“I built the thing I needed and couldn't find.”

I was head chef of The Oystermen in Covent Garden — an award-winning kitchen. I’ve also ran my own private dining company and held senior roles in the UK and abroad. I know first hand that the kitchen can be a genuinely tough place to keep your head straight some weeks. The demands of busy services day in day out are enough to stretch anyone to their limit. I know what it does to a person to run a section, a shift, a team, on no sleep and no space to talk about your mental health. I've been the one who couldn't say it was getting to me, and the one who didn't know how to ask a junior if they were okay.

Outside the kitchen, I volunteer weekly on a mental health crisis line and I'm accredited by MHFA England — trained, properly, in how to actually listen to someone who's struggling and not make it worse. That combination is the whole point of Hard Yards: someone who's stood on the pass and knows what a bad service does to a person, and someone who's had the training to do something useful about it.

When I went looking for something built for kitchens specifically — not generic corporate wellbeing, not a leaflet in the staff room, something that actually understood the hours, the culture, the language — it didn't exist. Every option was designed for an office. So I built the one I couldn't find.