It’s never too late to tap into new talents, is my main takeaway from a chat with Barrie Watson.
As we sit down for a cup of tea made by his lovely wife Gill (with help from their perfect pooch Dougal!), we agree that it makes sense to start from the very beginning. Barrie grew up in Murton and it didn’t take long for him to learn that he was set out to work in some sort of creative capacity. After leaving school in the 80s, Barrie went on to practice hairdressing at college and admits that he was probably the ‘Billy Elliot of Murton’ at that time.
“It was an unusual thing for a young lad to go and do,” he explains.
“But I knew I wanted to work with my hands, and it was just something I always wanted to have a go at,” he adds.
Barrie worked his way into the hairdressing world in the conventional way. From college, he went on to work in a salon and eventually started working as an educator for a manufacturer.
“At that time, my wife Gill and I were getting married, so it was a more secure business path for me, not having to contend with the sometimes unsociable hours that come with working in a salon. My job was to go round salons, educating stylists and trainees on the products they were using.”
From there, Barrie moved into sales - the day job he came back to later in life, and still enjoys today.
The time between is when Barrie’s career really started to take a turn - for all the right reasons. A chance application meant he was very quickly juggling hair products with kitchen kit.
“While I was quietly working away in my day job, I decided to apply for BBC’s MasterChef,” Barrie smiles.
“We were watching it one day and Gill said to me, ‘you could do that!’. It was a cult programme back in the 90s, presented by Loyd Grossman - so it was a very exciting thought.
“I had no experience as a chef at the time. I was purely self-taught, just messing around in the kitchen and really enjoying eating out at nice restaurants.”
Barrie applied and was surprised to hear he was successful. He was even more surprised when what he thought was just going to be ‘a bit of fun’, turned into a place in the finals.
“Before I went to the regional heat, I met with Terry Laybourne for guidance as he had been a professional chef judge on the show before. He was a huge help, and I’ll be forever grateful for the support,” he says. “It was all very chaotic, juggling work and trying to master a menu.
“I was driving back from a colour conference event where I had just won Colour Salesperson of the Year, and I was having to order my produce for the finals. At the time I was getting my fish from a place on Acorn Road in Jesmond. I was on the phone to them saying, ‘I need mussels. I need seaweed. And I’m going to need it quick!’.” He may not have come away with the crown, but this opened up a new avenue of opportunities for Barrie, bringing his love of food to the forefront of his mind.
I loved how I just lost myself in it for a couple of hours. It was my escape - and it came at a time when we all needed a bit of that in our lives
“MasterChef was a lot different back then,” Barrie explains.
“You went down, delivered a three-course meal of a certain standard - with a pretty small budget - and then a professional juge, celebrity chef and Loyd Grossman, came in. There was nowhere near as much exposure as there is for contestants these days.” What it did do, though, was build Barrie’s confidence to go and do something professionally in the food world.
“One of the judges was Anton Edelmann,” Barrie starts.
“He was head chef at The Savoy in London and invited me to go and work with him for a week, which I did. He offered me a job, but I was 30 at the time and wasn’t fully comfortable moving my entire life down to London at that stage in life. It’s a huge change and it just didn’t feel like the right thing to do.
“He was head chef at The Savoy in London and invited me to go and work with him for a week, which I did. He offered me a job, but I was 30 at the time and wasn’t fully comfortable moving my entire life down to London at that stage in life. It’s a huge change and it just didn’t feel like the right thing to do.
“But it gave me the confidence to think, ‘maybe I could do something in food’, and that’s when I opened the Prickly Pear as an upmarket catering company. I was working out of a unit and would cater for events all over the region. I did Alan Shearer’s New Year’s Eve cocktail party and things like that - it was all very high-end.”
As business boomed, Barrie’s team grew in size and it led to the opening of the cafe, which quickly evolved into the Prickly Pear bistro.
“During this time, we had two kids and I was just juggling far too much,” says Barrie. “I was opening up at 5am to get the catering out, then preparing for lunch service, followed by evening service. It was non-stop and started to feel a little unhealthy.
“It was a huge success and I really enjoyed it, but I decided it was time to sell up and get a bit of balance back in my life.” Life had come full circle and Barrie found himself back in his beloved job in hairdressing. Things had started to settle and life was moving at a much slower pace, until his creative itch popped back up again and Barrie found himself enrolling into a ceramic art class.
“It was just a hobby and an escape from the day job,” Barrie tells me. Shortly after, we found ourselves navigating a pandemic and people all over the world were turning to those quiet pastimes.