How the Topjaw team became Britain's most influential foodies

Times

4 days ago

I s Topjaw the most powerful force in food right now? Oh, I don't even know why I'm asking. Yes, it is. The two-man social media sensation with 400,000 and rising YouTube subscribers and 830,000 followers on Instagram has the ability to get a restaurant booked out for years and years to come. It can turn chefs into superstars and make icons of individual dishes. It could presumably destroy restaurants, chefs, individual dishes too, if it chose. But destruction is categorically not Topjaw's style. Ninety-second video interviews with everyone from Idris Elba to Marcus Wareing to Mary Berry, most of which seem to start with the question, 'Best restaurant in [insert name of relevant city here]?', each of which clocks up tens of thousands of views and guarantees the fortunes of anyone featured — that's Topjaw's style.
Do you feel powerful, I ask Jesse Burgess, Topjaw's presenter, and Will Warr, its videographer.
'No,' Burgess says. 'Not really.'
Do you recognise it as power, though?
'I mean… yeah? When we get restaurants saying, 'Thanks for that, guys,' and one of the first bits of really lovely genuine recognition we got was a little wine bar in Paris — Terra Bar à Vins, amazing food, punches above its weight — emailing us three years after that YouTube video saying, 'Guys, by the way, still every day there are people coming in off your video.' '
'That's cool,' Warr says.
'And we did this video on Canal [in Westbourne Park, west London] this weekend. Dom Hamdy, brilliant restaurateur, same age as us, he opened this one; he's got a Midas touch. So we did it and it went out. He texted me a few days afterwards saying, 'Eight hundred bookings in 24 hours.' '
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And that's a lovely thing to do for someone.
'Yeah,' Burgess continues. 'Not powerful. Just lovely.'
We're sitting in Gymkhana, the Michelin-starred Indian restaurant and a longstanding favourite of Warr and Burgess, who've featured it often, most recently 'as voted for by chefs: the No 1 curry in London'. There's an epic spread of delectable food in front of us. We're picking at it, taking it in turns to chew, swallow, speak.
Warr, 35, and Burgess, 33, are tall, good-looking, affable, solicitous and home counties posh, unthreateningly appealing on every level. The sort of men who genuinely do believe it's better to be lovely than powerful. They're best friends; good foils for one another. Burgess is warm and gossipy, a former model who looks more than a smidge like a young Jude Law — whom he knows, by the way. 'You know his name is actually Dave?' Burgess says, before reminiscing about teaching maths to Iris Law — Jude's now twentysomething daughter with Sadie Frost — when she was 'about ten'. Burgess had been in a band with Iris's half-brother, Finlay Kemp; he's also very good at maths.
'Jesse's role in Topjaw is, he can do the spreadsheets,' Warr says. Warr himself is quieter, a little more contained, less of a people pleaser. He moonlights as occasional videographer for William and Kate; he made the Princess of Wales's video announcing that her cancer had gone.
'I love making spreadsheets,' Burgess says. 'I love a good VLOOKUP. Do you know what that is?'
I do not, I say (turns out it's a tool in spreadsheet programs), but I note how his face has lit up.
'Oh, seriously. It lights him up a lot,' Warr says.
Right, so: how did two nice middle-class boys end up turning the restaurant business on its head with a professional endeavour neither of them can really define? ('It's hard when you're at a wedding or something and someone asks, 'What do you do?' ' Burgess says.)
By accident, by trial and error and with a little luck and a lot of graft, it transpires.
Neither of them was born a foodie.
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Warr grew up on a farm 'outside Banbury [Oxfordshire]. A smallholding. I was very lucky. I had a lovely green upbringing.' He wasn't that bothered about food at all — he just wanted to make films. Started messing around with a video camera in his early teens although, Burgess tells him, 'I've got a photo of you when you're six years old and you have a camera in your hand.'
'Really?' Warr says.
'Like an Early Learning Centre camera, a bit like the one Fred has.' Fred is Warr's three-year-old son with his wife, Sarah.
Meeting Jamie Oliver
@TOPJAW/INSTAGRAM
Warr studied product development at Loughborough University and worked on the side as a freelance film-maker throughout his degree.
There was really no chance of you doing anything other than make films, then?
'Straight out of uni, 100 per cent. Just thoroughly enjoyed creating beautiful films,' Warr says.
Burgess, meanwhile, grew up in East Anglia in a village called Yelling. He went to a 'little primary school. I was one of nine people in my year.' Food was more in the mix of his childhood, if from an unexpected source. His mother was part of the cabin crew on private jets, 'so a Saudi prince would go on and she would have been running around London like a blue-arsed fly trying to find this particular caviar that this guy wanted. She'd bring it onto the plane; he wouldn't touch it,' so she'd take it home and give it to her family.
