Angela Hartnett

Angela Hartnett is a British chef of Italian and Welsh descent, chef-patron of the one-Michelin-star Murano in Mayfair, London, and one of the most senior and influential female chefs in modern British fine dining. The first woman to be made head chef of a Gordon Ramsay Holdings restaurant — the Connaught's main dining room, which she ran from 2002 to 2007 — she has cooked principally in the Italian regional tradition and is widely credited with bringing serious, technique-driven Italian cuisine into the British fine-dining mainstream.

Hartnett was born in Upminster, east London, in 1968 to an Italian-born mother (from the Bardi-Emilia-Romagna area) and a Welsh father, the youngest of three. She has often spoken about Sunday cooking with her Italian grandmother as her first culinary education. She read history at the University of Cambridge — graduating from Trinity in 1989 — and worked as a holiday courier before moving into hospitality. After a Roux scholarship-funded apprenticeship at La Tante Claire under Pierre Koffmann and several years cooking in Italy (most notably at the family-run La Madia in Liguria), she joined Gordon Ramsay in 1994 at Aubergine — the kitchen Ramsay was then running for Marco Pierre White's group — and became one of his closest and longest-tenured deputies.

In 2001 Ramsay was given the contract to take over the dining room of The Connaught hotel in Mayfair, and appointed Hartnett — then 33 — as head chef. The Connaught restaurant under her opened in November 2002 and held one Michelin star throughout her five-year tenure. She left in 2007 to open Murano in nearby Queen Street, also as part of Gordon Ramsay Holdings; in 2010 she bought the restaurant outright from Ramsay, making it her first solo venture. Murano earned a Michelin star in its first guide (2009) and has held it continuously. She has since added Café Murano (a casual Italian group with three London locations from 2013), Hartnett Holder & Co at Lime Wood in the New Forest (2013, with chef Luke Holder), and the pasta-bar Cucina at Lime Wood. She has been a regular judge on MasterChef: The Professionals since 2017 and presented the BBC2 series Hartnett's Heroes (2016) and Diamond's Tour (2019). Awarded an MBE in 2007 and a CBE in 2017 for services to the hospitality industry, she is also a long-standing patron of the women-in-hospitality charity The Trussell Trust and the LGBT+ network in hospitality, OutLook.