The pioneering chef Skye Gyngell, who has died of Merkel cell carcinoma, a rare skin cancer, aged 62, was the first Australian woman to win a Michelin star, an early supporter of the slow food movement, and a champion of charities such as StreetSmart and the Felix Project.
Gyngell was a quiet radical. She came to public attention when she opened the Petersham Nurseries Café in south-west London in 2004. Until that point, she had been honing her own distinctive cooking personality that emphasised the quality of ingredients and the simplicity of their treatment and presentation. Her dishes were light, graceful and deceptively simple, but were founded on a serious understanding of how flavours and textures worked together, sometimes in surprising ways.
She had already built a reputation as a chef, cooking for such private clients as Nigella Lawson, Charles Saatchi, Madonna and Guy Ritchie. At the same time she served as food editor at Vogue magazine until 2003.
Gyngell’s friends, Francesco and Gael Boglione, had bought Petersham House, a Queen Anne villa on the River Thames just outside Richmond. In 2004 they asked her to run the cafe that was part of the garden centre in the grounds. She fell in love at first sight and agreed to cook there.
Gyngell meant to stay for just a few months but ended up being there for eight years. By 2005, it had won the Time Out award for best alfresco dining, with a Tatler award for most original restaurant the year after. In 2010 the Good Food Guide said of it: “There’s no doubting the allure of this secret, horticulturally minded oasis with attitude.”
In 2011 the Petersham Nurseries Café was awarded a Michelin star. As far as Gyngell was concerned this was a mixed blessing. On the one hand she was delighted by the recognition; on the other it raised the expectations of the customers who flooded in as a consequence. Gyngell left the next year.
She wasn’t out of the kitchen for long. In November 2014 she opened a restaurant amid the classical grandeur of Somerset House in central London. A far cry from the refined rusticity of Petersham Nurseries Café, it was a place of calm order and polished restraint, with interior design by Skye’s sister Briony. The new restaurant was called Spring.
Her reputation continued to grow. She became culinary director of Heckfield Place, a hotel in Hampshire, where she joined forces with her longtime collaborator, the farmer Jane Scotter. This gave her the chance to further develop her passion for ingredients. She helped create a hotel farm where she and Scotter grew rare fruit and vegetables, built up a working dairy, and planted orchards and flowers. Heckfield Place was in many respects the apotheosis of her vision as a chef.
Gyngell was born in Sydney, Australia, the daughter of Bruce Gyngell, a TV executive who was managing director of TV-am in the UK between 1984 and 1992, and Ann Barr, an interior decorator. Food was central to family life, albeit in an unusual manner. As Gyngell said later, they “followed a macrobiotic way of eating [which favours locally grown vegetables, fruit and pulses over animal products], which was quite big in the 70s”. She recalled: “We had always had a healthy diet eating fish and salads, but suddenly it became all about umeboshi plums, agar agar and 60% grain intake, and olive oil was completely banned. We spent a lot of time secretly eating away from home and saving our pocket money to buy sweets.”
Gyngell studied law at Sydney University. While there, she had her first experience of the restaurant world, washing up at a deli. She was inspired by the cook there, “a wonderful Lebanese woman called Layla Sorfie” who “taught me how to make mayonnaise, stock, pies, things like that”. Aged 19, she moved to Paris and did a course at Anne Willan’s La Varenne cookery school, before spending two years working at the Michelin-starred restaurant Dodin-Bouffant, where she absorbed the techniques and principles of classic French cookery.
After three years in Paris, she moved to London and went to work at the Dorchester under Anton Mosimann. By this time Gyngell had already begun to practise a fresher, less formal style of cooking, and the regimented style of a huge hotel kitchen did not appeal to her. She left after a year and joined Fergus and Margot Henderson at the French House in Soho. The Hendersons were among those who were revolutionising British cooking at the time. They were doing away with the complexity, ornamentation and rich saucing, and serving simpler, stripped-back dishes that focused on fundamental flavours and the quality of the ingredients, and exploring novel combinations. This was much more in keeping with Gyngell’s approach.
Her life was not without difficulties. She suffered low self-esteem as a child, and later spoke about her drug and drink addiction that began in Sydney when she was a teenager, and continued for 20 years until the death of her father in 2000.
Although well-connected in the media, she never developed a television career. She did write four well-regarded cookery books.
Gyngell’s food may have seemed effortless and delicate, but she had a determination that carried her through adversity. In the kitchen she was known as a demanding, meticulous craftsman, encouraging her staff to emulate her own high standards. She also had a natural modesty, and was driven by passion rather than ego – above all, she was a chef who loved to cook.
In 1989 Gyngell married Thomas Gore, with whom she had a daughter, Holly. The couple divorced in 1996. She had a second daughter, Evie, from a relationship with James Henderson. She is survived by her daughters and her siblings, David and Briony.