🇦🇺 Australia / United Kingdom · British cuisine · b. 1963
The Australian-born chef whose ingredient-led, garden-driven cooking at Petersham Nurseries and Spring transformed British seasonal cuisine.
Skye Gyngell is an Australian-born British chef, food writer and the chef-patron of Spring at Somerset House in London. She is among the most influential figures in the modern British seasonal-cooking movement, alongside Alice Waters (whose Chez Panisse was a direct model), Yotam Ottolenghi and the River Café team — her cooking, both at Petersham Nurseries Café in Richmond (where she was head chef from 2004 to 2012) and at Spring (which she opened in 2014), is built around vegetables and herbs cut the same morning from a single biodynamic farm.
Gyngell was born in Sydney in 1963, the daughter of the Australian television executive Bruce Gyngell. She studied at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and worked at the Hôtel de Crillon under Christian Constant before moving to London in 1988. After a decade as a private chef and as the food editor of Vogue Australia and other publications, she was invited in 2004 by Gael Boglione of the Boglione family — owners of the Petersham House estate in Richmond, west London — to run a small lunch-only café in their plant nursery. The café, which had room for sixty diners in a glasshouse open to the elements, became one of the most-discussed restaurants of the late 2000s. Its style — short, vegetable-led menus rewritten daily from the Petersham House kitchen garden, no telephones taken at lunch, an emphasis on light and air — was widely imitated in British country-house dining.
In 2011 Petersham Nurseries Café was awarded a Michelin star, a recognition Gyngell publicly and famously called 'a curse' in a 2011 Telegraph interview, arguing that the star brought a wave of formally-minded guests with expectations the small, informal glasshouse restaurant could not meet. She left Petersham in early 2012. After two years of consulting and writing, she opened Spring in September 2014 in the New Wing of Somerset House on the Strand — a 100-seat restaurant designed by Briony Fer with floor-to-ceiling windows onto the courtyard, supplied four days a week from the biodynamic Fern Verrow farm in Herefordshire run by Jane Scotter. In 2017 she launched Heckfield Place, the Hampshire country-house hotel of which she is culinary director, where she runs three restaurants supplied entirely from the estate's biodynamic farm.
Cook the garden. Gyngell's menus at Spring and Petersham have always been written after the morning's farm delivery rather than before. The kitchen has no fixed dishes; the menu is rewritten daily around the contents of the wooden crates from Fern Verrow (for Spring) and Heckfield's own farm. Herbs, flowers, salad leaves and citrus are picked into ice water; every plate must contain at least one vegetable, herb or flower harvested the same morning.
100-seat ingredient-led restaurant opened September 2014; supplied four days a week from Fern Verrow farm in Herefordshire.
Culinary director since 2017; three restaurants (Marle, Hearth, the Assembly) supplied entirely from the estate's biodynamic Home Farm.
Lunch-only glasshouse restaurant in a plant nursery; awarded a Michelin star in 2011.
These recipes from our database reflect the british cooking tradition that Skye works in. They are not direct reproductions of Skye's copyrighted recipes, but traditional dishes inspired by the same culinary heritage.
“The Michelin star was a curse. It brought us people who wanted the Connaught and got a greenhouse.”
— The Daily Telegraph interview (2011)
“I do not write the menu. The farm writes it. I just put it on the plate.”
— Spring cookbook (2015), introduction
Begins her formal training at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris.
Joins Christian Constant at the Hôtel de Crillon, Paris.
Moves to London; works as a private chef for the next fifteen years.
Becomes head chef of the newly opened Petersham Nurseries Café in Richmond.
Publishes her first cookbook, A Year in My Kitchen.
Petersham Nurseries Café is awarded a Michelin star; in a Telegraph interview she calls the star 'a curse.'
Leaves Petersham Nurseries Café.
Opens Spring at Somerset House, London, in September.
Becomes culinary director of Heckfield Place in Hampshire; opens three restaurants supplied from the estate's own farm.
Wins the Observer Food Monthly Outstanding Achievement Award.
In a 2011 interview with The Daily Telegraph, Gyngell argued that the Michelin star awarded to Petersham Nurseries Café earlier that year had brought a wave of guests with formal-dining expectations that the small, lunch-only glasshouse restaurant — without a printed menu, fixed cover charges or even consistent indoor heating — could not realistically meet. She felt the disappointment those guests expressed was destroying the spirit of the place. She left the restaurant in early 2012.
Spring is Gyngell's 100-seat restaurant in the New Wing of Somerset House on the Strand, London, opened in September 2014. It is supplied four days a week with vegetables, fruit, herbs and flowers from the biodynamic Fern Verrow farm in Herefordshire run by Jane Scotter, and the menu is rewritten daily from the contents of the deliveries.
Yes. Gyngell was born in Sydney in 1963. She moved to London in 1988 via her training in Paris and has lived in the UK ever since.
Since 2017 Gyngell has been culinary director of Heckfield Place, the country-house hotel in Hampshire owned by Gerald Chan. She runs the three on-site restaurants (Marle, Hearth and the Assembly) on the same farm-to-table principle as Spring, supplied entirely from the estate's biodynamic Home Farm.
Yes. Her father, Bruce Gyngell, was an executive in Australian commercial television and was famously the first person ever to appear on Australian TV, on the opening broadcast of TCN-9 Sydney in September 1956. He later ran TV-am in the UK in the late 1980s.
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