From The Archive: When British Vogue Photographed Chef Skye Gyngell At Petersham Nurseries
The chances are you’ll not have heard of Skye Gyngell. Until very recently, her name was a well-kept secret, known only to the few people for whom she worked as London’s best private cook. She didn’t advertise. She didn’t need to. She was the person to go to for totally fresh, seasonal food that tasted like the very best home cooking. Skye was known, too, for being unflappable: sudden extra guests who were on a macrobiotic diet, telephones ringing… Nothing fazed her. It was hardly surprising that her clients included Madonna and Mario Testino. The good news is that it’s now possible for ordinary mortals to taste food cooked by Skye.
In May 2004, Skye found the escape from private catering she’d been looking for when her friends Gael and Francesco Boglione opened a little café at Petersham Nurseries in Richmond. At first she had four burners and one sink, like a domestic kitchen, and made lunches for up to 10 people a few times a week. The idea was to keep things simple: just a choice of two or three dishes, all using seasonal ingredients. She didn’t think that the task she had set herself would gallop away with her, but if you cook as well as Skye does, word gets around. The Petersham Café is now open five days a week (Wednesday to Sunday), serving lunch to up to 110 people. She heads a team of 16. Food critics have unanimously given the café rave reviews and Sunday lunches are fully booked six weeks in advance.
Skye is very wrapped up in her work. Most nights she lies in bed, thinking over what she’s cooked that day, what she’s going to cook the next, how to refine things and improve them. She’s a naturally early riser, which is just as well because her day starts at six in the morning when she drives to Petersham from her home in Shepherd’s Bush to start planning the day’s menu. This typically includes about 12 dishes, covering three courses.
When she started the café it was such a small concern that suppliers wouldn’t deliver and she had to lug in all the ingredients herself. To begin with she even brought her own pots and pans from home. As the venture grew, says Skye, “Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray of The River Café very generously helped me to find suppliers. Then Wendy Fogarty of Slow Food Great Britain came to work here and she helped, too. We’re very into the idea of ‘slow food’, taking time and care to prepare the freshest ingredients.” They use vegetables from Petersham’s own vegetable garden. There can’t be many other restaurants in Greater London where you can eat a courgette that has been picked only moments before.
“We don’t know exactly what’s going to be on the menu until about 11am, when the suppliers have been,” says Skye. “For instance, we get lamb specially delivered from Wales, or cod’s roe from Suffolk, or mozzarella and ricotta flown in from Italy.” When I visit, the day’s delivery of smoked ricotta turns out to be less soft than Skye anticipated, so she and the other chefs devise a delicious roughly chopped green sauce of olives and fresh herbs to moisten it. A pan-fried halibut served with Savoy cabbage hasn’t enough depth, so Skye adds a beurre blanc to the mix. They are producing the cafe’s first-ever soufflés: hot raspberry ones in individual ramekins, accompanied by a little pot of cream and puréed sieved fruit. “They use four burners and an oven,” Skye tells me. “They’re a lot of work to make.” Other dishes include quail roasted with Umbrian lentils infused with a zing of lemon zest, and the best bread-and-butter pudding I’ve ever tasted, served with a handful of plump, juicy blackberries.
