xi 25
Skye Gyngell
I don’t much like Christmas.
Since I set the studio up, our Christmas party has been dinner at Spring restaurant in Somerset House, the former HMRC complex designed by William Chambers on the Thames alongside Waterloo Bridge, the best bridge in London (it is on the inside bend; crossing it with London laid out before you always makes me smile in awe.)
We go at my insistence because Spring never feels like winter: it is always spring there: bright, sunny, new, optimistic, the optimism and good cheer of the New World; none of the stuffiness of the old (my least favourite place, that). Every meal there is memorable and joyful.
Returning one New Year to the studio, my then colleague Zoë asked assertively: Did you read the Spring newsletter? I don’t read about food much. Asked the day after a dinner Did you have a good meal? I might say Yes, it was wonderful, but asked What did you have? the answer Maybe it was fish…? I remember the atmosphere, if it was a happy occasion, before I remember the food. Except at Spring. I can still taste certain dishes: the crab salad, a lemon pasta, a rhubarb tart. If my buildings were food, God how I’d love, aspire, for them to be Skye’s.
Anyway, Zoë asked if I’d seen the newsletter. I hadn’t. She had printed it out. Skye was hosting a cooking course at a villa in Sicily in late March. “I think you should go. I think you need a holiday”. I figured the trip would be self-selecting, and against all instinct, I picked up the phone and booked a place, a room overlooking Etna.Three months later I was standing in the salone of what turned out to be the most wonderful villa in Sicily, waiting to meet my fellow cookery students. The first to come down was Anna, who it turned out lived up the road from me in London and within a minute was confirmed as a fellow vintage 911 owner. Anna and I now are like brother and sister; it is inconceivable that we couldn’t have met. But each of us was squarely outside our comfort zone. An arranged trip. With excursions.
At dinner that night I sat next to Catherine, stage name Badomi di Cesare and half Sicilian who had had a cabaret act on Broadway in the ‘80s until a man in the audience had understandably fallen in love with her (as I did that night) and taken her around the world: “He was a prince of a man”. Love and then grief had followed. I had never known such openness. Jon and Marco whose house it was became firm friends. I wrote part of my book in their house. (If this sounds a bit luvvy I’m sorry it was and is).
Anna and I were the naughty kids at the back of the MPV subverting the trip to the butchers to learn instead how to deep fry zucchini flowers (a much more useful life skill). Badomi stayed in bed in the mornings.
One morning at class in the kitchen I was at the back feeling a fraud knowing it would probably never matter if my butter was salted or unsalted, just watching Skye, Rose Ashby the head chef (sister of designer Sophie who I would later work alongside) and Sarah Johnson, head pastry chef, the three of them improbably and implausibly there to teach the just eight of us students.
As I stood at the back, interested but ultimately uninvolved in the butter, just watching the chefs interact, I found myself welling-up (quiet beauty combined with greatness has this effect on me), thankfully unseen by the others. The grace of the interaction between Skye, Rose and Sarah was un-manning. Skye would be about to ask for olive oil and it would be passed into her hand before she spoke. Sarah would whisk a cake mixture with the gentleness of an angel as Rose poured oil in for her. I don’t know now what they were making, but I remember wishing they could be making the world, that all human interaction could be this elegant, this inspired, this beautiful.
Over the years I knew Skye lightly since, this desire has become increasingly felt and needed. God, how we need Skye‘s beauty, and how utterly cruel and wrong that it has been taken from this planet, her earth. Skye was open, fun and didn’t suffer from the boredom of discretion. Once you were in, Skye was intoxicatingly (for someone who didn’t drink) open, refreshingly so, like one of the apple bellinis at the top of her menus.
Years later, Skye and I talked about creating a glass restaurant in a farmyard, for diners to sit down in the soil amongst the produce of her food. Our worlds met.
Another anecdote from Sicily: Skye spoke about knowing where each lemon used at Spring had grown, where each olive tree that had produced the oil was, and when, and of writing to Jane Scotter at Fern Verrow farm and suggesting that instead of telling her what produce Spring needed for its dishes that Skye would create dishes to suit Jane’s produce, and the tears of gratitude that that had elicited.
The same tears that I feel now.
What beauty Skye made and left.
Happy Christmas (I do mean that).
Skye Gyngell 1963 – 2025.