From the moment she stepped into the spotlight, the Duchess of Sussex has shown herself to be full of surprises, but the thing that most impressed Clare Smyth, a British chef, was her knife skills. “She’s pretty good at filleting a fish,” says Smyth, who runs Core, a three-Michelin-starred restaurant in Notting Hill, west London.
Smyth is a guest in the new series of the duchess’s Netflix show, With Love, Meghan. The second instalment, where the duchess is joined by “beloved friends for hands-on adventures filled with laughter” airs on Tuesday. “Meghan is actually really good at cooking and she’s creative, with a good palate,” says Smyth, who teaches her how to make a “very healthy poached halibut with seasonal vegetables and bone broth” in a forthcoming episode.
Smyth, 46, is softly spoken, extremely polite and wary of saying the wrong thing. When we meet at Core — a stylish dining room with warmly lit bookcases and large floral arrangements — it’s just over an hour before dinner service and Smyth is dressed in crisp fitted chef whites, with immaculate make-up and a neat ponytail. She keeps one eye on me as we speak and the other on her team as they prepare for the evening’s guests.
VICKI COUCHMAN FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
Smyth’s relationship with Meghan goes back several years. The duchess and duke were regulars at Core before Megxit and they hired her to cook for 200 guests at their private wedding reception at Frogmore House in Windsor. Does she consider Meghan and Harry to be friends? “Yeah, I would do … I’ve known them for a long time,” she says, after some careful thought and another long pause. “We stay in contact.” Meghan “personally reached out” to ask her to be on the Netflix show “right from the beginning, but we couldn’t get the timings to work”. Eventually, she flew to California late last year.
“The idea was to teach Meghan how to do fine dining and what goes into that, rather than just something you can make at home,” she says. They went to the fish market to buy fresh halibut and picked loads of herbs and vegetables from the Sussexes’ garden in Montecito. “It was about showing her that level of detail and giving her tips on presentation and skills … she was really interested in that,” Smyth says. Meghan also wanted to recreate Smyth’s speciality sourdough recipe served at Core that the duchess “loves” — but Smyth had to explain that it used a 20-year-old starter. “I told her the process would be too long for the show,” Smyth says, so they made Parker House bread rolls, another Core speciality, instead.
If fine dining finesse is what the duchess is after, there’s no one better to learn from than Smyth. She left her family’s potato farm in Co Antrim aged 16 and moved to Surrey to take up an apprenticeship at Grayshott Hall and later became a protégée of Gordon Ramsay. She now lives in Wandsworth, southwest London, with her husband and West Highland terrier — “literally just around the corner from Gordon”.
Gordon Ramsay called Smyth “one of the greatest chefs to have graced my kitchen”
Her former boss (now a “very good friend”), initially told her she “wouldn’t last a week” when he hired her as a chef de partie at his restaurant in Chelsea in 2002. But by 2007 — aged 29 — Smyth was head chef, and Ramsay went on to describe her as “one of the greatest chefs to have graced my kitchen”.
He famously called her the “Margaret Thatcher of cooking”. Not because she had an Iron Lady persona but “because I was quite reserved”, she says. “Gordon said Margaret Thatcher was a shy young woman once but she was taught how to run a country. He said he would teach me how to be a leader and he did.”
Within a year of opening, Core received two Michelin stars and was awarded another in 2021, making Smyth the first British woman to hold three of the fine dining accolades. She is grateful for the recognition, but stresses that her “guests, the people we look after” are who really matter. Those guests include Adele, Ed Sheeran and the Beckhams, who are such huge fans (“they love our signature dishes”) that David held his star-studded 50th birthday dinner there in May.
“They just love food, especially David. He is very appreciative of nice food and nice wine and always comes to try our tasting menus,” Smyth says.
The Beckhams lived it up at Core in May
But it’s her relationship with the Sussexes that has thrust her into the limelight. At the time of their wedding, it was widely reported that Smyth cooked wagyu beef burgers for them. It is a rumour that clearly irks her. “It wouldn’t take a lot to figure out that we probably didn’t cook burgers,” she says, rolling her eyes and gesturing around the 54-seat dining room.
It is a fair point. Core is not a burger and chips sort of place, in cuisine or price — the seasonal tasting menu is £265 per person (or £255 for the classic), plus an extra £175 each for the wine pairing. At the wedding, she actually served some of Core’s signature dishes including “potato and roe”, a jacket potato that takes 25 hours to prepare (24 of it for marinating), and roast chicken with a twist — a nod to Harry’s proposal, which apparently took place while he and Meghan were roasting a chicken on a cosy night in.
Smyth compares running the kitchen for the event to “a Formula One pit lane because things need to run like clockwork and you don’t have any other option but to keep your cool”. If she has a lower profile than other top-tier chefs, that is a deliberate choice. She “dips in and out” of appearing on television but lets slip that she appears in the current series of the BBC’s MasterChef as a judge in the final episode.
The BBC1 flagship cooking show was hit by scandal last year when one host, Gregg Wallace, was sacked after allegations of inappropriate touching and sexual comments. Then last month his co-star, John Torode, was fired when an independent report upheld a complaint for use of racial language. Both have denied the allegations.
“I haven’t actually seen what he did to be honest,” Smyth says quickly, when I ask what she thinks of Torode’s dismissal. “Was it an inappropriate comment? It’s always one scandal after another … but it’s hard isn’t it, for a show that’s been on for such a long time.”
Smyth is so uncomfortable discussing MasterChef that it is unclear how she will cope with appearing on a programme as widely mocked as With Love, Meghan. The first series was subject to heavy criticism when it aired in March, with critics describing it as boring, vapid and “an exercise in narcissism”. The line-up of guests for the second series, which includes Chrissy Teigen, the American model turned celebrity chef, has been labelled “underwhelming”. “I’m not bothered about that at all,” shrugs Smyth. “It’s a show that’s quite sweet and nice … It’s easygoing and lighthearted.”
For now, Smyth is too busy opening new restaurants to worry about television, with plans for a bistro and an upmarket seafood restaurant at Admiralty Arch in central London, part of the processional route to Buckingham Palace. She claims to be excited about the Netflix show but judging by the way her eyes widen when we talk about it, nothing is as exciting to her as her new restaurant. “Having a really iconic building in London is something that I’ve always wanted to achieve,” she says. “Every major event that happens in the city goes through that archway. I can’t wait.”