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: 6 days ago
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.”
From Photography to the Plate:
Detail as Discipline
Before kitchens, Cameron trained his eye elsewhere. Photography that captures architecture, form, proportion, and light. And when he speaks about food, you can feel that visual education is still quietly governing his decisions.
He points to the empanadas as an example. They could have been left plain. No one would have complained. But the surface matters. The micro-decisions, the detailing, the texture, the insistence on finish, are where identity begins to form.
His process rarely starts with garnish. It begins with shape: A round plate becomes geometry. A potato becomes a volume problem. A terrine is cut not for convenience but to meet the rim exactly, height calibrated, edges aligned. A cream is never simply placed; it’s structured, integrated, and functional. The plate breathes as the guest controls its interaction.
Design as structure, this isn’t prettiness for its own sake. It’s logic first, then pleasure.
“I start with how I want a dish to look — then I work backwards until it tastes the way it should.”
Spain: Pressure, Process, & the Laboratory Mind
Cameron’s years in Spain carry a certain weight and gravity. Working within Albert Adrià’s orbit, across Tickets, 41 Degrees, Hoja Santa, and the wider El Bulli philosophy meant living inside intensity. Those kitchens weren’t restaurants so much as systems for thinking. Ideas came first. Everything else followed.
He began in pastry, where technique is law and chemistry dictates outcome. Learning then wasn’t algorithmic. It was slow. Books, notes, repetition. Understanding why something works mattered more than copying how.
What stayed with him wasn’t just the technical vocabulary; it was the mentality. Dishes began as concepts. Problems need to be solved. How do you make something feel like something else without becoming theatrical? How do you build meaning without gimmick?
He talks about Albert not as a chef but as a thinker, someone who fabricated, revised, abandoned, and returned. Creativity as sustained pressure. When I ask whether his own voice emerged there, he pauses. Not really, he says.
Spain was an absorption. The voice came later, after leaving, after distance allowed things to settle, to process. Spain gave him tools. London allows him to digest and decide how to use them.
“Those kitchens weren’t restaurants. They were places for thinking, for problem-solving ideas until they made sense.”
ALTA: Basque Instincts, British Ingredients, & Art of Fire
ALTA begins with a decision that shapes everything: no gas. No conventional safety net. The kitchen runs on fire, embers, oven heat, and constant negotiation with a living element.
Yes, you can measure temperature. But measurement only gets you so far. You also have to feel the fire: move embers mid-service, sense shifts, anticipate changes. The fire becomes a second job running alongside cooking itself.
For someone trained in precision, this is a deliberate destabilization. Fire introduces uncertainty. It resists control. It demands presence. This isn’t a rejection of technique; it’s translation. Everything learned in the world of calculation is now filtered through instinct. That tension is where ALTA’s confidence lives.
“There’s no gas here.
You have to feel the fire, look after it, move with it. It changes how you cook.”
ALTA’s references are unmistakably Northern Spanish from the Navarra region, but Cameron is careful with homage. Replication doesn’t interest him. Interpretation does. He talks about the squid dish. In Spain, it would land with heavier, bolder heat, stronger intensity, flavors that announce themselves. At ALTA, the structure remains, but the volume is lowered. Smoke is precise. Sauce is edited. Balance becomes the message.
The same happens with traditionally rustic dishes. Served elsewhere, they might arrive forcefully. Here, they’re re-authored yet still satisfying, still direct, but refined into something quieter, more architectural.
The name ALTA , “high” in Spanish, reflects that ambition. Elevation without elitism. Craft pushed upward while remaining accessible. He also likes how the word works in English, hovering near “ultimate” without insisting on it, a linguistic bridge rather than a costume.
The New Energy at Kingly Court
Why Soho?
Cameron’s answer is practical: footfall matters, but there’s something cultural underneath. Restaurants are drifting west. Fresh momentum is forming in the neighborhood.
Inside, the space transitions through different moods across two levels, spanning 5,600 sq ft: grounded and energetic below, calmer above, and more intimate toward the back, where the room becomes a space for events and private gatherings. It’s a restaurant still settling into itself, but already flexible, suggesting what ALTA could grow into over time.
Rather than trying to compete with Soho’s noise or theatrics, ALTA creates its own internal rhythm. It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t over-style. It assumes that guests who arrive are ready to listen to the fire, to the food, to the room.
When Cameron discusses sourcing, he mentions that quality matters, but philosophy matters more. ALTA works closely with growers who think long-term. Vegetables are planned seasons ahead. Relationships are built over convenience. Flourish Farms and Good Earth Growers become collaborators rather than suppliers.
