‘The young offenders system worked for me’: the ex-convict turned chef

A year or two ago, he isn’t quite sure which, Jon Watts’s father came to him with a well-intentioned suggestion. Watts, a social media star and private chef – with a popular debut cookbook already under his belt – had settled into a sustained period of professional success. “Dad said to me: maybe it’s now time to stop chatting about all that stuff from your youth; to leave it in the past.” Watts junior found the prospect tempting. “It’s really not easy to talk about it all,” he says, with a deep exhale. “And I’m in two minds about a shameful history being part of my identity for ever.”
Today, Watts is 35. The experiences he’s about to share – of a violent conviction, years in a young offenders’ prison, learning to cook and coming out the other side – take us back to his late teenage years. Watts could quite easily draw a line and move on: focus on his regular catering work, his second recipe book, published later this month, and his sprawling online following. He has more than 800,000 Instagram followers to tend and 600,000-plus on TikTok, too. His uploads clock up views in the millions.
“But, honestly,” Watts concluded, “I couldn’t do it. I’ve always been open and honest about where I’ve been. I think that’s how I’ve succeeded. I’ve owned up to what I’ve done. And I see how much sharing what I went through helps people who hear. So, I’ll keep telling it.”
First, though, his new book, Speedy Weeknight Meals, packed with easy-to-follow, affordable recipes, ready in 30 minutes. It’s a departure from his early forays into recipe-writing. Watts saw himself as a cheffy chef. He certainly looks the part, sitting at the table in a London restaurant: white T-shirt and trainers, tattoos, a mop of curly hair.
“The first recipe I filmed for social media,” Watts says, “was scallops with truffle and porcini. Who is going to make that at home?” Then, in 2022, a client asked him to cook a no-bake Terry’s Chocolate Orange cheesecake. “I filmed it, but was reluctant to post it.” Few processes; basic ingredients. “I posted anyway, and it went viral, single-handedly bringing me 20,000 new followers. It was the beginning of my rise.” There’s a version in the new book. “I adapted from complex chef food to meals that people actually make. I’m not sure how many people in my position can say a large network of people cook three, four of their recipes every week. It’s what I’m most proud of.”
His debut cookbook, a fancier affair, was published in 2023. A small publisher offered to print it, if he could bring in 500 confirmed pre-orders. He did the marketing himself, talking his way on to ITV’s This Morning sofa. He demonstrated a proven internet favourite: Marry Me Chicken – a poultry dish with a creamy Tuscan sauce and novel backstory. It worked. “The book trended on Google. We sold thousands of copies.” Days later, he was signed by Bloomsbury. “I knew right away what this book would be: quick, easy meals that anyone can make. That’s my focus. I’ve built a huge community: people who’ve never cooked, or people who have fallen back in love with food. They’re grateful, send photos, and ask questions. It feels as if I’m having dinner with thousands of strangers every night.”
They’re also the sort of meals that might have appealed to his own busy parents when he was a kid. The family home was in Wantage, Oxfordshire. “Mum would cook…” – he picks his words carefully – “functional food. I’m one of five – second oldest – so there were seven mouths to feed. It was a jungle. Let’s say I never looked forward to dinner. For her, understandably, just getting something on to the table was an achievement. And they didn’t have much money.”
Mum worked in a care home, dad was a laboratory assistant. “The recipes I’m writing now, I’d like to think, would be perfect for people in their situation.” They’re also dishes Watts himself might have grappled with early on in his culinary career. And he’s ready, now, to come to that.
He was often in trouble as a teen. Nothing serious at first; detention-level. “To this day,” he says, “I’m not sure why. I could never comprehend it. I felt misunderstood, and neglected.” He trundled through school. Toward the end of year 11, a piece of paper was passed round his form room. The class were asked to write down their future plans. “Everyone had an answer: college, apprenticeships, work or sixth form. University hopes. I sat and stared at it, with no idea.”
He left education at 16, feeling lost, with no direction. “I’d sleep in, drink in the park, you know: teen stuff. That’s when I started down the wrong route.” He picked up, then lost jobs: garage, warehouses, shelf-stacking. “Nothing was clicking for me. At 17 and 18, I felt unfulfilled, searching for a sense of purpose. I got into the wrong crowd. They were into drugs, both dealing and taking.” Watts steered clear, “but the drinking, getting into fights, the violence, that was me. We had too much time on our hands.”
He offers up an example. “In my late teens, I was walking down the street one evening, a car pulled up, and a bunch of blokes jumped out with weapons: baseball bat, golf club, knives.” One of Watts’s friends took a beating. “He spent two weeks in intensive care. It was like that, non-stop. Turf wars. Stupid, really. It became my purpose, and something to belong to. I had nothing else going on.” Until, that is, legal proceedings beckoned.
“I was charged with GBH,” Watts says. “It was June 2007, one night I got into a fight.” Watts was 18, the other guy 24. “I didn’t know much about him. I was quite drunk, feeling frustrated, with this pent-up anger…” There was an altercation. “This guy was friends with some nasty people. Life got tough quickly.” Watts was arrested and charged. “I was on bail for six months, knowing I was going to prison.” Awaiting trial, he had a target on his back. “There was a park at the end of the road where I’d hang out with mates. People would have to keep watch at the gates – if it was known I was there, we’d have visitors. One afternoon, that’s where I was sitting when a bloke I knew walked past.
“‘So, you’re not dead yet?’ he asked.
“I should have left. Next thing I know, three guys arrive.” Watts was pulverised. “My eye socket broken, my nose broken… I was anaesthetised in hospital as they put my face back together. It all felt normal at the time. I don’t know how I’d cope with it all now. There’s so much to lose. But back then, I felt I had nothing. I was at the bottom.”