Burgess originally thought he wanted to be an actor. But when he realised how tough that would be to get into, he gave in to another ambition: just to get to London, whatever that required. 'I was obsessed with London. I thought it was the coolest place.' Aged 17, while visiting 'a sort of a girlfriend, I was on Kings Road waiting for her when someone came up to me and said, 'Do you do modelling?' And I was like, 'You've got me mixed up with somebody else.' '
You didn't realise you were handsome?
'No, no, no. Modelling was not a consideration.'
Modelling disagreed. Burgess was promptly signed by Storm, one of the biggest agencies in London — Kate Moss's, famously — which allowed him to move to the city. 'Modelling was like, 'Hey, we can also put you up in this flat in Stockwell,' and I said, 'Hell, yeah.' '
After a few good years, Burgess grew bored by it and ended up employed by Jamie Laing, the Made in Chelsea star — now podcasting magnate — who, at that point, 12 or so years ago, had just launched his sweets enterprise, Candy Kittens. Laing had been on Storm's books too.
By chance, Warr took up a desk in the Candy Kittens office when he first got to London from Loughborough, and so the two men met for the first time.
Did your eyes meet — and you realised you could make social media gold?
They laugh.
'No.'
They did, however, get dispatched by Laing to tour the country together with a video camera. 'The Candy Cruise,' Warr says. 'Doing pop-ups in shops and whatever, trying to sell all the Candy Kittens merch.' At this point there were no actual Candy Kittens sweets — they were still being developed. There was only merchandise, T-shirts etc and a brand identity to build.
'It was like a university tour,' Burgess says. 'Will and I were going to Liverpool together, making a video, and we thought, 'This is really fun and we're quite good at this.' '
The friendship that would become Topjaw was born.
Then what?
'It was when Instagram and social media were starting,' Burgess says. 'So ten years ago — 2014-15 — when people first had a half-decent camera on their phone. And they'd go to a restaurant, take a picture of it, put it online. That was then getting amplified with this wave of fast, casual restaurants like Byron burgers and Burger & Lobster. Young people doing cool, younger, experiential restaurants.'
And you two recognised that something was … stirring in the zeitgeist? Something you could document? Parlay into a massive social media enterprise?
'It was just exciting,' Burgess says. 'A lot of young people taking a lot of big chances. Joe [Grossman], who started Patty & Bun, he put all his money into one little restaurant that's eight metres long — and that was exciting.'
In 2015, Warr and Burgess started making 20-minute films about this bold new breed of restaurant, digging up the stories behind them and interviewing the people creating them.
They did not, however, find that they had an instant hit on their hands.
'No,' Warr says. '[We were making] these quite niche films in pockets of London. There wasn't the demographic for it on YouTube back in the day.'
But that wasn't the point — they were having a nice time. 'Some guys play golf; we make films about food and drink together,' they've said in the past.
But, you know, the internet's intriguing and nothing if not potent, so they went for a beer with a person who plays Fifa on YouTube: CapgunTom, who now has 980,000 subscribers. 'He very quickly analysed our content and said, 'Hold on. Anyone around the world can tune in and watch my Fifa YouTube, but you have to be quite interested in Bermondsey if you want to watch a 'best sandwiches in Bermondsey' film. Why don't you try to do more global guides?' So we decided to go abroad.'
In 2019, four years after they'd first launched Topjaw, Burgess and Warr took a video camera to Paris.
'We called it '48 Hours in Paris', even though we only had 36 hours,' Burgess says. 'We went without a plan; got the Eurostar. We had a note from a chef — Maxime Alary from Blanchette; he's from Paris — and he said, 'Go to this bakery that I absolutely love. It's the best boulangerie in France.' So that [Du Pain et des Idées] was the first stop on our tour. From then on we just went to wherever someone next told us. A local or someone would say, 'Oh, go here,' or, 'Go there.' ' They accidentally created a definitive locals' guide to Parisian food.
That film became Topjaw's first breakout viral hit. Warr and Burgess were making another film in Bangkok when 'the Paris film was booting off. It was just such an exciting moment,' Warr says.
How did it feel?
'Nuts, because finally it was, 'This is what it's like,' ' Burgess says. 'You'd refresh it and have another 10-20,000 views and a load of comments: 'Thank you YouTube for finally recommending something good.' '
Yet that was still not quite that for Topjaw.
Covid struck. Restaurants and travel shut down at the precise point Burgess and Warr were getting somewhere with their… side hustle?
'I wouldn't even say 'hustle', because it didn't make any money,' Burgess says. 'It was a 'side passion project'.'
Another thing that happened during Covid was that incredibly short-form video content, like Instagram Reels and TikTok, boomed.
'That whole dynamic of being on your phone and flicking,' Burgess says, flicking his thumb to illustrate the speed with which those films are consumed, 'that process didn't really exist pre-2020. We were watching so many reels and shorts but not making them. We turned up our noses a bit because we like making these long 20-minute stories — but maybe we shouldn't do that.'
