Skye gyngell biography of michael

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My lightbulb moment: Chef Skye Gyngell on how she realised her dreams lay in the kitchen while whipping up mayonnaise

Skye Gyngell, 53, is head chef at Spring, her restaurant at Somerset House. She lives in London and has two daughters, Holly, 27, and Evie, 20.

I grew up in the suburbs of Sydney, where everyone knew everyone’s business, yet rarely talked openly about their problems. I studied law out of a sense of duty to my father, who was desperate for one of his children to follow in his footsteps at Sydney University. But I knew I didn’t want to be a lawyer.

In 1981, I took a student job washing up at a Sydney restaurant — and it was here, up to my elbows in suds, that I suddenly felt all my self-doubt start to fall away.

Australian chef Skye Gyngell, 53, studied to be a lawyer but realised she was happier being a chef, and her lightbulb moment came while whipping up mayonnaise in a Sydney kitchen

All day, I’d watch the head cook, an Australian Lebanese woman called Layla Sorfie, work what seemed to me pure magic. Boning duck; whipping up delicate sauces with spices I’d never seen before; creating puff pastry with the skill of a French patissier.

Layla’s joy in food, and passion for ingredients was obvious even to the shy girl at the sink.

One day, she asked me

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Skye Gyngell

Cooking with the seasons, championing produce over everything else, keeping things simple on the plate – there are dozens of chefs now following this mantra in restaurants across the UK. But one of the first to walk this path was Australian-born Skye Gyngell, someone who now encapsulates this zero-waste, ingredient-led style of cooking at her beautiful London restaurant Spring.

Growing up in 1970s Sydney meant Skye was brought up amongst a variety of food cultures, eating out every weekend at the many Korean, Vietnamese, Lebanese, Greek and Italian restaurants set up by immigrants to the city. While her family were very food-focused (‘they followed a macrobiotic way of eating, which was quite big in the ‘70s’), it wasn’t until she got a job washing up in a charcutier whilst studying for a law degree at university that Skye started to really fall in love with cooking. ‘There was this amazing woman there who’d studied in France,’ she says. ‘She taught me how to make mayonnaise, stock, pies, things like that, and after a year at university I moved to Paris to do a cookery course before spending two years cooking in a two-starred restaurant called Dodin-Bouffant.’

After three years in Paris with a strong understanding of classical cooking under her belt, Skye moved