Tom Shepherd has done a lot in 20 years as a chef, restauranteur and entrepreneur, from Sous-Chef at Swinfen Hall Hotel and The Samling restaurant in the Lake District to Development Chef at the Restaurant Sat Bains and to receiving the Acorn Award, which celebrated the top 30 hospitality professionals under 30.
A West Midlands lad born and bred, Tom’s passion for cooking and looking at how he could make his own mark on the industry saw him take on running his own restaurant, Upstairs, on Bore Street in Lichfield, situated above his father’s jewellery shop.
Since opening in 2021, the restaurant has set a standard for high quality which is unmatched across Staffordshire and has even led to it becoming the first Michelin-starred restaurant in the whole county, as well as being named as one of the top 100 restaurants in the UK by the National Restaurant Awards three years in a row.
For Tom, the awards were nice and showed that he and his staff were doing something right.
He said: “I think, naturally, if what you’re doing on a daily basis is being rewarded in any which way, that’s obviously a pleasurable thing, but a reward to us is a really good review.
“A reward of being in the top 100 restaurants is absolutely insane and a bit of a dream, so for people to think of us that highly is amazing.
“However, it doesn’t change what we do, but it does give us that sort of satisfaction and clarity and what we’re doing is right, but when you produce your own thing, you do second-guess yourself, so the recognition from anything from a review to a top 100 list is very positive.”
Tom said that running his own restaurant had been a dream from when he started out, saying that it followed his own mission statement of setting a goal and a purpose and working towards that target.
The unique location above his father’s jewellery shop is one of the things that sets Upstairs apart from other restaurants, although Tom said it had been far more his vision and he had had to be persistent about it.
He said: “The restaurant itself found me as the whole story had been about our family jewellers, with the whole property purchased just for my father and it had been the first property in 80 years of jewellers that they had actually bought.
“There was never any question or thought about a restaurant, or me even being involved in it, but Dad soon discovered that the upstairs part of the building was just too big and so they were discussing what to do with it.
“There were options such as accommodation or turning it into flats, but I came in and just starting visualising a restaurant being upstairs, to which Dad said I was mad, but I said it could happen and I was like a dog with a bone about this and wouldn’t let it go and we eventually opened in October 2021.”