Four years filming the restaurant, the apprentices, and the Cornwall Food Foundation at Watergate Bay, from 2016 until the doors closed in 2019.
Some clients you remember for the place. Some for the people. Fifteen Cornwall was both. The restaurant sat at the top of the cliff at Watergate Bay, looking out across one of the most striking stretches of coast in north Cornwall, and inside it was a team of people who cared deeply about what they were doing and why. We worked with them from 2016 until they unexpectedly closed at the end of 2019. Four years that we still look back on as some of the most rewarding work we’ve made.
For anyone who didn’t know the restaurant, the model was unusual. Fifteen Cornwall was a working restaurant that doubled as a training kitchen. Each year an intake of apprentices, often young people who hadn’t had an easy path to that point, were brought into the kitchen and the wider team to learn the trade properly. The dining room funded the programme. The programme produced chefs. Alongside it sat the Cornwall Food Foundation, the charity that ran the apprenticeship and extended the same philosophy out into the local community. The whole thing was knitted together by a belief that food could be a vehicle for second chances, and that was the heart of what we got to film with them over four years.
The graduation films
Our first project with Fifteen was the 2016 graduation film, and it became an annual tradition. Every year from 2016 through to 2019 we produced a film series for the apprentices’ graduation ceremony, screened on the night to friends, family, and the team.
The format settled into something we genuinely loved. We’d sit down with each apprentice and ask them what the programme had meant to them. Then we’d film the head chef, the front of house team, the mentors, the people who had watched them come in green and walk out as capable young chefs. The films cut those threads together: the apprentice in their own words, and the team around them describing the change they had seen.
Filming the graduation series put us right at the heart of the programme. You couldn’t help being affected by it. Some of the apprentices had stories that were genuinely hard, and the openness they showed in sitting down on camera was something we never took for granted. The screenings were always emotional nights. Family members seeing their son or daughter described in those terms by the team they had worked alongside for a year. Apprentices seeing themselves through other people’s eyes, often for the first time. The films did a real job, and they were always a privilege to put together.
Filming the Cornwall Food Foundation
The foundation’s work went well beyond the apprenticeship at the restaurant. It ran projects across Cornwall, teaching people to cook and grow food from scratch, and using food as a starting point for building confidence and practical life skills. The end goal was always the people, not the food.
In 2019 we produced a series of films for the foundation, following that work out into the community. The values were already on the surface. Our job was to film honestly and let the people in front of the camera do the rest.
A day with Jamie at the tenth anniversary
2016 was Fifteen Cornwall’s tenth anniversary, and the team marked it on a single ambitious day in May. Jamie came down with his mentor Gennaro Contaldo to celebrate. The graduating cohort of apprentices walked in their ceremony the same day. And, most striking of all, the restaurant brought as many of the previous decade’s trainees and graduates back together as they could, for a gathering on the beach at Watergate Bay.
We spent the day with the team behind the scenes. What came across, more than anything, was how invested everyone still was in what Fifteen had been set up to do. Jamie included. The questions, the way he spoke to apprentices old and new, the small things that aren’t on a script. A decade in, he was still genuinely paying attention.
What Fifteen stood for
Over the years of the apprenticeship, more than two hundred young people passed through the programme, with around a hundred and thirty graduating into kitchens here and abroad. Those are the numbers, but the numbers were never really the point. The point was a small group of people on a clifftop in Cornwall deciding that a restaurant could do more than serve dinner, then proving it every day for thirteen years.
We feel lucky to have been around for some of it. The team welcomed us in, trusted us with their stories, and made every shoot a pleasure to turn up to. The doors closed in December 2019, but the apprentices, the chefs, the kitchen porters, and the front of house team all carried what they’d learned out into careers all over the world. That’s the legacy worth remembering.
