Where the Chefs Eat: Diana Henry’s favourite tables in London

Where the Chefs Eat asks your favourite chefs for their top restaurants in cities across the world. For this edition, we speak with Diana Henry.

“Two of the most alluring spices are saffron and cardamon: cardamon because its flavour is so elusive – the dishes it flavours feel as if a ghost has walked through them – saffron for those blood-red threads that turn whole platters of food into gold, bleeding yolk-yellow streaks over creamy chicken and milky white yoghurt.” So writes Diana Henry. And I don’t know about you, but for me, that stunning simulation of language makes food poetry, elevating simple ingredients to an almost ethereal level.

Diana Henry is a James Beard Award winner and author, most recently publishing 52 essays in Around the Table. She is a woman and a writer I’ve long admired. Diana wrote that “figs, quince, pomegranates, and dates are fruits that could turn a girl’s head. Elusive, romantic, and erotic, they conjure up visions of hot sun, starry skies and, let’s be honest, sex. Figs are the sexiest of the lot.” What’s not to love? And I was even more impressed when I discovered that she’d never actually planned a life as a food writer. I met with her for lunch recently to learn more about her life and found her honesty and sense of humour, Irish accent, and general joie de vivre as alluring as her written work. She is one-of-a-kind and her latest book is a stunning summary of her life, her experiences as a cook and a mother, and her travels around the world.

“The first essay [in Around the Table] is set when I first moved to London. And that is my story,” she tells me with trademark directness. “The early works really show me just learning the world. And I can’t believe that I’ve ended up with the life that I have. I idolised Claudia Roden, and to think that now I’m friends with her and I go and drink whiskey with her? It’s amazing.” Born in Northern Ireland against the backdrop of the troubles that began in 1968, Diana fell madly in love with the antithesis of what she found as a teenage exchange student in France. “I think my love affair began as a reaction against all that because it was grey. It was unrelentingly bleak. But it was also a very difficult time,” she tells me. “I lived north of Belfast, in a little seaside place, so you’d think I’d be okay, but as a kid, I knew what the different types of bombs were. We got used to being searched every time we went into the city centre and soldiers being everywhere and knowing that something bad could happen every day. Still, you just got used to it.” The sunflower fields of Provence, she explains, “were a welcome respite, and there were things that just didn’t feel real to me growing up, like pomegranate seeds. I remember reading about ratatouille and having no sense in my head of what it could taste like.” A move to London opened unimaginable culinary doors to her: “I would walk down the Edgware Road, and it felt like the entire world was there. I can still vividly remember the first time I had Vietnamese food. And the first time I had Ethiopian food sat on the floor out of an edible bowl.”

Diana tells me of how her children’s father left when her youngest son, Gillies, was just one, and the house was full of builders. “It was a really hard time.” She had built an incredibly successful career in television, producing Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall in TV Dinners, amongst many others, and forging an enviable career. But she had children, and “it sounds terrible, but I found myself in a place where I just didn’t care anymore. I just wanted to get home to [my eldest son] Ted. I knew in that moment I needed a new career because I just lost it, and I went into a sort of period of grief after that. I’d spent such a long time trying to get to that position in television, and I had no backup.”