Skye Gyngell

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.