The Bocuse d’Or — known as “the Olympics of cooking” — has been running for almost four decades, with the UK battling against 23 countries every other year for culinary supremacy.
The spotlight has been renewed this month following the release of We Live in Time, the decade-spanning romance starring Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield. In the film, Pugh's final ranking is never revealed — but Clare Smyth, president of Team UK, is hoping this weekend's Lyon showdown will produce a more definitive result.
I meet Smyth, the first and only female British chef to be awarded three Michelin stars (only four others globally are as decorated) at her defining Notting Hill restaurant, Core. We are in the late-afternoon lull between lunch and dinner; the cocktail lounge, deep velvet green and burnished bronze, awash with squiffy chatter between chaps bemoaning their legal skirmishes (“at least I turned up to court in a jacket that fit, unlike the policeman”) and one guest demanding an elaborate tipple she’s found online featuring cherry tomatoes.
The 47-year-old has been involved with the two-day contest, named after fêted French chef Paul Bocuse, for more than two decades. “It’s like a sport,” she says of the five-and-a-half hours chefs spend cooking in front of 1,000 fans (British supporters are prone to decibel-busting renditions of Rule Britannia), and a 24-chef jury that has previously included the likes of Heston Blumenthal, Ferran Adrià and Wolfgang Puck.
“All the best chefs in the world are literally there, tasting and scrutinising every move, so the pressure is immense,” Smyth says. Part-cookery, part-performance art, the winner scoops not only a €20,000 prize, but perhaps more importantly, pole position on the global culinary stage.
Despite regular missives from other nations about the quality of British food, Smyth, who was made an MBE in 2013 and catered for Prince Harry’s wedding, is confident that we have no point to prove. “We punch well, well, above our weight in the world of gastronomy, and that team shows the world just how strong we are,” she says of this year’s competitors: chef Tom Phillips (Restaurant Story), commis Harry van Lierop (the Ledbury) and coach Ian Musgrave (the Ritz). As starry establishments go, you’d be hard-pressed to outdo that list, though the balance, as ever, is not quite even.
Around six per cent of Michelin-starred restaurants are led by women, while 18 per cent of kitchen staff in the UK are female. At Core, that rises to about half, “but I always find the females need more encouragement, just to step forward and say, ‘I want to take this on.’ So sometimes they just need a little bit more support, and maybe it's because there aren't as many other females competing, they don't feel as confident to step out.”
We punch well, well, above our weight in the world of gastronomy
A look at the glass-fronted kitchen behind us suggests the kind of quiet that would have once been unthinkable; the workspace as calm and perfectly turned-out as Smyth herself. She feels the old days of screaming-and-swearing-style leadership (made famous by the likes of her mentor, Gordon Ramsay); the ultra-late nights, sex and drug misuse, have “changed a huge amount. The difference in the atmosphere in the kitchen because of the balance and diversity, it's just transformed completely. The environment that people think [of]; testosterone-fuelled, pressured” — is not one she recognises any longer. In kitchens now, she feels, “people are people, and they're able to be who they are.”
That may be the case at Core; elsewhere, it seems there is work to be done. I tell Smyth that over the past year I have spoken with top-level female chefs across the capital who have been approached by junior women sharing “soul-destroying” stories from sexual misconduct to being burnt with scalding pans. “I just find that really, really hard to hear,” Smyth says. “I would just encourage anyone that is in that environment to just absolutely get out of it.”
She knows that being a female chef comes with a set of expectations, no matter how irrelevant gender feels to the work at hand. When she was put in charge of Restaurant Gordon Ramsay aged 28 — the first female chef in the UK to lead a three-star kitchen — “I got a lot of attention as being the first woman. And that felt like an awful lot of pressure,” she reflects. “I was thinking, God, if I lose [a star], how's that going to look for women?” The association was frustrating, because “I wasn't thinking like that. I was just thinking, I wanted to be the best that I can be.”
Time and accolades have made her more comfortable in her own skin. “You get to be yourself; you get to be feminine,” she says of how her cheffing style has developed, in a world where that once might have been a dirty word. “That's the most important thing. It's not trying to fill a man's shoes.”
Smyth is rightly proud of being among the small generation of female chefs who “really broke through.” Yet incoming budget changes due to take effect come April 1 are threatening more roadblocks after years of Covid and Brexit-induced turmoil. The imminent rise in employers’ national insurance contributions will cost £3bn, according to UKHospitality, while between October and November — the first month following the Budget announcement — industry insolvencies rose by 29 per cent. Between last May and the 12 months prior, 20 per cent of hospitality firms were forced to shutter.
Smyth admits that she is in a rarefied “bubble” at Core, whose 54 seats (there are 67 staff) are perma-booked. But “it's quite scary what's happening around,” she says of the wider January downturn, and the now all-too-often announcements that top chefs are closing their doors. Prices “just continue to go up and up. And it's going to reach a certain level with people's pockets where they think, ‘I can't afford to pay that right now.’” People will still celebrate a special occasion at Core et al, but “the bulk in the middle really suffers.”
The Government is doing little to ease the pain — a touchpoint for Smyth, given the £93bn annual contribution hospitality makes to the UK economy. “I don't think they're doing anything, to be honest.… it seems to be very much ‘suck it up and deal with it’ now. We're just going to raise your national insurance. We're just going to put your business rates up again. We're just going to do that. And you've just got to deal with it, which is why we can see the outcome of lots of businesses having to close. It's just not sustainable.”
She is doing her part to boost the industry. In the summer, Smyth will open a third restaurant (she launched her second, Oncore, in Sydney, in 2021); a fourth is in the works. Lest anyone accuse her of not having enough on her plate, there will also be a pop-up at the Cheltenham Festival, a Team UK Bocuse d’Or event at Fortnum & Mason next month, and of course, Lyon.
Might the UK on the cusp of its inaugural victory? “If I can pick a position that I want them to come in, it's obviously first,” she says, though “I realise that everything in life that's really hard and worth doing is incredibly difficult.” Smyth, no doubt, is up for the challenge.
