A garden has more than four seasons. There are moments in each where certain fruits and flowers are in full bloom, then there are others where seeds lie dormant and the land is fallow or frozen cold, and still others when shoots appear and everything seems to just spring forth. After a bitter winter for all in the hospitality industry, Skye Gyngell, one of the great originals (and iterators) of the food world, is again experiencing a new season and living up to the name of her beloved London restaurant, Spring. Long admired for her dishes that can only be described as painterly, as well as her singular palette and superlative taste that extends beyond food, Gyngell inspired many through the pandemic, and continues to do so.
Unlike many of today’s quick-to-fame chefs, her path to cooking, from her homeland of Australia to her now-home in London, was more of a garden meander than a steep climb up the ranks of the kitchen brigade. Most notably it took her from a garden-focused cafe at Petersham Nurseries to Spring and now its Notting Hill little sister market, Spring-to-Go. She also serves as culinary director of the expansive 460-hectare Hampshire hotel, Heckfield Place.
During Gyngell’s early days cooking in France at a time when so many in the world’s top kitchens were still focused on French cuisine, then later as the food editor at British Vogue during a multi-year restaurant sabbatical, she formed a style that was at once insistently classic and yet always one step fashionably ahead. But her greatest learnings arguably came from Petersham, a grand, family-owned Queen Anne estate on the Thames with an equally expansive English garden and nursery. She started a simple cafe by making just a few plates a day with whatever was growing that week. After nearly ten years evolving the project, she was ready to grow in another direction, but not yet untether from the garden. And along came Spring.
Built in a 19th-century drawing room in London which had stood vacant for 150 years, Spring is ingredient-led, with philosophies that are simple and grounded and an ambiance that is grand yet airy and feminine. The restaurant opened to fanfare, but it found its footing when a truly unique partnership was struck with legendary farmer Jane Scotter of Fern Verrow, Spring’s exclusive grower. Scotter, Gyngell says, is half of the creativity behind every menu, a cyclical conjuring of the English seasons. However, these women don’t endlessly tout the virtue of farm to table: this is a spin-less restaurant. They just do the work. It is also this complete fidelity to one grower and to the seasons that led Gyngell and her team to a quiet and elegant yet profoundly impactful commitment to sustainability that makes it the gold standard in London, with its plastic-free and zero-waste ethos. Gyngell’s just weeks-old market, Spring-to-Go, aims to use every last inch of what is pulled from Fern Verrow farm to create elevated home cooking staples, from the most perfect herbed salad dressing to jars of honey, tea-soaked prunes to fresh hazelnut butters.
Watching Gyngell at work—or even hearing her speak about food and her restaurant’s day to day—is to be inevitably romanced. It isn’t an intentional seduction, but she simply doesn’t speak or think about ingredients and their marriages like anyone else: “I might do those tiny clams with borlotti,” or “tomato and peaches with a peach leaf oil.” There is always some twist, some elevation, never chef-y but entirely “Skye-food,” as many chefs have referred to it, the ultimate compliment. Far from forced “fusion food,” Skye’s cooking sits both everywhere and nowhere, which reflects her London location, her cosmopolitan nature and her Australian upbringing—but, most importantly, her extreme sensitivity, nuance and sense of aliveness, a beauty of spirit and connectivity to the planet that sees the gifts of nature come alive on every plate.
David Prior: Your first restaurant was in a garden of sorts. Can you tell me the story of how you became chef at Petersham Nurseries?
Skye Gyngell: I knew the owners Gael and Francesco Boglione and they asked me to come down and have a look. More than a garden in the beginning, it was a conservation area, and where Petersham was situated right on the Thames was the most visually stimulating place I've ever come across. What became Petersham was all cement, a garden center run by a guy called Bob who'd run it for 30 years and wanted to retire. Francesco thought [he would] just close the gates and have seven acres on the Thames, but on that journey, things began to change. They have beautiful taste and had the beginnings of a little vegetable garden out back, and a very famous English gardener called Mary King, who's probably in her nineties now and still designing gardens. I suppose it was when Lucy Gray [River Cafe cofounder Rose Gray's daughter] came and started growing vegetables, that was the thing that created the relationship between a farmer and a grower. I remember being completely obsessed with watching everything grow. It was the flowers and the garden as much as the vegetables that influenced the food I cooked there.
Tell me about the relationship with Jane Scotter of Fern Verrow, the grower you work with at Spring, and what it means to your restaurant.
