At just after nine one Friday spring morning, Angela Hartnett’s basement kitchen in her beautiful, chaotic, Georgian terraced house near London’s Spitalfields Market is still blinking itself awake. Hartnett, in leggings and an old sweatshirt, has some coffee on the stove and a pile of croissants on the tiny kitchen table surrounded by mismatched chairs that have moved houses with her. The one worktop is piled with a jumble of pots and dishes and books and letters.
Hartnett’s husband, Neil Borthwick, is wandering in and out in his cycling kit, moaning about the tube strike and getting ready to head to his job as chef at the upstairs restaurant at the French House in Soho. Hartnett is chatting to me and checking her emails, and they are both trying to keep their dog, Betty, in check. There’s an Aga, which they use for heating rather than cooking, and a temporary fridge in one corner, a replacement for a fancier one that broke down in the first lockdown, beside a back window that looks out to a high-walled garden full of shady greenery. Sometimes, Borthwick says, they think of extending down here – it feels pretty crowded with even the three of us – or at least adding another work surface, but you doubt this plan is particularly urgent. Having both spent all their working lives in far smarter kitchens than this – they met at Gordon Ramsay’s the Connaught, where Hartnett won a Michelin star and Borthwick was her brilliant junior – it’s now where they come together to relax.
