Spring is a season of transition, when bare earth transforms into something alive with promise. It was also the name chef Skye Gyngell, who has died at age 62, chose for her London restaurant. She said it was her favourite season, but the truth is she embraced all four and lived them wholly.
Gyngell was singular: she had the palate of a chef and the palette of an artist. Those twin gifts met in food that was painterly in its composition, delicate in its details and tuned to nature’s shifting notes.
It was that interplay that made her so beguiling, placing her at the heart of a movement she never sought to lead, yet in her own quiet, uncompromising way undeniably did. It is why she stands as one of the most significant chefs of her generation.
I knew Gyngell long before she knew me. Though I never told her, the first meal I ever had in London was at her restaurant Petersham Nurseries, which opened in 2004. I pretended I was looking for the bathroom just so I could walk up to the little garden shed where she cooked. She was a beautiful, striking figure who seemed to tower above me. I mustered the courage to tell her how much I loved her monkfish curry: a bright and brilliant dish that seemed to float above continents. It tasted Australian in its top notes yet was grounded in ingredients gathered locally.
She used the eclectic toolbox she had collected along her path from Sydney to Paris to London to create something unmistakable, what I came to think of simply as “Skye food”.
Several years later we met properly, while I was working for one of her greatest inspirations, Alice Waters, the California pioneer of the farm-to-table movement and a radical force for women in kitchens.
The parallels between Gyngell and Waters were unmistakable, as they were with legendary food figures such as Maggie Beer and Ballymaloe’s Darina Allen. All were feminists, bold in their conviction that food rooted in nature could be transformative.
Gyngell took that inheritance and made it entirely her own. For this she won the respect of peers as diverse as René Redzepi and Nigella Lawson.
I was a generation below her, and like many of my contemporaries – not only in food but across the broader creative world – thought she was impossibly cool. We all wanted to sit next to her at dinner, to tap her taste in fashion, literature and art, or simply watch how she saw the world.
She was often searingly honest and unintentionally hilarious. A sentence beginning, “Darling, if I am really honest …” always heralded an observation about the food world that cut through its nonsense. She had no airs, yet her intelligence was acute, and she cared instinctively for people, especially those who had not yet found their place.
Gyngell’s professional life was a series of reinventions that strengthened, rather than diluted, her voice. In her first head chef position at Petersham Nurseries, she began cooking from a garden shed. From there, she upended the way Michelin thought about restaurants. With dirt floors underfoot, she produced food bracing in its beauty, dishes that looked simple until you realised how stealthily sophisticated they were. She was awarded a Michelin star in 2011, and left the restaurant the next year.
Much has been made of her rejecting the Michelin star. With hindsight that decision seems prescient, just as her early commitment to food directly connected to its source anticipated where the culture would go.
In 2012, she became culinary director of Heckfield Place, a period less often cited but defining. Working with her longtime collaborator, farmer Jane Scotter, she helped build an extraordinary hotel farm: rare fruit and vegetable varieties, a working dairy, orchards and flowers grown with intention. While other hotels boasted herb patches, Heckfield’s produce travelled metres and came almost entirely from the property. Some of her best cooking happened there. Again she rewrote the book of dining in the UK.
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In 2014, she opened Spring at Somerset House and in 2019 it became the first restaurant in the UK to go plastic-free. She pioneered a joyful, prix-fixe Scratch menu, cooked from ingredients that would otherwise go to waste. It was not earnest or worthy, but generous and quietly radical, offering an affordable way to dine beautifully inside one of London’s grandest buildings.
Her perspective shaped the tastes and thinking of a generation of cooks. She never sought acclaim or authorship. She was respected, yes, but she was adored – deeply – by those who followed her.
Her deepest pride were her daughters, Holly and Evie, who embody the best of her. Both possess their mother’s beauty, curiosity and quiet strength. Her grandchild Cyprien brought her new joy.
Several hours after I heard of Gyngell’s passing, I found myself at one of New York’s most admired restaurants, a rarity for its seasonality and for being run by three extraordinary young women. On the menu was a layered radicchio salad, a study in bitterness and colour arranged with precision. They call it a “Skye salad”. They had never worked with her. They were simply cooking in the language she helped write.
Skye Gyngell was a great original. She created a vocabulary of beauty, purity and integrity in her food that travelled far beyond Britain. Her legacy endures in every dish that feels perfectly of its moment: seasonal, honest, surprising, painterly. She couldn’t help but be Australian – her instinct, her sense of colour and her agenda-setting food – but what she created belongs to the world.
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David Prior is the founder of the New York-based travel company Prior and the former contributing international editor of Condé Nast Traveler
