The winners of this year's newcomer award are more like a rock band than a restaurant. The name refers not to a bricks-and-mortar establishment but to a collective of chefs who are, aptly enough, young, ambitious and healthily iconoclastic. They make fleeting appearances at unconventional venues, keeping fans in the loop on Twitter. If you caught them last summer at a disused office building in Canary Wharf, or on the roof of a car park in Peckham where they reimagined dishes for a Turkish ocakbasi grill, count yourself lucky: these events have acquired semi-legendary status in the London food world.

Last October, we had a chance to get to know James Lowe and Isaac McHale a little better when they settled down for a six-month residency above the Ten Bells pub in Spitalfields. Here, they had a chance to cook food that was inventive and daring without being flashy in a room that had none of the hush and formality you associate with fine dining (you had to cross the crowded floor of the pub and climb a narrow, creaky staircase to get to it). Since then, they've been touring their talents around the world, to Mexico City, Shanghai and New York, where last month they did a successful turn at the prestigious Le Fooding event.

For all their unconventional working habits and punkish attitude, however, the Young Turks are not quite as radical as they sound. They became chefs the usual way, paying dues in high-pressure kitchens, albeit rapidly. Thirty-three-year-old Lowe cooked at La Trompette and the Fat Duck before becoming, at 26, head chef at St John Bread & Wine. McHale, 32, worked at the Ledbury in west London for five years and did a stint at Noma in Copenhagen. A third member, Ben Greeno, also worked at Noma, but dropped out of the Turks to work for David Chang at Momofuku Seiobo in Sydney.

The Young Turks formed when Lowe, McHale and Greeno were invited separately to guest-chef at the influential Loft Project supper club in east London. "We shared views on the London food scene and food in general," Lowe tells me. "Each of us was keeping a close eye on what was happening abroad – in the States and Japan and around Europe – whereas many British chefs were still very inward-looking."

"We had various ideals," says McHale. "Eating more vegetables, paring things back a bit, sharing ideas instead of being secretive." Reclaiming neglected British ingredients and updating antique recipes were other areas of common ground. One of Lowe's most successful dishes, when the Young Turks returned to the Loft in spring 2011, was a very traditional British pairing of beef and oysters, but served raw with chickweed.

Although founded on honest food philosophies and serious talent, the Young Turks had astute marketing: the swaggering identity and the shrewd use of social media guaranteed column inches as well as bookings. Both are now working on solo projects. McHale is preparing to open a permanent restaurant at Shoreditch Town Hall in January – he's calling it the Clove Club.

Again, social media has proved invaluable to his progress: using the crowdfunding website Crowdcube, McHale raised £250,000 from 50 donors to help get the project started. Meanwhile, he has kept the Ten Bells restaurant going. It's no longer officially a Young Turks operation – young ex-Ledbury chef Giorgio Ravelli is in charge of the kitchen – but some of McHale's dishes, including his justly famous buttermilk chicken and pine salt, are still on the menu.

James Lowe took the summer off to do a chef's Grand Tour – "China for a month, Taiwan, Italy for a few weeks, Copenhagen, Mexico, Brazil and Colombia" – and and now he too is looking to start up a restaurant of his own in east London. Does this signal the end of the Young Turks?

No, McHale says, though he admits the relationship may change. "It was never a till-death-do-us-part arrangement, it was a springboard to us finding our own sites. It went better than we expected – but we have to be true to our own identities and do our own things." Young Turks projects will continue to happen – they will be cooking in Turin at the end of October – albeit less frequently, and McHale and Lowe remain enthusiastic about their alliance.

According to McHale, last month's Le Fooding extravaganza in New York was "the most fun foreign event we've done. We were nervous when we started doing them but now it's less nerves, more enjoyment – and it helped that everyone seemed to have heard of us. We're proud of the things we've done together as Young Turks," he adds. "Hopefully, this is only really the beginning."

youngturks.co.uk; thecloveclub.com; tenbells.com