By the beginning of 2023, Warr and Burgess had reached a 'bit of a crossroads with Topjaw', Burgess says, 'where it wasn't really making any money. We thought, 'OK, we either pack this in because life's getting busy — Will was starting a family — or we pack everything else in and really go full-on Topjaw.' '
They decided to go full-on Topjaw.
They started out with 'about £70,000' in a bank account — Burgess had been smart by investing his modelling money into properties, doing them up and selling them on — and 'about 70,000 followers on Instagram'. They took both, along with their new vision of short, sharp video content, and started their revolution. Their first film was with Dom Fernando of Paradise in central London. They didn't run it by Fernando first. 'We knew him, so we just dropped in. We knocked on his door and said, 'Do you fancy just giving us five minutes?' ' Warr says, which Fernando did before 'walking us round Soho, introducing us to other chefs in restaurants: 'Hey, can you come out?' And we caught Diana Alvarez [of Cantabrian Kitchen] on her break outside. It was quite funny — people were happy at that stage to really speak their minds because they thought, 'Well, where's this gonna go?' '
And Topjaw began to fly.
When did they realise they were famous?
'Oh, I mean, occasionally we get stopped even from our original Paris video in 2019,' Burgess says. 'But the frequency has definitely steadily increased. Everyone's really lovely.
'You get the occasional person who runs 100 metres after us to say, 'What's the best restaurant in London?' Then you see the look on their face as they go, 'I have not thought this through.' But generally, obviously, we're so happy that someone watches our stuff. I mean, I was with blimming David Beckham on Monday.'
How come?
'It was something at Wimbledon. He was lovely. Shook his hand — softly, 'cos he's got a broken hand. I said, 'Oh, have you ever seen any of the Topjaw stuff?' And he went, 'Yeah, I've watched loads of it.' Started talking about ones he really liked. That is crazy. Blimming David Beckham! What an awesome god.'
Is Becks going to do a Topjaw film?
'Yes. Our teams have connected. We'll do a couple of fun bits. He loves pubs, so…'
The pub with Becks and Topjaw it is.
Idris Elba has already done one ('He has an aura,' Burgess says. 'A presence, yeah,' Warr says. 'He makes your organs fall out of your arse,' Burgess adds), and Florence Pugh. They did a film with Rishi Sunak too, in the dying days of his premiership. But their subscribers responded so badly, they took it down.
'We learnt something from that,' Burgess says. 'You get an offer and …'
Ah. So Sunak came to you?
'Yeah. At first you think, 'Oh wow, that is very flattering.' When we've worked for so long on something, then to be recognised by… Despite what we may think of the person. The offer itself was like, 'Holy shit.' But we will never work with a politician again.'
I ask if anyone's turned them down — restaurateur or celebrity.
'We really don't reach out that much,' Burgess says. 'But one person [we did approach] and were really trying to get was Alison Hammond.'
Alison Hammond turned you down?
'Too busy.'
Success as suddenly acquired as Topjaw's inevitably inspires tension among certain parties — particularly those with fortunes that depend on operations like Topjaw's not undermining their influence and, potentially, revenue streams.
One very established restaurant critic wrote an extensive article on the phenomenon, one that acknowledged their impact but took care to lampoon their poshness, their eagerness, the money they take from advertisers (which they do — but selectively, they tell me: 'Stella Artois, Google'), and their goofy 'bro' schtick.
'Ah, you're never gonna get to the size we are without having people throwing peanuts from the gallery to make them feel better about themselves,' Burgess says. I marvel at his permanent condition of easy-breeziness. Doesn't that level of joviality ever become exhausting?
'Yes. Sometimes I can be really dead, really tired, but then I'm looking at the lens and I'm fine.'
I ask them what the ultimate game plan is. Burgess, who is getting married a fortnight after I meet him, is to appear on a new Gordon Ramsay-produced Apple TV+ show called Knife Edge: Chasing Michelin Stars, in which he'll go behind the scenes in the kitchens of restaurants attempting to win Michelin stars.
But as far as Topjaw is concerned, 'I know it sounds silly, but we sort of want more of the same,' Burgess says.
'We've only just found our groove after all these years,' Warr says.
I ask them what 'Topjaw' means.
'Good question,' Burgess says. 'We called it Topjaw before we'd even made our first video.
'We can't really remember why or where we got the name from, but what we do like about it is that j-a-w — Jesse and Will.'
I ask them how they don't get fat.
'I can't imagine my internals are in particularly good nick,' Warr says.
Finally, I ask them the question I have taken, over recent years, to asking all the foodies I interview. I've asked Stanley Tucci and I've asked Tom Parker Bowles.
Jesse and Will, tell me: if you had to choose between food and sex for the rest of your lives, which would it be?
It's worth noting that both Tucci and Parker Bowles stammered and grimaced and boggled and ultimately refused to answer.
'Food,' Burgess says without hesitating.
'Oh, food, man,' Warr agrees.
'I gave you a beat as well. I was like, I'm not gonna say 'food' before you finish saying 'sex',' Burgess says.
Brilliant, I say.