Chef Rob Roy Cameron — From El Bulli to Soho, Shaping London’s Next Chapter Through Fire at ALTA
- Andrew C.
- Dec 30, 2025
- 9 min read
Updated: Dec 31, 2025
There’s a certain kind of chef who doesn’t announce himself. He doesn’t arrive with manifesto plates or self-conscious statements. He builds, patiently and privately, until the room begins to speak for him. Rob Roy Cameron belongs to that rarer category: deeply technical yet instinctive, quietly firm, and emotionally calibrated in a way that only comes from experience, friction, and lived distance.
His journey doesn’t move in a straight line. It arcs from the open landscapes of Botswana to the pressure-driven laboratories of Barcelona, then back into London, where reinvention is never simple. That contrast lives in his cooking today. You feel it at ALTA, newly opened by MAD Restaurants in Kingly Court, Soho, London, a location engineered for liveliness and movement, yet capable of holding stillness when a restaurant finds its own internal rhythm.
I first met Cameron years ago in Mayfair, before the world was brought to a standstill by Covid. Time, distance, and parallel lives intervened. Now we find ourselves reunited here, in a new project that feels more like a distillation of memory, technique, and journeys.
ALTA’s promise sounds bold on paper: live fire as the engine, Northern Spanish instincts as the pulse, British produce as the grounding. But the power of the place lies not in its headline; it lies in what Cameron believes. There is no shouting here. No proving. Just a slow, deliberate composition unfolding in real time.
He speaks the way he cooks: measured, thoughtful, architectural. Nothing is oversold and rushed. And throughout our conversation, the same ideas surface again and again: fire as memory, detail as discipline, rhythm as restraint, and the quiet ambition of building something that lasts without demanding attention.
Where Fire Became Memory
Cameron’s earliest food memories are vivid and lived.
Botswana, he tells me, meant being outside, properly outside. Camping for weeks at a time. Mornings beginning with fire, not electricity. Coffee brewed over embers because that’s simply how you ate when you were far from town. Cooking wasn’t a choice or an identity. It was survival, ritual, and rhythm combined.
His father barbecued constantly. Fire was always present, not stylized, not curated, just there. Sometimes they hunted. Guinea fowl is cooked later in the evening. Smoke and heat as inheritance rather than technique.
When people ask him now why fire sits at the center of his cooking, his answer is almost disarming in its simplicity: it never left. South Africa carried the same language, barbecue not as an occasion but as culture, meat as social glue, the outdoors as a table without walls.
At ALTA, where there is no gas in the kitchen, Cameron places his full attention on the fire play. It doesn’t feel like a pivot away from his past. It feels like a return, one sharpened by time.
"Fire was never a technique for me. it was part of my childhood. It never really left.”
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