In the team, he looks for something rarer than skill: belief. People who stay late not because they must, but because they want to. Professionalism paired with excitement. Shared ownership of the idea.
London: A City You Have to Learn to See
Coming back after years in Spain, the adjustment was more complex than expected. On paper, London should have felt familiar, the language, systems, a city he had once known. In reality, it demanded reorientation.
Barcelona, he explains, may be a global city, but it behaves like a small town. London does not. It is dispersed, layered, and emotionally demanding. You don’t arrive here and feel held; you have to build your own map again, one conversation at a time.
For a long while, London felt flat to him, not because nothing was happening, but because the city's energy lives in pockets. Until you learn how to read those layers, you can miss it entirely. “That changed,” he says, “once you find it.” Finding London, for Cameron, meant discovering places that operate on conviction rather than presentation.
“London looks flat until you learn how to read it. Once you do, everything opens up.”
He mentions Singburi almost offhandedly, a small Thai restaurant that used to sit quietly in Leytonstone before relocating east. No reservations. No real menu. You eat what they tell you to eat. Every visit is different, shaped entirely by what’s available that day and how the kitchen wants to cook it. What draws him to places like this isn’t novelty, it’s confidence. The absence of performance. The refusal to over-communicate.
“You don’t choose,” he says. “They decide.” That idea resonates deeply with how he thinks about cooking. Singburi isn’t about refinement or polish; it’s about clarity of intent. Strong flavors, direct cooking, no dilution. Food that doesn’t explain itself, it simply arrives as it is.
London, he’s learned, rewards that same attentiveness. After more than seven years back in London, Cameron no longer approaches the city as something to decode or conquer. He treats it like a long conversation, one that rewards patience, trust, and the ability to sit with complexity without needing to resolve it immediately. And that may be why ALTA feels so precisely placed here, not as a reaction to London’s excess, but as a quiet answer to it. A restaurant that understands that in this city, the most meaningful experiences are rarely the most visible.
Travel, Movement, & the Work of Observing
For Cameron, travel isn’t an accessory to cooking. It’s part of its architecture.
When service ends, and the fire cools, he seeks space. There’s life beyond the kitchen. Motorcycles and long rides. The need to leave intensity behind and let the mind breathe. Perspective as maintenance. Cameron crossed Africa on two wheels, and recently, Wales became a refuge with open roads, mountains, and silence. Riding until thoughts loosen. Thinking without an agenda. Photography stays with him, and he is drawn to older cameras, medium format & film, because they slow him down. You have to look before you act, seeing before intervening.
On a recent trip, Northern Greece surprised him — the mountains, forests that disrupt the usual postcard narrative. Small restaurants. Older couples cooking confidently. Cheese everywhere — grilled, abundant, never heavy.
When asked where in the world he’d cook for a season, Scandinavia emerges instinctively. Sweden, he named. Short growing cycles. Ingredients pushed to intensity by compressed sunlight. Ancient food cultures shaped by landscape.
Across continents, the pattern remains. Cameron is drawn to environments that impose limits — because limits sharpen instinct.
“The road gives me rhythm. It’s how I reset after the intensity of service.”
The Quiet Measure That Matters
At the end of our conversation, I ask Rob Roy Cameron the simplest question, the one that tends to reveal everything.
What should a guest carry home?
He says: I want people to leave with a smile, feeling like they had fun, like they were surprised.
That answer mirrors the path that brought him here.
ALTA is not a concept assembled overnight, nor a reaction to trends. It is the result of accumulation, years of fire learned instinctively, technique learned rigorously, and restraint learned slowly. Northern Spain provides the grammar, Britain supplies the vocabulary, but the voice is unmistakably his.
There is confidence in what ALTA chooses not to do. No excess. No theatrics. No need to explain itself. Instead, there is clarity: in the way ingredients are sourced, in how the fire is managed, in how dishes arrive without forcing attention. Everything feels considered, but never constrained. Intended, but never clinical. When Cameron finally describes his culinary philosophy in three words: Considered. Measured. & Tasty. It doesn’t read like a motto. It reads like a conclusion reached through experience.
“Considered. Measured. Tasty.”
In a city that often rewards noise, ALTA moves differently. It builds trust over time. It lets the room do the talking. It allows pleasure to emerge without instruction. And perhaps that is its quiet ambition, not to be everywhere, not to say everything, but to create a place people return to because something about it felt right and shared.
Not louder. Just truer.
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