By:
Chris Madigan
Allegra McEvedy
Allegra is a co-founder of LEON, the award-winning, healthy, fast-food restaurant group. Chris Madigan talks to her about work and being gay.
"the angst and the passion and the love really got me going"
Allegra McEvedy took a while to find her way in her career. She was 17 when she realised she was gay – "the clouds roll back and you realise, oh that's what it's all about, having tried to snog boys for a few years and not really enjoyed it". The same year, her mother died and she went off the rails – expelled from her London public school, kicking around mainly having fun. At 21, her father suggested she take her love of food and playing host and open a restaurant. After a Cordon Bleu course, she worked in kitchens including the River Café, gastro pub the Cow and the Groucho Club ("I was fired for shagging a barmaid in the shower before service – after service they probably wouldn't have minded").
What should have been a career highlight – running Robert De Niro's New York restaurant Tribeca Bar & Grill – made her realise that show-off cooking wasn't what she wanted to do. "I want to bring the best food to the most people." On her return to the UK, she set up a "two courses for a fiver" lunch at a Notting Hill community centre. Then, after a stint at the Institute of Contemporary Arts venue, where she met her future wife Susi, she and two business partners started the healthy fast food restaurant chain Leon, feeding 20,000 people a day and counting...
How did people you knew from public school react when you said you were going to be a chef?
St Paul's produced politicians and high-flyers in business. My friends had gone to Oxford, Cambidge or other top universities, and were going on to be lawyers or doctors, and at that time being a chef was one up from being a scullery maid, so they said, "You're going to do what?!" Things have changed a lot. Marco-Pierre White's book White Heat came out in 1990, and the bad boy glamour, the angst and the passion and the love really got me going. And it changed the image of the job for people.
Can kitchens be a bit daunting if you're not a macho, rampantly heterosexual, sweary bloke?
Top kitchens tend to be macho and stroppy, but they're also a massive buzz. A lot of women – because of the hours, the physical demands, or the stick – either say, it’s not for me. Or become pastry chefs, where you're not in the fireball of the main kitchen, you're responsible for your own schedule. But I wanted the fire and brimstone. Whatever you're like, there's a kitchen out there to suit you. If you want to be the big bad boy, there are a lot of those out there; if you want to get your head down and make nice food, there are kitchens like that; and there are jobs where you can go in, do your hours and not give a toss in catering.
With all that football team-style aggression and banter, one would imagine there is a lot of homophobia in the kitchen.
There's always homophobia to some degree in the world, either in your face or behind your back, and if I've annoyed people, being gay is something they'll pick on to hit back with. But the kitchen is a good cross-section of life – there are all sorts of people there, including plenty of gay people. The worst trouble I've had was when I was brought in to run Robert De Niro's restaurant – I spent most of the first week being locked in the walk-in freezer. Not only was I gay, but I was English, younger than all of them, one of only two women in the 60-strong male, mainly Latino brigade – and I'd been brought in above them. But you come out and thwack them with a frozen side of mutton.
How does cooking at home work for a chef? Is it a busman's holiday?
Well, I do more now, because I spend less time in restaurant kitchens and more time writing columns and books, or designing menus. My wife eats well. Last week I was working on my next book and I made 24 soups, so we're still working through them. I hate waste – I have two fridges (one a double) full of food and I have to find room for 17 types of feta for a tasting.
Does your wife ever cook?
About once a month she does breakfast at the weekend. She's half-American, so it tends to involve muffins, bacon and maple syrup. And for the first time in four years, she's made me supper recently – twice in a month, in fact.
The food at Leon and in your books is very much healthy eating. What's your utterly inorganic, hydrogenated guilty pleasure?
We all have our naughty bits. I'll have fish'n'chips once every three months – not gastro pub fish and chips, but from a proper chippie. I'll have a crap burger twice a year. I've never had a sweet tooth though.
You got married in 2007. As someone who likes to be in charge, was it hard to let someone else cater your wedding?
Well, Heston Blumenthal did the canapes on the boat on the Thames – 600 Scotch quail's eggs, please. But for the main shebang, I designed the menu and wrote all the recipes. I know, control freak. I was banned from actually going in the kitchen though. It was a trolley dolly theme – guys with trolleys with sides of beef on them, and cigarette girls with pork pies etc.
And what was your wife doing?
Susi was just as bad controlling the front-of-house – you see, we met when she was running events at the ICA, where I was cooking, for things like the Pet Shop Boys' Trafalgar Square concert and Matt Lucas's engagement party. She spent hours laying one table, so that they could copy it for all the others.
How pleased were you the law changed so you could get married?
I'd always felt like I wanted to get married. In the years when I was shagging around, searching for my Susi, I'd always said that when I found the right girl, we'd go to Norway and get married. So when the law passed here, I was delighted I could get married at home, but other than that I didn't feel anything other than, well, that's right.
So what's the next thing to fight for?
We've got to work on the Church of England. It always annoyed me that I wouldn't be allowed to get married in church like my sister did. My church is important to me – I've been going since I was young, my mum's funeral was there, my sister's kids were christened there. But I was very lucky: our lovely vicar actually allowed us to have a wedding service in church as well as the town hall legal thing. But so many other gay Christians lose out.
But do you generally feel that British society is close to equality? How do you feel when you hear people saying, "I haven't got a problem with gays"
There's still a pervasive prejudice. I drink in a pub where the blokes know me and would be protective of me if anyone had a go, but they refer to gay men as "tailgunners" and so on. I know what you mean about treating gay people as people to be tolerated, but it's better than not saying they don't have a problem with us.
First job: Door-to-door rip-off perfume saleswoman
Worst job: That one
First job in catering: Work experience in a greasy spoon – I loved it
Worst job in catering: A pub in Mayfair – they did terrible things with food
Favourite place to sit with a coffee and your laptop: Baker & Spice café in Chelsea (47 Denyer St, London SW3)
Favourite pub: The Anglesea Arms, Chelsea (15 Selwood Terrace, London SW7)
Favourite restaurant for a treat: Galvin at Windows (The Hilton, Park Lane, London W1)
Favourite restaurant for a bite: Our local Syrian restaurant, Abu Zaad (29 Uxbridge Road, London W12)
Where would you go to escape London: New York or Amsterdam – I'm very much a city girl
What country's food excites you most? Spain – great ingredients and so varied, I like the Moorish influence
If you had no tastebuds, what job would you do? Taxi driver – I know all London's backstreets
