Stuart Deeley joins Opheem's senior team in Birmingham
The 2019 MasterChef: The Professionals champion leaves the Warwick at Mallory Court for Aktar Islam's two-Michelin-starred Indian kitchen.
Stuart Deeley, the 2019 MasterChef: The Professionals champion, has joined the senior management team at Opheem, Aktar Islam's two-Michelin-starred Indian restaurant in Birmingham.
Deeley left his post as executive chef at the Warwick at Mallory Court in September, after a run in which the Royal Leamington Spa hotel kept its three AA rosettes and a place in the Michelin Guide UK & Ireland. Before that he was chef director at Smoke at Hampton Manor Estate in Solihull, and earlier worked the stoves at two other Birmingham names, the Wilderness and Simpsons.
Opheem became the first restaurant in Birmingham to hold two Michelin stars in 2024, five years after its first. Islam built the menu around Ni'matnama, a 15th-century manuscript recording the recipes of the Sultan of Mandu, and the kitchen has kept drawing on that source for dishes such as its achaari-spiced vegetables and slow-cooked lamb raan.
A MasterChef champion joins a kitchen that took five years to earn its second star.
Twenty years before the hire
"Stuart and I have known each other for nearly 20 years," Islam said, dating the relationship to the two chefs' time together at Simpsons. He said they had discussed working together "for some time" before Deeley's move became possible this autumn. Islam described their shared aim as a "relentless pursuit of excellence," a line that carries more weight attached to a kitchen that took five years to go from one Michelin star to two.
Deeley's title has not been detailed beyond "senior management team," and neither chef has said whether he will cook service or take a more structural role across the business. Michael Smith's recent move to Perle Hotels as culinary director shows one route a MasterChef-winning chef can take into a broader brief; Deeley's arrival at a single two-starred kitchen looks narrower, and more hands-on, by comparison.
Birmingham's Indian kitchens keep making news
The appointment lands in a year when Birmingham's Indian restaurants have drawn national attention beyond the Michelin Guide: Grace Dent's review of Indian Café Racer's bigger Birmingham site was one of several pieces treating the city's Indian cooking as a story in its own right, not a regional footnote to London's. Opheem, already the city's reference point, now adds a MasterChef champion to a kitchen built on a 600-year-old cookbook.
What Deeley actually cooks there will be the real test of the appointment, and neither chef has said when that starts.
