 A collapsed soufflé could so easily have marked the end of any culinary aspirations James Cross harboured. But for the Masterchef contestant it was merely a blip on a path which will surely see him one day open his own restaurant. Now 26, James finds himself as a commis chef under the tutelage of Luke Tipping and Adam Bennett at the Michelin-starred Simpsons Restaurant in Edgbaston. "If my soufflé hadn't collapsed in the quarter final I would have probably gone further - that was a bit of an unfortunate television incident," James smiles ruefully. "It was a very shiny brand new oven - you get heat radiation from the top which I didn't anticipate," he adds. "But I'm not bitter; all you can do is laugh about that sort of thing." While a love of food has always been there ("I've always cooked," says James. "Mum taught me to make an omelette when I was eight and the whole thing kind of snowballed"), the 26-year-old has taken the scenic route to his current position at Simpsons. The former King Edward Five Ways pupil studied Classical Literature and Civilisation at Birmingham University ("when you're 18 you don't really know what you want to do"), during which time he had his first taste of catering - waiting tables at a pizza restaurant in Selly Oak. A job at Le Petit Blanc followed, during which time James became good friends with the ex head chef Walter Blakemore, the man he cites as helping discover his passion for good food and ingredients. "I never wanted to just knock up beans on toast for dinner," says James. "It was always trying something different and going through my mum's old cookbook; my freezer at home has stuff like veal jus [in it] and you can always find gourmet bits and bobs in my house." After Le Petit Blanc, James studied for a postgraduate law degree at Birmingham ("an academic nightmare"), but before he completed his applications to bar school, found himself working at Hopwood Organic farm in Solihull ("doing odds and ends, helping around the site") - a logical step for someone with his own allotment ("everything from seed to plate I love about food") and a passion for picking wild mushrooms and selling them to local restaurants: "I just got a good book and got stuck in," says the man who really knows his ceps from his morels. "Basically I got into the forests and just started finding them and identifying them and distributing them to various restaurants in and around the Midlands - one of which was Simpsons. "I randomly walked in the door with a load of mushrooms and Adam [Bennett] had them off me - that was a year before I started working here." It was while working at Hopwood Organic that James's father saw the Masterchef advert and convinced his son to enter. The rest - collapsed soufflé and all - is history. From the farm James moved to work as front of house manager at Berrow Court in Edgbaston ("If you want to run your own restaurant you need to know everything from cleaning the toilets to cooking the foie gras and everything in between") before moving to front of house at JJays Indian restaurant . On the look-out for a new chef, James contacted Adam to see if he could recommend anyone. "Adam wasn't there and I'd never met Luke before, but he knew who I was - Adam had obviously told him about the Mushroom Man," James chuckles. "Luke said 'I might be able to help you - I'll give you 15 minutes' - and 15 minutes turned into two hours," he adds. "We just nattered about food and the industry and what we like and what we don't like and he just looked at me and said 'you know you're going to be in a kitchen one day - that's a logical progression for you', with a glint in his eye that Luke has. "A couple of weeks down the line, things hadn't worked out at JJays and I left, and the conversation I had with Luke was going round in my head, I phoned him up and said 'this is what's happening, it's the right time for me to make a move into the kitchen, and I know what's involved' - and at 25, 26 you don't go into this sort of thing lightly. "I said to Luke 'give me a chance.'" After half a day's trial, Luke offered James a job at Simpsons. That was 15 months ago - and the former Classical Literature student hasn't looked back since: "It's hard graft but it is worth it," he says. "If you don't have the passion you don't want to be doing something like this. "It's been everything I expected and more - it's very difficult in terms of the hours, but I'm fortunate enough to have a partner who really understands what it's all about," says James. "If she wasn't so supportive it'd make it a lot harder." From looking after the larder section, James currently works on the vegetable station, a typical week seeing him work five days, 9am 'til 3.30pm, back at 5pm until close, usually around midnight or 1am at weekends. It's no picnic, but James clearly loves his job and, with the ultimate goal of one day owning his own place, he could not have found anywhere better to start his career: "What makes it worth the brutality is the fact that you love it," he says. "I am setting myself up for my own place, who knows when - I've got a long way to go at Simpsons, a lot to learn in the kitchen," James admits. "There's no better place in the Midlands to be than this kitchen; in terms of the learning experience this is the best place, the best kit, a great team of chefs and the food is relatively classical, impeccably executed - you're learning something new every day." Unlike that soufflé, James is on the rise. | 
