Angela Hartnett's kitchen cabinet

She’s helping her boyfriend set up his first restaurant, wants to give her head chef his own kitchen and lets her young staff stay with her. Nick Curtis on super-chef Angela Hartnett’s food of love
21 June 2013

How lucky is Angela Hartnett’s boyfriend, Neil Borthwick? He gets to share an immaculate Shoreditch home with the warmest and most talented of Gordon Ramsay’s former protégés, and now she’s helping set him up in his first restaurant. The Merchant’s Tavern opens in Shoreditch — where else? — in September within a Victorian warehouse and apothecary that was latterly the east London favourite Cantaloupe. The Tavern joins Michelin-starred Murano in Mayfair and the Lime Wood hotel in Hampshire as part of Hartnett’s mini-empire, but it won’t have her name over the door. “This is going to be Neil’s place,” she says. “I’m just background support.”

The menu will be seasonal and Modern European, showcasing the skills Scottish-born Borthwick learned at The Connaught, The Square and Restaurant Michel Bras in Laguiole. Think Hoggett broth with pearl barley, loin of venison with lardo di Colonnata, mandarin and cardamom burnt cream. But the Tavern also aims to cover most bases: snacks in the bar, brunch on Sundays, novel British beers, “the sort of place you can bring your mum or your girlfriend”, Hartnett says.

She and Borthwick are equal financial partners in the new venture with Dominic Lake and Patrick Clayton-Malone, the co-founders of Canteen, but she is lending Borthwick her head chef from Murano, Diego Cardoso, and has been advising on staffing and rotas as well as food. “I’ve had the experience,” she says. Her name, bolstered not just by professional acclaim but by a healthy TV career and a recent MBE, obviously carries cachet. But I wonder if Borthwick had to have his own kitchen to set against her success and celebrity. The restaurant world remains overbearingly macho, and she was his boss at The Connaught before they were a couple.

“I don’t think we’ve ever had any rivalry,” she says. “It’s not a case of me trying to better Neil or vice versa. We work in unison and we get on very well. We’ve been together three years, nearly, but he used to work for me years ago, and we’ve been good friends since then.” Hartnett says that her family — a strongly matriarchal clan of home cooks who came to London by way of Kent, Wales and Italy — have always kept her ego in check.

“Of course, sometimes I’ll mock Neil and say, ‘Ooh, that tart’s not quite right, y’know’. But on the other hand, sometimes I’ll say to him, ‘Jesus Christ, show me how to bone this chicken again, I’ve forgotten’. His skill level is very good. I wouldn’t go into this if I thought there would be compromise.”

With him getting the Tavern up and running, and her cooking, consultancy and TV commitments, their spare time will be squeezed more than is normal in the pressurised restaurant world. “I never thought I’d end up going out with a chef,” she says, “but I suppose that’s the only option in this industry because you work so hard.”

This leads to the two inevitable questions Hartnett gets asked. The first is whether things have got better for women in the testosterone-charged world of kitchens. She replies that she never had a hard time, even from Ramsay, and that the numbers of women in kitchens is increasing, especially in positions of authority (half of Murano’s kitchen brigade is female). But “inevitably it will always be a male industry because of the hours. It’s night and day. If you want a family and all that …”

Cue the second question: has Hartnett, 45, had to make a choice between having children and having a career as a chef? “It’s not something I necessarily think about, and certainly not something I talk to journalists about,” she ripostes. “Things have just gone their way. There’s always time to do stuff if you really want to. I have never sat down and thought about it. I’ve just … worked, I suppose.” Would she like to take time out from the relentless pressure of work to even think about it? “Not this month!”

Maybe she doesn’t need to. As well as Borthwick, Hartnett shares her house with her sister Anne, who works in human resources, and Anne’s dog Alfie; her brother Michael, a banker now based in New York, bought the house ahead of the Shoreditch boom so he could walk to the City. Hartnett talks about the villagey nature of the area, about the great sense of community engendered across London by the Olympics (she ran the catering for the sponsors’ suites) and the Jubilee. Her cooking has always been social, inclusive, hospitable rather than icily clever-dickish. And it may not be too much of a stretch to see her staff as an extended family.

Unusually for a chef-patron, she writes the rota in her kitchens, to stay aware to her employees’ changing needs and situations. She pays well and gives them three clear days off after four hard-grafting days on (this goes for the Merchant’s Tavern, too). A kitchen porter came to stay with her for a week while he was moving house, as did two young cooks who worked with her in Dubai. When her sous chef Pip Lacey broke her hand and neither Hartnett or Diego were on shift, she trusted the kitchen to her other sous chef, Oscar Holgado “and he did a brilliant job. If you want people to stay with you, you have to give them the possibility to expand.” If her empire grows, she will probably give Diego his own restaurant. This is, she acknowledges, “a bit Gordonish” but with less swearing and overweening ambition: “I don’t want to put my name on 50 restaurants.”

Much has changed since Hartnett started cooking full-time 20 years ago, after first taking a history degree. There are many more restaurants, and much more appreciation of food, at least in London. “We’re in a bubble,” she says. “In Soho and Covent Garden everything’s full and buzzing, but if you walk around Upminster, where my mum lives, that wouldn’t be the case.” The seemingly endless food boom is fuelled not just by the super-rich but by a young, inquisitive audience who have learned to expect better and more exotic food thanks to cheap foreign travel and the exponential increase in the number of food programmes and cookbooks. (Hartnett attributes this largely to Ramsay, and, almost uniquely among his former acolytes, remains fond of and friendly with him.)

She thinks the trend now is toward simplicity rather than fancy presentation or molecular gastronomy — “making fishes into water” — and that London outstrips New York in terms of variety, although the Japanese food here isn’t as good. Ingredients are still ludicrously expensive here compared with Europe, leading to a kind of food apartheid between rich and poor. Localism is all very well, but our dreadful summer means Kentish tomatoes aren’t a patch on those from Sicily. She quite likes dude food but “if I’m parting with money I want something on a plate, not a piece of kitchen roll. And no burger is worth the queue.”

For those who work in kitchens and dining rooms, things are both better and worse. Being a waiter is now seen as a career rather than a last resort: this means service has improved but also that the market is more competitive. Social media means that jobs go quickly, and bad employers are swiftly blackballed. “The great kitchens are full,” so it’s harder to get experience. Most crucially, the minimum wage, and better distribution of tips, means you can earn a decent living in restaurants, but the London property market means you will be unable to live anywhere near your work.

“When I started out I lived with my aunt in south London and never had to worry about washing clothes or buying food,” she says. “Now, with the average rent at £200 a week, you have to live in zone six. If I’m giving someone a hard time because they’re late, I have to remember that maybe they’re finishing [work] at one in the morning, then have a two-hour journey to Deptford.” A 24-hour Tube would help, but since that isn’t realistic, “a lot of our guys end up sharing in rented flats. When I left college I never wanted to share again. But if you want to live in central London now, that’s the only option.”

Do you think Hartnett’s male peers ever think about these sorts of things. I don’t. Lucky old Neil Borthwick, eh?

The Merchant’s Tavern opens at35-42 Charlotte Road, EC2 in September (no website or phone yet).

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