Not many people walk into an empty pub kitchen and think, “I belong here.” But not many people are like Anna Haugh. “There was no reason for it to feel right, but it just did. It felt like a real Eureka moment,” she says, of the moment she first realised she wanted to cook. Twenty-five years on and a few miles across the Irish Sea, we’re sitting in the MasterChef judge and Saturday Kitchen regular’s Chelsea-based restaurant, Myrtle, on the publication day of her debut cookbook, Cooking With Anna. Today, though, her mind is on a life in restaurants — and its highs and lows, particularly as a woman.
Owning her own modern Irish establishment is a far cry from what Haugh had envisioned for herself when working at fine dining establishments like Phil Howard’s the Square and Shane Osborn’s version of Pied à Terre. “I never even imagined being a head chef, I just couldn’t,” she says, as staff reset tables after a busy lunch service. “I was always afraid to imagine anything too big [for myself] because I had to be realistic. There aren’t as many success stories of women, I wasn’t seeing myself reflected.”