In February 2008, Watts pleaded guilty as charged: to GBH and the lesser charge of ABH (actual bodily harm), the result of a separate incident, a year prior. He was sentenced to six-and-a-half years, and sent to HM Prison Reading, a young offender institution. “There was no duvet in my cell the first night I arrived,” he remembers. “The old windows, covered by iron mesh, were stuck open. It was January and freezing. I was wrapped up, shivering, waking up on the hour.”
The next morning, Watts called his dad. “Now we know when you get out,” Watts senior said, “you have something to work towards.” It struck a chord. “In the months on bail,” Watts says, “I’d already been shaken into wanting to sort my life out. To achieve things. Then in prison, I found routine and structure.” Take the different prison regimes, which determine daily life. “When you go in,” he explains, “you’re on a standard regime. If you cause problems, you’re relegated to basic. But if you’re well-behaved, engage with education, don’t get into trouble, you eventually get to enhanced: you’d live on a different wing, and access some perks, like wearing your own clothes.” Plus, you could work and earn.
He picked up various jobs, before eventually landing on cooking. “First,” he says, “I cleaned. Extra loo roll was a bonus. Then it was litter-picking across the site, which got me outside. Otherwise, the only regular fresh air was from short periods in the yard: concrete floor, razor wire upfront, in the shadow of the block.”
Then came a gig in the kitchens. “It paid £11 a week,” he says, “the highest rate. Plus you got more food.” He had no passion for cookery, and the work didn’t inspire. Breakfast prep involved packing paper bags with a cereal box, UHT milk, a slice of bread and a jam sachet. “Other meals didn’t involve much cooking either. Lots of mince. Rice or frozen vegetables in packets.”
He kept his head down, even working towards his Duke of Edinburgh Award. Bronze, at first, complete with a night camping on the prison football pitch. Next came silver, then gold: he was the first person to be awarded that award while in custody, Brecon Beacons expedition yomp included. Watts used cookery to fulfil the award’s required skill section. He switched the main prison kitchen for the officers’ mess. “It’s the best job in prison, cooking in the prison staff canteen: they had proper ingredients. I’d dice onions, make lasagne or shepherd’s pie, and cakes. Food didn’t interest me, but I was good at it.”
Two and a half years in, Watts was signed off for day release. An early branch of Jamie’s Italian was due to open down the road. “This was maybe their third site,” he says, “back when they worked with lots of fresh produce.” Watts had heard about Fifteen, Oliver’s London restaurant which trained up chefs from scratch. “Reading Prison had tried to get someone in there before, but had failed. They didn’t want people already in the justice system.” Undeterred, prison staff contacted Oliver HQ. “Two days before the restaurant opened,” Watts says, “the Jamie’s Reading head chef came to see me and offered me a job.”
Watts turned up for his first day eager to earn, but blasé. “Italian chef Gennaro Contaldo was in, demonstrating butchery, discussing ingredients. I walked into the walk-in fridge and faced this wall of herbs – I’d never seen them fresh. I opened a box: fresh mint. The smell smacked me. There was basil, rosemary, thyme… It sparked something. Until then, cooking was a task that I needed to complete. From that day on, I’ve loved it. That’s the only way I can put it.”
For the remainder of his sentence, Watts grafted hard, six long kitchen days per week. The walk, door to door, was 10 minutes. Watts arrived at 7am sharp, the other chefs an hour later. “It gave me extra time to learn.” Few of his colleagues knew of his situation. “They must have assumed I was antisocial, always turning down pub invites.” Watts kept what he earned, saving up £10,000.
After serving three years and three months he was released on licence in April 2011. The money he had saved proved vital. Rather than be placed in a probation hostel, he rented a flat. He continued working at the Reading restaurant for another year, before being transferred to their St Albans branch. Six years later, in 2015, he left to set up on his own: a food truck, then private cheffing and event catering, before his online boom. With headlines dominated by stories of prison overcrowding, reoffending rates and crises across the prison estate, is he a broken system’s poster boy?
“Yes,” he accepts. “The young offenders system worked for me. I don’t know where I’d be without those years inside. There are other people I know who were inside and are doing well. One friend is a property developer, with a lovely young family. He did five years for armed robbery.”
Trajectories like these, he fears, have become increasingly rare. “I was still inside in 2010, when something shifted.” It was the election of the coalition, then later Conservative government, after 13 Labour years. “You saw a change literally overnight. There were cuts: not enough staff; programmes disappeared; we’d spend more time locked in our cells. The system wasn’t great before, but it just about worked, sometimes.” In January 2014, Reading Young Offenders was closed. Today, it’s a museum. “Those programmes I was part of were already a rarity. Then they vanished. People in my position today? I’m not sure they’d have the same chance. Yes, those officers who care still exist. But they’re stretched further and further.”
Watts regularly visits institutions like the one he served time in, delivering talks to the youngsters – when possible, while cooking. “There’s a cycle that so often happens once they’re out: these kids can’t get a job because they haven’t got an address. Can’t get work or a bank account.” The odds are stacked against them. “British reoffending rates are 75%. They’re not given the support and opportunities I had. And with the state prisons are in, it would be easy for society to give up on young offenders. For them to give up on themselves. We don’t go the right way about rehabilitation. With support and guidance, proper resources and effort, we could turn those rates around rapidly. My story is proof of what’s possible.”
Speedy Weeknight Meals by Jon Watts (Bloomsbury Publishing, £20) will be released on 29 August