The Portal’s Open. Here’s What It’s For.

I’ve spent the best part of five decades in professional kitchens, and I’ve learned the same lesson more times than I care to count: knowledge that isn’t organised is knowledge you can’t use when you actually need it. You pick something up on a bad Saturday service, you swear you’ll remember it, and six months later you’re making the same mistake because there was nowhere to put what you learned.

That’s what the Chefs Studio Portal is for. Somewhere to put it.

What the portal actually gives you

Registration is free, and I want to be clear about what that gets you before I talk about anything else. You get one account that follows you around the site, courses you can work through at your own pace, and a place to keep coming back to when the same problem turns up again, because in a kitchen it always does.

Inside, it’s built around the parts of the job that are easy to put off and impossible to ignore:

• Costing, leadership, menu engineering, kitchen systems and turnaround planning — courses you can work through around service, not instead of it.
• The Management Workshop — a premium space for the kind of practical thinking that doesn’t fit neatly into a course, with prompts and discussion grounded in real kitchen experience rather than theory.
• A working library — ebooks, checklists and guidance you can go back to when the same challenge comes round again, and it will.
• Fifty years of kitchens, distilled — I’ve made the mistakes so you don’t have to make all of them yourself. That’s really the whole point of the place.

None of it is designed to be read once and forgotten. It’s designed to be useful on a Tuesday afternoon when you’re three staff down and trying to work out why your food cost has crept up again.

The Founding Member Bundle

Now, the offer.

For £50, you get my autobiography, Just Call Me Chef, as a signed hardback, plus lifetime premium access to the portal, which means the management workshop and all six current premium courses. On top of that, you get a complimentary ebook from my back catalogue every month, for as long as the portal runs.

One payment. No subscription. Tracked postage is added at checkout, and if you’d like a personal dedication in the book, put it in your order notes.

If you’ve already bought the printed autobiography, you don’t pay again. You’re grandfathered into Founding Member access as a thank you for backing this from the start.

Here’s how it works, plainly:

1. Buy the bundle once — £50, plus postage.
2. Your premium access activates automatically once payment is confirmed.
3. You’re a Founding Member — lifetime portal access and a new ebook in your library every month.

“Lifetime” here means the working life of the portal itself, not yours or mine, and the full terms are laid out clearly if you want to read them before you buy.

Why I’m doing it this way

I could have built a subscription. Plenty of people would tell you that’s the smarter business. But that’s not what this is, not yet, anyway. I wanted to write a book worth owning first, something that earns its place on your shelf, not your bank statement. Founding members get in now, at this price, for good. When the subscription does arrive, you won’t pay for it. Everyone else will.

If you’re not ready to commit to the bundle, register for a free account and have a look round first. There’s no charge for that, and no pressure to take it further. But if you want the whole thing, the book, the courses, the Workshop, and a reason to check your inbox once a month, the Founding Member Bundle is the way in.

Explore the Chefs Studio Portal → Get the Founding Member Bundle — £50 →