, so why not? He rolls up his sleeve to show me. It’s a bloody butcher fishing fly, his skin still red and shiny from the needle. Above the bloody butcher fly? A tattoo of a fish. There’s also a fish on the Straker’s sign outside and on the menu. A lot of small fishes in one big pond.
The restaurant is almost done. There are corduroy booths and suede banquettes; a stereo system booms a playlist that sounds like we’re in a sex club in Ibiza. (Or not! “This doesn’t sound like a sex club in Ibiza,” Straker tells me after I make the joke. I wonder if he knows from experience.)
On the walls is art. Serious art. Two Keith Haring paintings. Six Damien Hirst drawings. A giant black skull painting by Brian Clarke. They’re on loan from Tico Mugrabi, a scion of the New York-Israeli family with a $5 billion trove of contemporary art that includes over 800 Andy Warhols. (When Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump were renovating the penthouses in the Kushner family-owned Puck building, they asked Mugrabi to help them spruce the place up. Mugrabi tossed them a Richard Prince, a George Condo, and a Damien Hirst dot painting.) Straker met Mugrabi through his well-connected friend Wenty Beaumont, founder of the art advisory Beaumont Nathan. Mugrabi invited him to coffee in Southampton. So Straker hopped on a Blade and helicoptered out East to schmooze at Sant Ambroeus. The trip probably cost him $2,000, he estimates. But mere thousands are a negligible line item against the millions of dollars worth of art he procured.
Although—with all due respect to those contemporary creative greats—the conversation piece is a ceramic bar jar by artist Jake Clark that reads “Lucky Strakers.” It’s an artistic nod to Lucky Strike, the Keith McNally–run restaurant that existed in the space for 31 years before closing during the pandemic. (McNally, also the man behind Balthazar and Minetta Tavern, is one of the most famous restaurateurs in New York, if not the most famous: His memoir, I Regret Everything, is a New York Times bestseller—the Kitchen Confidential of the millennial age.) “I walked into this space, I opened the door, and the energy hit me in the face. I was like, ‘Fucking hell, this is it.’ All those martinis!” Straker says.
A ceramic bar jar at Straker’s. It’s a nod to Keith McNally’s Lucky Strike, the former restaurant in the SoHo space. Does McNally have any feelings about Straker moving in? “Feelings of rage and jealousy,” he says.
He wrote to McNally and asked him to get a coffee. When they met, they talked about restaurants, operating them, and rent. (“[Keith] said the landlord’s a cunt, but I already knew that,” Straker says.)
Straker speaks of McNally with a revered respect, taking on a noticeable air of sincerity when I ask about their relationship. “That’s been a lovely experience as well—getting to know someone who you admire in the same field,” he says.
I also emailed McNally, who agreed to answer a few questions about Straker for this story. Our conversation is below.
When and how did you first meet Thomas Straker?
About a year ago. He got in touch with me.
What was your first impression?
I didn’t like him.
What is your impression now?
I like him even less now. That’s not a joke.
Straker’s restaurant will take over the old Lucky Strike space, which you had for 31 years. What kind of feelings does that bring up for you?
Feelings of rage and jealousy.
Have you given Straker any advice? If so, what?
Yes. Straker’s in New York won’t work. Go back to London.
Anything else you want to add?
Yes. Although I loathe Tom, I love his food, and I plan to eat at his NY restaurant every other day for the next 40 years or until I die. Whatever comes first.
I repeat McNally’s answers to Straker. “He asked me very sweetly to come and stay with him in Martha’s Vineyard,” Straker says. “Maybe that would’ve been to kill me.”
McNally’s 23-year-old son, George, opened a restaurant called Faux a few blocks away. Like Straker, he’s English, and also like Straker, he’s got a gritty off-the-cuff energy and biceps full of tattoos. Both Faux and Straker’s will be open late-night, transitioning from a restaurant to a lounge of sorts.
It all feels very synergistic: In the 1980s and ’90s, McNally and his brother, Brian, opened the very restaurants that defined New York’s downtown zeitgeist after moving here from London: the Odeon, Indochine, and Balthazar. Even as the artists left downtown and the bankers took over, George and Tom are keeping it cool—next-gen British restaurateurs saving Manhattan nightlife like two tatted-up, foulmouthed Batmen.
At Straker’s, it’s only 3 p.m., but the bass blasts through his amps so loudly that multiple wine glasses fall from their hanging rack and shatter on the bar below. Straker doesn’t bat an eye; the music electrifies his body. I stand by a green phone, connected to the restaurant’s VIP line. Who gets the number? I ask him. He flashes a devious smile. “You.”
“I don’t want to be a fucking biggest fish in a small pond. I want to be a small fish in a big pond.”
