Carla Tomasi, who has died aged 70, belonged to a generation of chefs, among them Alastair Little, Simon Hopkinson, Antony Worrall Thompson and Rowley Leigh, who helped shape the gastronomic geography of London in the 1980s.
She became head chef of Frith’s, in Frith Street, Soho, early in that decade and, not long after, took over the restaurant altogether. This was a time when few restaurants were run, let alone owned, by women. However, Sally Clarke (at Clarke’s), Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray (at the River Café) and Juliet Peston (at Alastair Little) were successfully challenging male domination. Like these redoubtable pioneers, Tomasi showed passion, resolve and determination – her colleague and friend Jeremy Lee described her as “distinctly feisty”.
In later years, having returned to her native Italy, Tomasi became a point of reference for anyone travelling to Rome to learn about where to shop and how to cook. They came to her home and to the classes she gave in Alice Adams’s much loved Latteria studio in the Trastevere district of the city. Sarah Roberts, who recruited her as one of the cooks giving the courses and gourmet masterclasses offered by the travel company Tasting Places, remembers Tomasi’s passion for lists and her meticulous attention to detail. “She was honest and strong and straight and incredibly generous with her time.”
Tomasi was also one of the first “Pasta Grannies”, the Italian cooks celebrated in the books and YouTube videos by Vicky Bennison. She was championed, too, by the food writer Rachel Roddy, of this newspaper, whose teacher and friend she had been.
Carla was born in Rome, the younger daughter of Onorina Mercuri, who came from the Le Marche region, and Antonio Tomasi, from Sardinia. According to Carla, her mother was “a very bad cook” and she started to cook herself so she did not have to put up with her mother’s offerings. She inherited her love of food from her father and her passion for cooking from her maternal grandmother, whom she remembered making pasta on the kitchen table “with a great big rolling pin”, and minestrone with the exactitude of a Michelin-starred chef.
Fascinated by England even as a young girl, Tomasi first came to London aged 18 as an au pair, but three years later returned to Italy. It was not until she was 30 that she decided she wanted to live in London full time and enrolled on a course at Leith’s School of Food and Wine.
She then worked as a jobbing cook in various pubs until she went to work at the Neal Street Restaurant owned by Terence Conran. A few months after she arrived, Conran’s brother-in-law, Antonio Carluccio, and his wife, Priscilla, took over the restaurant. Carla and Antonio did not get along, and so she left, soon to join Frith’s.
Soho was London’s culinary hub in those days. The scrubby strip clubs, dodgy bars and restaurants of old Soho were giving way to smart, sharp, casual new eateries. Good food, great food, was made accessible to a burgeoning new gastronomic class, and Frith’s was one of the culinary dynamos that helped transform the area.
It was not, however, a lonely outpost of authentic classic Italian cooking. In those days Italian food in London bore little resemblance to Italian food in Italy, and French cuisine still set the standard by which all others were judged.
But even if French in style, Tomasi’s dishes at Frith’s bore the unmistakable imprint of her Italian origins, with the emphasis on flavour, seasonality and the excellence of her primary ingredients, particularly vegetables. She was helped by Gregg Wallace, now a TV presenter but then a greengrocer, and his partner, Charlie Hicks. Her menu consisted of four first courses, four main courses and 10 puddings (she had noted Britain’s passion for puddings).
The standard and authenticity of Italian food began to change, in part inspired by the publication in 1987 of Anna del Conte’s masterpiece, The Gastronomy of Italy. It opened Tomasi’s eyes to the range and diversity of true Italian cooking, and she began to include regional Italian dishes on her menu.
But in 1990, at the height of the Thatcher revolution, Frith’s, like so many other small businesses, was hit by a massive hike in council rates. In Tomasi’s case the rates went up from £12,000 to £24,000. The business could not support this scale of financial burden, and so reluctantly she closed the restaurant. After a brief spell cooking at the Peasant, a pub turned restaurant in Clerkenwell, she returned to her family in Italy.
After the deaths of her mother and her sister, Selena, she set about building her second career as a teacher. She taught the kind of dishes she liked to cook herself, the type of food that was, in the words of the newspaper Corriere della Sera, “senza fronzoli, frugale ma decisamente invitante e facile da realizzare” (“without frills, frugal and decidedly inviting and easy to make”).
In recent years, her house and garden in Ostia, near Rome, had become a place of pilgrimage for many food writers, drawn by her directness, warmth and generosity, and she continued to pass on her wisdom and her experience with the same fierce passion and pragmatism that had characterised her life.
• Carla Tomasi, cook, born 9 March 1954; died 22 August 2024
