Meet the British Foodie Demystifying the Michelin Guide’s Secrets

Jesse Burgess is a chef whisperer. If you’re interested in food and have a penchant for scrolling, you may already know this from one of his many vertical clips.

The 35-year-old English foodie, host and co-founder of media platform TopJaw, forged a reputation for charming London’s culinary luminaries into opening up not just about their work but the restaurants, bars and Sunday roasts that they adore. And, just as informative, the spots that they think are overrated.

Interviewing chef after chef after chef for going on 10 years, Burgess has honed another rather novel skill. He can talk about fine dining without a ring of pretension. “This guy properly reads the fucking room,” says Gordon Ramsay, several times a TopJaw guest. “Jesse understands what he does and doesn’t know. He talks from a viewer’s perspective and lets you in on the secret, what’s going on … where a critic would have the tendency to slide toward being an asshole.”

An asshole was the last thing Apple TV needed when casting its ambitious culinary series, Knife Edge: Chasing Michelin Stars. The word Michelin already evokes thoughts of white tablecloths, comical price tags, foams, fermentations and microgreens applied via tweezers. (And, you know, the whole tire manufacturing part of the business.) To preemptively deflate perceived elitism, many associated with the project say there was ultimately only one choice to be its face.

“I’d heard about the show, because they had already filmed quite a bit of it without a host, flying to chefs all around the world,” says Burgess, over lunch this past summer in East Hollywood. “I didn’t think I had a hope in hell of getting the job.”

The series was being produced by Studio Ramsay Global, so it was Ramsay who suggested Burgess fly out to do a screen test during the first season’s Sweden shoot. “We had a long list of A-listers lining up to present the show, and Apple wanted some of their own talent, but Jesse, from my side, was the running favorite from day one,” says Ramsay. “What makes him special is his vulnerability in these situations”

It’s a unique situation in which Burgess found himself. Ostensibly another cooking competition, Knife Edge, which concludes its second season on Nov. 6, follows chefs from around the world as they strive to earn, maintain or up their count of stars in the storied Michelin guide. They punch walls. They weep. They hemorrhage money. They make very appetizing meals. But in lieu of having Burgess exhaustively interview them, he’s almost the translator of their work — narrating the trials of operating a restaurant and describing meals as he eats them with the relatable manner of a thoughtful guy at the pub who just really wants to tell you about his burger.

Most episodes include one of Michelin’s many international galas where the stars are announced and presented. Maintaining a distance from the hopeful chefs like he’s Jane Goodall, Burgess takes it all in from the backs of different ballrooms as careers are made and hearts are broken. His empathy and everyman quality make him suitable for this job, but he doesn’t claim to have ever had ambitions for a traditional career in entertainment.

Burgess just likes travel and eat and talk about both. Chatting over our respective plates of Somali chicken and grilled fish at East Hollywood Pan-African bistro Foods From Afar (his selection), Burgess traces his curiosity back to his mother’s career as cabin crew on Britannia Airways and then private jets.

“To me, her life was just so exciting,” he says, recalling how he’d wait for her return and edible souvenirs. “I had Beluga caviar because she’d flown to Russia, Danish pastries from Copenhagen, Stollen from Cologne. She hates me telling these stories because she reckons she wasn’t allowed to take the food out of the country. She thinks that someone’s going to come and arrest her or something.”

In 2015, Burgess made eating his business. He partnered with his friend Will Warr and founded TopJaw. The digital media brand originally just focused on YouTube and on London, because they couldn’t afford to go very far, with Burgess in front of camera and Warr largely behind the scenes. Growth was slow and incremental. It took four years before they hit 10,000 subscribers. But when they began posting travel videos, things accelerated quickly. One in particular, 48 Hours in Paris, went viral. It’s since logged 2.6 million views. Unfortunately, this mitzvah was the eve of lockdown.

Restaurant content wasn’t a viable plan in 2020, and the guys thought of hanging it up. But when restrictions loosened, a shift back to the U.K. and, pivotally, a focus on Instagram grew the business so that it could be Burgess’ full-time pursuit by 2023. Today, they have almost 1.9 million followers across platforms. They produce travel videos in cities around the world now, but, in world culinary capital of London, TopJaw has arguably become the most valuable resource for recommendations.

He’s not just interviewing chefs anymore, either. Every few clips there’s another luminary: Matt Damon, Florence Pugh (twice), Kate Winslet, Theo James. The singer Jessie Ware, who hosts food podcast Table Manners with her mother Lennie, recently mocked Burgess’ rising profile by referring to him as “Mr Michelin” in her visit to TopJaw. (The calls for talent participation, by the way, are almost exclusively incoming.)

Knife Edge has already been renewed for a third season, and Burgess will be there to chronicle the professionals he admires succeed and fail — and to eat their food. But when I ask him the obvious question, if this is another paver in the path from content creator to traditional TV host, the suggestion seems to leave him a little indifferent.

“There’s so much that I want to do in that world, and I don’t think I’m necessarily attracted to doing more TV,” he says. “There’s a lot of green grass on both sides. Plus, making videos on the internet is awesome.”

So is getting to travel and eat for a living.