The first thing you see when you get off the commuter train in Mount Kisco, N.Y., is the Union Jack. Facing the station is a shop bedecked with several versions of the British flag, selling Cadbury chocolate and “Abbey Road” puzzles.
But that’s not the only thing British in this upstate hamlet. A leafy and serene 10-minute drive from this outpost of Britannia brings one to the estate of the Peltz family, where their newest member, Brooklyn Peltz Beckham, is making fish and chips for lunch.
“Some Americans find English food kind of gross, which I don’t understand,” says Peltz Beckham, standing in the kitchen of a cottage on the spacious property. He pours a decent splash of IPA into the batter in which he’ll be coating cod fillets, and sneaks a sip himself. “But I cook fish and chips and pie and mash for my American friends, and at the end they’re like, ‘OK, I understand.’”
Peltz Beckham, 23, is the eldest son of Britain’s other royal family, football legend David Beckham and Spice Girl-turned-fashion designer Victoria Beck ham; in April in Palm Beach, he married the “Transformers: Age of Extinction” actor then known as Nicola Peltz, daughter of billionaire investor Nelson Peltz. (British Vogue reported they served burgers from Wendy’s at the end of the night; Peltz is the biggest investor in the fastfood chain.) Like many a restless prince before him, Peltz Beckham needed a way to set himself apart from Mum and Dad — a path that, for him, ran through the kitchen. He prefers the term “cook” to “chef”: “I’m almost 100% self-taught,” he says. “Ever since the start of quarantine, I’ve done it every single day, and it’s the one thing I’ve found that takes my mind off of anything I’m thinking about.”
Cooking, as a venture, arrived in Peltz Beckham’s life after initial pursuits didn’t quite connect. He walked away from soccer at 16 after being released from the Arsenal club as a youth prospect. “My dad wasn’t sad, because he was like, I just want you to be happy. But of course I was sad. It was my whole life since I was literally 2.” (His brother Romeo Beckham plays for Inter Miami II, a soccer club owned by their father.) In choosing not to pursue a career in the sport, Peltz Beckham was reckoning with the reality of the pressures his name brought on: “To try and live up to what my dad did in football, I was just like, that’s going to be a bit difficult.”
Dabbling in modeling, including a stint as a face of British streetwear brand Superdry, followed. And Peltz Beckham enrolled in but eventually left Parsons School of Design, the New York institution where he’d been studying photography. “I really enjoyed it for a couple of years,” he says. “I love taking pictures of my wife. I still have all my film cameras, but now it’s just more of a fun thing to do. They were kind of all hobbies. I was still trying to find that one thing I would literally die for, and I found that with cooking.” Now, he says, culinary projects, including a seven-hour Bolognese to which he adds a whole bottle of wine (“My dad uses two cups, and when I told him, he said, ‘You’re going to get people drunk!’”) fill his time. “I’m going to go to the grocery store. I’m weird like that — I love going to smell different herbs.” (He pronounces this last word Britishly, with a hard “h.”) “I found what I absolutely love to do a little later in my life, but I absolutely love it.” Perhaps only in a family where the parents were both 20-something superstars is 23 considered “later in life.”
Peltz Beckham was a child throughout the peak of his father’s playing career with Manchester United. He recalls when he realized his family was famous. “One of the first times when we were walking out of the stadium — I wasn’t asleep the one time — I was like, why is everyone screaming at my dad, happy, asking for photos? That was the moment I was like, oh, OK.” Despite this, his parents tried to raise him under relatively normal circumstances. For instance, when he became obsessed with skateboarding, “hanging out at the skate park with my skateboarding friends,” his parents encouraged him: “Do your thing, but just be careful.”
And even though both his mom and dad sport well-documented body art, he was not allowed to get a tattoo until he was 18. Five years later, he says he has “about 95.” Several pieces are devoted to his wife: One marks the day he proposed, and on his ring finger are her initials. Another reads, “Our little bubble,” referencing the world the Peltz Beckhams inhabit in Los Angeles. “We can be quiet and watch our show and relax. It’s very tucked away in the mountains.” (They’re obsessed with British TV, including the immersive dating show “Love Island”; when we speak, Peltz Beckham hasn’t yet heard of the culinary-TV sensation “The Bear.”) He also grows herbs in a small garden on their balcony, says Nicola: “Listening to him talk about it, how much passion he has in his voice, it makes me fall more in love with him. It’s so endearing and sweet. He gets so excited with everything to do with the cooking space.”
Peltz Beckham’s approach to his career is — now, after some false starts — tactical. But his kitchen endeavors are anything but; indeed, his laid-back approach may be what makes him relatable. “The first few videos, my phone kept falling, I kept trying to catch it, I was burning stuff, I cut myself.” That didn’t make it into the clip, but the air of an eager newbie willing to figure things out did. “I don’t understand why people still think that I try and act like a professional,” he says, “because I’m absolutely not. I’ve always said, this is the very beginning. I have a lot to learn. I’m probably never going to stop learning.”
Our lunch winds down; shortly Peltz Beckham will leave the remains of our meal, grab the second-to-last IPA from the fridge and drive a golf cart to parts of the estate to which a journalist doesn’t have access. Tonight, he’s told me, he is taking his wife to Manhattan for a meal at Le Bernardin; with a still-new marriage and various irons in the fire, there’s plenty to celebrate, and to anticipate. Parenthood looms large in the cook’s mind, and he brings it up again in closing. “I always say to my wife, I wonder what our kids are going to want to love to do,” he says. “But I’m so happy that I’m the first Peltz Beckham to do cooking — the first one in my family to do it.”
