The Jackson & Levine guide to life: 'Success is so subjective'

“Sometimes if we have a period when we’re proper busy I’m like, well Beyoncé has the same amount of hours in the day as we do,” laughs Alice Levine. The truth is Jackson & Levine can’t be far behind queen Bey in the busy-ness stakes.

Meet Laura Jackson and Alice Levine, the talented pair behind food and lifestyle brand, Jackson & Levine.

By day Alice is a BBC Radio 1 DJ, while Laura is a TV presenter for the ITV2 Take Me Out spin-off The Gossip amongst other things. But by night the duo are hosts of London’s “hottest supper club.”

They met at a charity jumble sale, hosted by mutual friend Gemma Cairney, while flogging their wares wearing bum bags. “We hit it off straight away,” explains Alice. “It was kind of like that playground friendship when you’re like ‘you’re my best friend.’ It doesn’t happen that much as a grown adult.”

Bonding over their love of food and shared desire to seek out cheap yet chic lunch eats, the supper clubs were meant to be a bit of a fun challenge, something they could do together because they liked hanging out and cooking.

“We’d heard about supper clubs but we didn’t completely know what they were and thought maybe we should do that. We made up our own rules and just decided to do one,” Alice says of their first event. “We never really knew what it was going to become so we took it pretty much one at a time,” Laura chimes in. “So we did one and then we’d did another one and each time they grew not necessarily in numbers but in ambition and scope.”

Knowing they also wanted to write about food the pair sent a GCSE style mock up of a magazine page to Company magazine “I think they felt sorry for us but we basically started writing for them and then over the years we just added to our culinary arsenal,” Laura continues. The pair went on to become columnists for Elle and are now food editors for Marie Claire.

And the Jackson & Levine takeover didn’t end there: A cook book deal quickly followed (Round To Ours – 24 menus perfect for every gathering came out in May this year), a homeware range for Habitat, oh and their own online TV show. All squeezed in between their broadcasting day jobs.

To say they’re killing it would be an understatement. Yahoo Style UK caught up with the dynamic duo on a break between shoots to talk food, feeling the ‘yes’ pressure and finding balance.

On time pressures

Laura: Sometimes we’ll spend more time doing more food and then other times that will take a back seat. When you’ve got a few projects on the go you can’t say, right every week we’re going to do Tuesday and Thursday together and we’re going to do this many hours. You have to cut each other a bit of slack and understand that it’s not like a normal 9-5. You’re going to have to get a bit creative with how you spend your time.

Alice: We do a lot of different things. Television, broadcasting and radio are kind of the job and then we have other businesses around that. We’re like proper millennials aren’t we? But if you enjoy what you do, it just works itself out to be honest. You just find the time.

On fitting in friendships

Alice: It goes in swings and roundabouts. Sometimes I feel like I do really well at keeping up with people and then other times I’m really bad at it. Sometimes if you’re really busy, you do let a friendship slip but we’re at an age now when you have true friendships with people. So sometimes I don’t see my school friends for three or four months but then when we meet up we’re talking about the same things and you just pick up where you left off. When you’ve got really deep-rooted friendships it doesn’t matter and you do forgive people if they don’t see you for a while.

Laura: My chill time is having everyone over and cooking. I always end up feeling really stressed and deciding there and then that I’m not going to do it again. But then when they’re all gone I’ll email them all and ask if they want to come round again the following Thursday. I like the pressure of cooking for people.

On feeling pressure to say ‘yes’

Alice: I’ve got a lot better about being quite direct and saying ‘oh I don’t really want to do that, I’ve not got much time, so count me out.’ You get better at that as you get older and people get less offended. People throw invitations out there and there was a time when you had to have a big long list of excuses but now you can be like ‘you know what I’ve had a really busy weekend I just feel like I want to stay in.’

On finding a life balance

Alice: I don’t always strike that balance perfectly. You can tell by the state of my flat when I haven’t got the balance quite right. There’ll be piles of laundry and plates and you’ve barely unpacked one bag before you’ve got to pack another and everything’s just a bit chaotic. When stuff is out of kilter I get to a critical point when I think right I need to rebalance, think about what I’m eating, what I’m doing day to day.

Laura: Balance can be applied to everything. You wouldn’t wear the same outfit every day of the week and it’s the same with everything. You don’t hang out with one friend, you don’t go to just one restaurant. It’s about getting a balance of everything in your life.

On trying to eat healthily

Alice: We spend a lot of time thinking about food because that’s a big part of our job. And so we definitely don’t grab stuff from the service station. We enjoy eating too much to waste a meal or a snack. We definitely have a handful of almonds to snack on in our handbags or something we’ve made at home that morning that we’ve taken with us on the run because then you don’t have to rely on getting something from a vending machine. Honestly we’ve all done that but when you’ve got the time and energy it is nice to be prepared with stuff like that. Because I get so Hangry. Ask Laura. She puts on this upbeat voice a bit like a phone voice and she’ll be like ‘Erm you should probably have something to eat soon shouldn’t you?’

Laura: With food if I’m out and about every night of the week and I’m having dinner out a lot, which does happen quite often. I think I should have something healthy, that’s not going to make me feel bad about having those burgers I had seven nights a week.

On faking it til you make it

Alice: When we started out in food we were really ready for people to say ‘you’re not real chefs’, so we were really careful to use the right terminology and say that we were cooks. We didn’t want to be charlatans and claim we’d trained in kitchens for 15 years. What we found is that people just want to talk and enthuse about food, they don’t really care about your credentials. And you can really learn from winging it. Say yes I know how to do that and go away that night and find out how to do it. I don’t think anyone is ever annoyed or upset with you if you say ‘can you teach me? I’m willing to learn can you just show me?’

On finding your own path

Alice: There aren’t linea career paths anymore. Everyone has taken these different journeys to do the same kind of things. I loved school and Laura didn’t. I’m academic and Laura is visual. We didn’t come out of school with the same results or wanting to necessarily go on the same academic path, but we’re doing the same thing so it just shows you that there are different ways of going about things.

Laura: At school your career’s advisor gives you about four options. I never knew that putting make up on people’s faces could be a job or that you could work in food even though you’re not a chef. We need to tell people that there are all these other really exciting, creative jobs out there and you don’t have to be good at maths or get an A in science to be really successful. I think that we are carving out those paths for younger people to say, hey its ok you can do what you’re good at instead of being told you have to be a lawyer by your parents.

On redefining what success is

Laura: Success is so subjective. What I might consider successful Alice might not. For some people success is having a really big sports car, but for others it’s a promotion at work or buying a property. It’s difficult to not look at what everyone else is doing and feel jealous or like you should be doing that but we need to be strong minded enough to say hey you’re doing ok. Alice and I are quite good at being happy with what we’re doing.

Alice: Sometimes I think the money measure can be really distracting and the what your peers are doing thing can be really distracting. Somebody else might look at us and go ‘oh but you haven’t opened 32 cafes worldwide or world domination is the aim and you haven’t done that. But actually what we have done we never thought we’d get to do. Being in a room with Nigel Slater and Nigella and all these cool people that we really admire, you have to step back sometimes and say ‘if nothing else happens, this is pretty cool.’

Alice Levine and Laura Jackson want people to say yes to snacking with California Almonds. For more information and snacking recipes, please head to www.almonds.co.uk.