Staff Profiles
Head Chef Les Wassall and Restaurant Manager Matt Walsh
Les Wassall – Head Chef
Born and bred in nearby Congleton, Les not only knows all about the fantastic high quality produce grown, reared and made in the rolling Cheshire countryside around Pecks, but his culinary skills are also rooted in his French and Italian heritage.
Cooking has been in Les’ blood - and being a chef his driving ambition -since fondly remembered family dinners prepared by his Italian grandmother who was locally famous for her amazing traditional cucina. His mother was born in France of Italian parents.
Les joined the brigade at Pecks eight years ago and stepped up to become head chef under the new ownership of Andy and Sue Pear, grasping the opportunity to raise his cooking to award-winning levels and adding the restaurant’s first-ever inclusion in the Good Food Guide to its growing list of accolades. Diners certainly like his style with Pecks having won the 2008 Cheshire Life Readers’ Choice Award.
Success came early for the budding young chef. While at South Cheshire Catering College Les entered and won one of the very first televised inter-college cooking competitions hosted by Stuart Hall. After gaining experience working under the Italian chef Sergio Grassini and in local hotels and restaurants, Les returned to college to attain higher qualifications. He moved from the Bulls Head Hotel to take charge of banqueting at Peckforton Castle before joining Pecks.
Matt Walsh – Restaurant Manager
Local boy Matt joined the staff at Pecks straight from school at the tender age of 15 some 13 years ago, rising from trainee waiter to take overall charge of the restaurant’s all-important front-of-the-house duties.
He recognises the crucial value of properly trained people in maintaining Pecks exceptional standards of service because he was trained up himself “from the bottom” by the restaurant’s co-founder and former owner Lucy Peck.
Though still young, Matt has vast experience of delivering the Pecks experience – “not just a meal but a night out” – to the restaurant’s legion of loyal customers and represents continuity of all those aspects of service that are unique to Pecks. “The Theatre of Food is something that we now would not and could not change,” he says.
Matt heads up a six-strong management team and responsible for a welcoming and well-drilled part-time waiting staff of 16.
