McEvedy's mission
By her own admission, Allegra McEvedy has the attention span of a gnat. But she is certainly no sloth. At the age of 29, she is in charge of her own restaurant (the Good Cook in Kensington, west London), is on the verge of widespread TV success, writes a regular recipe column for ES (the magazine supplement of London's Evening Standard) and has a book to her name - its cover sporting a carefully artless, soft-focus photo of McEvedy with her nose thrust into a verdant handful of rosemary, à la Jamie Oliver.
"Don't. Don't say that," she protests, before the comparison is even made. "I've never met him. I've never seen his shows. And now people are even beginning to say that I look like his big sister. Please!"
Maybe it has something to do with her toothy smile, the untidy blonde hair, her dress-down mode, her youth and her liberal use of colloquialisms in conversation and print, such as "stonking", "whacked" and "funky". And then there's the fact that both she and Oliver have worked at the River Café.
"I was at the River Café before him," McEvedy says. "I'm completely different. The one thing I feel about these Jamie comparisons is that we've both got a hands-on approach to cooking. It's like, ‘Don't forget about the food. Don't think that you've got to be like Escoffier to cook for your friends or yourself.' Cooking is a very real thing that we all do every day."
The Oliver comparisons may be unwelcome but they are inevitable, given TV's insatiable urge to clone anything that is successful. And McEvedy, who already has under her belt a series of appearances on Channel 4's The Big Breakfast and a pilot show for BBC2, is canny enough to know that being one of that rare breed - a female chef - has helped to attract and sustain media attention. "I'll tell you what I've got going for me," she says. "I'm young, I'm a woman, I've just been given an amazing restaurant. I make nice food, I can write a book. (Of course I wrote it - can't you tell it's the same voice?) The timing's right. But everybody's going over the top about me at the moment and I really hope it settles down. The most important thing to me is the restaurant."
The 100-seat restaurant, which opened its doors in May opposite the Royal Garden hotel on Kensington High Street, is a direct consequence of McEvedy's success with the Good Cook, mark one, in Notting Hill's community centre, the Tabernacle. Set up in 1998 by the Good Business group with McEvedy as head chef, the original Good Cook was accessible to its culturally diverse clientele and put out what McEvedy describes as "good" rather than "posh" food. It gained a reputation as a buzzy venue, with favourable reviews from London listings magazine Time Out, among others.
Success meant that the Good Cook soon outgrew the Taberbacle site ("we were in a lobby in a little corner - the food said one thing, the surroundings another"), hence the upmarket move two months ago.
The eaterie may have moved site and acquired the trappings of an aspiring modern restaurant - blond wood floors, marble-topped bar, discreet lighting, frosted glass, cream walls and mauve banquettes - but McEvedy has transplanted the Good Cook's food ethos into new soil.
Her weekly changing menus carry robust, straightforward dishes which have their origins in her experience at the River Café, in the USA and in her travel around the world. For instance, the Italianesque lemon and artichoke risotto (£10), served with a rocket salad, or the Turkish aubergine classic imam bayildi may sit alongside a Californian-inspired duck with Jerusalem artichoke mash and sour cherry sauce (£13.50), served with buttered Savoy cabbage. The sauce for this, a reduction of dried sour cherries (reconstituted in boiled water), brandy, sugar and chicken stock, with a touch of duck fat, serves to cut through and contrast with the rich density of the duck meat.
US-inspired
Another US-inspired dish, this time with roots in McEvedy's time as senior sous chef at New York's Tribeca Bar & Grill, is a starter of sticky baby back pork ribs served with beetroot remoulade (£6). The ribs are coated in a sauce which includes allspice berries, coriander seeds, roasted garlic and tomato purée.
"You can do so much with pork," she enthuses. "It has a fantastic range of cuts, and you can roast, braise, smoke, grill or cure it." It is clear that learning to make a prosciutto at a dairy in Marin County, California, still stands as a highlight in her culinary education.
McEvedy's lack of pretention doesn't recommend itself to everyone. Critic Fay Maschler was not impressed with the Good Cook's food. Describing it as "pretty mediocre", she summed up McEvedy's style as "chalet girl for the millennium", and ascribed her renown to the fact that "she has cooked for Robert de Niro" (London Evening Standard, 6 June), the actor being a co-owner and frequent diner at Tribeca.
Perhaps that's unfair. McEvedy is certainly not aiming at the top end of the market. She is definitely a Guinness girl, far happier with a pint in her hand than a vodka and tonic, and this naturally reflects in the product she puts out, though that product is always made on site with the freshest of produce, a culinary lesson instilled in her during her River Café days. "If I ever got a Michelin star, I would hurl myself off a cliff," she states, horrified by the prospect. And, of course, every restaurant has its teething problems - "the Good Cook is still very much a work in progress," she says.
What is more important to McEvedy and her Good Business partners is a responsibility and contribution to the restaurant's local Kensington community. The ethic of putting something back into the area, socially and financially, is fundamental to the restaurant's existence - 2.5% of the service charge on a Good Cook restaurant bill, for instance, automatically goes into a fund for local projects. And McEvedy has also been involved in a Cooks for Schools programme at Kensington's St Mary Abbot's School, just 150m away.
"The fact that you can actually make money and be part of the community is lovely," she says. "Something started to grate when I was working in posh restaurants that charge a lot, and it's wonderful that the work I do at the Good Cook has a direct result for the local charities. We've just been able to hand over a cheque for £2,000 to KIDS [a north Kensington charity for children with learning difficulties]."
As for teaching eight- to 11-year-olds how to cook, she has this to say: "I feel very strongly about making cooking fun. It's an extra-curricular activity and it's a shame that we don't put the effort into getting an interest going in cooking when kids are young at school."
Exhibiting a social conscience, together with airing uncompromising opinions about her own industry, certainly wins McEvedy column inches in the media and brings in offers of TV, journalistic and promotional work. Only time will tell if she has spread herself too thinly, and if the product at the Good Cook has been pitched correctly. McEvedy herself has one aim for it: "To make it something that we're all really proud of. It's not about making money. It's not about that."
