Going off the beet-en track

A Hampshire chef has tapped into the growing food trend and opened a vegan cookery school. Faith Eckersall went to meet him

Seven years ago Peter Axworthy was “as far as you could get from being vegan”, enjoying a carnivorous lifestyle and telling friends who suggested he go veggie not to be ridiculous.

“Then I watched one of those documentaries on Netflix; I’d always been interested in the farming industry because I worked as a private chef but it switched my whole outlook,” he says. “I wasn’t a hippy type of person but the thought of taking another life from something that hadn’t got the choice over it, and with the industry becoming so factory farmed, I just thought: ‘I don’t want to be part of that anymore’.”

This abrupt decision resulted in a complete lifestyle change which has resulted in the two successful restaurants he runs today, along with what he believes is Hampshire’s only vegan cookery school. “Within weeks of starting my vegan diet I’d started to notice the health benefits,” he says. “I was working long hours at the time but I was less tired and could easily get out of bed.”

He’d been concerned that not being able to use meat and dairy would lessen his passion for cooking but the opposite happened.

“It seemed to reignite all the passion I had when I started cooking,” he says. “I was learning so many things from new; new techniques, new flavours, I was being forced to try things I’d shied away from and I found it really exciting.”

He’d always wanted to have his own restaurant and started searching for an appropriate venue. He found it six years ago at the Chesapeake Mill antiques centre in Wickham near Fareham where he opened one of the county’s first fully vegan restaurants with his mum.