The Torridon’s Danny Young on his double win: ‘It’s been pretty special’

The brief read as such: for the starter, chefs had to cook a classically inspired lobster dish with an elegant sauce; for main, a beef dish using two different cuts, served with one potato and one onion element; then for dessert, a tart or tartlet focusing on the flavours of Valrhona chocolate.

 

Young worked on his dishes with his team at the Torridon, but no amount of preparation could account for competition conditions and invariably things went wrong in the heat of the final. “I think one of the biggest things I learned, and which helped my success this year, was having a plan B,” he says. 

 

Case in point: Young had planned a dessert of Valrhona fruit and nut tart with mascarpone ice-cream and Pedro Ximénez sherry – “a sophisticated take on a Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut” – but when the freezer was jam-packed, the dish hit the ropes.

 

“Being from Scotland, we had to get something deep-fried in there”

 

“I knew it could happen. You’re in a kitchen with 10 other chefs and if the freezer is packed, the temperature rises and things don’t freeze in time. Luckily, we’d practised for that. If the ice-cream wasn’t solid enough to rocher and get on top of the dessert, I planned do it as a soft-serve on the side.” It was a successful pivot, but at the expense of aesthetics: “I knew the flavour was amazing, but it didn’t look as good as I wanted it to.”

 

Competition cooking is all about picking your battles, and dessert was one of two courses he’d identified to go all-out on. “It’s impossible to cook three dishes with multiple different elements in three hours. You have to play safe on one to be able to elevate the other two,” he says. With dessert one of his standout dishes, he feared that not hitting the visual heights might cost him.

 

His safe course was his “solid” dish of dry-aged beef fillet with glazed tongue, beef fat onion, potato and truffle, which left him time and energy to deliver a knockout starter. “The food I cook is quite heavily sauce-based – when I eat I always want a sauce to dip things in – and I like to cook the way I eat.” The result was a starter of lobster tail paired with a yuzu beurre blanc, a custard made with lobster juice and filled with claw meat, and a tempura lobster claw – “Being from Scotland, we had to get something deep-fried in there”. The whole dish was then topped with N25 caviar.

Winner’s perks

After not placing in the 2024 final, when did it start to dawn on Young that he might have a shot at the title, despite the slip up with dessert? “Once you’ve finished cooking, they take you into a room for a briefing, which can be quite overwhelming – like going for a job interview with all these amazing chefs. I’m sat there with Phil Howard [chef patron of London’s Elystan Street], Matt Abé [chef-patron of two-Michelin-starred Bonheur by Matt Abé in London], Lisa Goodwin-Allen [chef patron-director at Northcote in Lancashire] and Jocky [James Petrie, global culinary director of the Fat Duck Group].

 

“The previous year, the judges’ feedback had been quite constructive, but this time I got some amazing feedback, especially for my starter and dessert. I thought then that I might place in the top three, but I didn’t think I’d done enough to win it. But when they read out second and third places [Katie Morgan from Belmond Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons was runner-up, while Ruth Hansom-Rigby of Hansom came in third] I was like: ‘What’s going on here?’”

 

Abé, who announced Young as winner of the National Chef of the Year 2025, said: “Danny delivered a menu that was not only brilliantly executed, but it absolutely nailed the brief I set, and he worked with such an incredible level of professionalism from start to finish.”

 

Victory not only came with the prestige of joining an elite group of previous winners, but also a raft of career-enhancing prizes worth more than £15,000. In November Young visited the Valrhona headquarters in France and all-expenses-paid trips to Australia, Bordeaux and Cornwall are yet to come, along with £3,000 from the Worshipful Company of Cooks of London to spend on culinary development.

Double whammy

For Young, it was also a vindication of what he set out to do when joining the Torridon in July 2024. The chef was born and raised in Accrington in Lancashire and joined Northcote hotel in the Ribble Valley in Lancashire as a 16-year-old in 2010. He rose through the ranks and became head chef in 2018, the same year he won an Acorn Award, The Caterer’s award to recognise 30 of the best up and coming talents in hospitality under the age of 30.

 

After deciding to spread his wings outside of Lancashire with a brief spell at Port Gaverne hotel in Port Isaac in Cornwall, he settled at the Torridon on the west coast of the Scottish Highlands. “When I came here, my goal was to turn the Torridon into a foodie destination rather than just an amazing hotel destination,” he says.

 

His first task was to drive up cover numbers by elevating the à la carte offering in the brasserie, which gave his team the licence to kick on with a tasting menu at restaurant 1887. In early February, their hard work was rewarded with a star in the 2026 Michelin Guide, along with a green star for sustainability. “Only two restaurants in Scotland were awarded a star this year, so it was pretty special,” he says. “Dan [Rose-Bristow, owner of Torridon with his wife Rohaise] said to me that he never wanted to bring a chef in and say their goal is to get a Michelin star, but that has always been his dream. Better still, it’s something the whole team can celebrate. Chef of the Year was mostly my individual success, but the star is for the team.”

 

After a whirlwind four months, what now? “Everyone keeps saying that I’ve done what I needed to do, but this is just beginning. It’s just a platform to build on and I’m still learning, so this is the start of something for me.”