In Season for 40 Years by Sally Clarke: The most important woman in Lucian Freud's life...or at least the one who kept him fed
- Constance Craig Smith reviews Sally Clarke's new book which celebrates the 40th anniversary of her restaurant, Clarkes
IN SEASON FOR 40 YEARS by Sally Clarke (Sally Clarke £30, 192pp)
In Season for 40 years is available now
If anyone was born to be a chef, it is surely Sally Clarke. As a child, she was in charge of making the Sunday lunch while the rest of her family played golf or gardened.
Her idea of the perfect birthday party was having her friends over and spending the whole day cooking with them.
By 1984, aged 30, she had opened her own restaurant, Clarke’s, in west London, having somehow persuaded a bank manager in Guildford to give her a large loan (which she repaid within a year).
Her concept for the restaurant sounded crazy: like the roadside cafes in France which she adored, customers were to be offered a no-choice menu which changed every day, with all the food made from scratch from the freshest ingredients.
‘My family and friends were understandably nervous for me,’ she admits. Yet, against all the odds, Clarke’s was an instant hit.
Customers included Jerry Hall, Mick Jagger, Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman and Princess Margaret. Princess Diana ate there, though all she asked for was a banana. It was only 15 years ago that Clarke relented on the no-choice menu, and now there’s a choice of four or five starters and main courses.
TV presenter Anne Robinson calls her ‘the best chef you’ve never heard of’, because Clarke has no interest in being a celebrity chef. Nigella Lawson, who has been going to Clarke’s since it first opened, praises the food as ‘pitch perfect, unpretentious, precise’, while admitting that she used to find Clarke herself rather terrifying.
One of the restaurant’s most loyal customers was the artist Lucian Freud.
He used Clarke’s as a place to have meetings, ate breakfast there almost every day, often stayed on for lunch and sometimes returned for dinner.
‘Sally was instrumental in keeping him alive and well for as long as he lived,’ his niece Emma Freud says. Clarke sat for the final head and shoulders portrait that he completed before his death.
There are chapters on the people who have made the restaurant what it is, from the staff, suppliers and clients to Clarke’s formidable 96-year-old mother, who still sends up boxes of herbs from her garden.
For each month of the year, there’s one of Clarke’s simple yet delicious seasonal recipes – rhubarb baked with orange and sweet wine (February), a wedge of pumpkin roasted with mushrooms, garlic and rosemary (October) and a decadent Mont Blanc pudding of chestnuts, meringue and soured cream (November).
In the office: Sally Clarke (right) in her restaurant Clarkes
There is, of course, no mention of the fearsome price of eating at Clarke’s (a veal chop, for instance, will set you back £55) but this is an unexpectedly charming book which sportingly includes some of the negative reviews Clarke has received over the years.
In 1989, a diner wrote to complain that the food was ‘nicely presented but this was Nouvelle Cuisine at its worst’.
A visitor from South Africa fulminated that he’d had the worst meal of his life at Clarke’s: ‘I have never paid so much for so much garbage in my life, and that includes places like Calcutta and Port Said.’
Although her staff talk fondly of her warmth and sense of fun, Clarke comes across as a rather elusive figure who doesn’t give much away about herself, but she must surely take pride in having inspired several generations of British chefs, particularly women chefs.
Why has her restaurant thrived for so long? After all, scores of highly praised restaurants have gone under in the 40 years that Clarke’s has been in business.
The actress Patricia Hodge praises the ‘ambrosial food’, but says the restaurant’s real secret is that ‘there are some places that make one feel better just by walking through the front door. Sally’s is that, and so much more.'
