How Clare Smyth turns humble, everyday ingredients into something special
Luke BenedictusEDITOR’S NOTE: This article first appeared in Issue 9 of the Time+Tide NOW Magazine. You can find Issue 9 in both physical and digital formats in the T+T Shop, and you’ll be treated with more industry insights, exciting interviews, and of course, the full Watch Buying Guide.
Tucked down a residential street just a block away from the bustle of Notting Hill’s Portobello Road, Core doesn’t really feel like a fine dining restaurant. There are no primly starched tablecloths or leather-bound wine-lists, and when I walk in, the maître d’ offers what feels like a genuine smile. In fact, the dining room is welcoming all round with its bright interior full of soft beige banquettes and blond-wood fittings. On this Friday lunchtime, the clientele appears similarly relaxed, with jackets and ties considerably outnumbered by diners in knitwear, sneakers, and jeans.
Don’t get me wrong, Core is a very serious restaurant. It’s one of only six in London to have earned the prestige of winning three Michelin stars, and any faint hope you have of nabbing a table will involve booking, I’m told, at least 91 days in advance. The prices are suitably punchy, too. Order the “Core Classics” tasting menu along with its wine pairing, and it’ll set you back £390 per head (about US$500). Yet under the hand of its founding chef, Clare Smyth, Core wears all this culinary distinction with admirable lightness. As a dining proposition, it’s the essence of casual luxury.
The relaxed atmosphere was no happy accident. “Before we opened Core, what we were seeing was a move away from fine dining, because people were maybe finding that it can be slightly cold and pretentious,” Smyth admits. “They didn’t feel comfortable with it, or weren’t sure they’d have a good time in a restaurant like that. I just wanted to take away all of that formality, because none of that stuff’s important. The food is the art form, that’s what we do. And that’s also why we don’t put words on the menus that people might not understand. It’s why the wine list is full of drawings and little snippets that people can follow. Because they shouldn’t need to know anything about food or wine to come and enjoy dining in our restaurant. I just want people to walk out the door at the end of the meal and think, ‘I’ve had a really good time’.”
We’re sitting in Whiskey & Seaweed, Core’s adjacent bar that’s named after their signature cocktail that combines Irish whiskey with kelp, sea lettuce, and black cardamom. It’s a beguiling space, too, dimly lit and ensconced in dark teal-coloured panelling. Perched opposite me on a stool is Smyth who’s dashed straight from a busy lunch service in the kitchen in her chef’s whites, her blonde hair scraped back and her sleeves rolled up for action. This last detail highlights the watch on her wrist: a Hublot Big Bang Integrated Tourbillon Full Carbon. It’s a distinctive piece due to its exotic case and bracelet that are made from a shimmering mix of carbon fibre and a material called Texalium, a high-tech combo that ensures it weighs just 66g (or in culinary times approximately the same as a parsnip). It’s not a watch that you see every day, largely because it costs US$132,000.
Smyth is an ambassador for Hublot, and let’s be brutally honest here, 99% of the time it’s easy to view such arrangements with a cynical eye. The way these things work in the industry tends to go something like this: a watch brand identifies some exciting mover-and-shaker, and slings them some dosh and some fancy watches. In return, the brand gets to bask in some of the star’s deflected glory, while also showing they have their finger on the zeitgeist’s throbbing pulse. Such relationships often feel a bit mercenary and dispiriting because of the total lack of synchronicity between the pair. Yet Hublot’s partnership with Clare Smyth is one of those joyful rarities that genuinely makes sense. Let me explain…
Hublot may be a luxury watch company, but it’s always revelled in doing things differently. It’s far more open-minded and expressive than most Swiss brands, showing a willingness to push the boundaries whether it’s through experimentation with innovative materials, bonkers designs or retina-searing shades of ceramic. It’s certainly a high-end brand – the most affordable Big Bang starts at more than US$20k – but not remotely stuffy. It was Hublot, you’ll recall, that happily sponsored football while other brands fretted that the worldwide populism of The Beautiful Game meant it failed to represent a sufficiently exclusive vehicle for their luxury wares.
Much like Smyth’s restaurant, Hublot isn’t one for enforced dress codes. It proved that emphatically back in 1980 when the brand’s founder, Carlo Crocco, appalled traditionalists with his Classic Fusion that had the gall to put a gold watch on a rubber strap – something that’d never been done before. The reason for the initial outrage was that rubber was viewed as a cheap utilitarian material, antithetical to the luxury experience. But what Crocco was actually doing was displaying confidence in his design vision. Today, Rolex, Patek and AP have all followed suit and stuck precious metal cases on rubber straps.
In culinary terms, Smyth does something very similar by elevating simple ingredients at her restaurant and making them the stars of the show. “Before we opened Core, I had worked in three Michelin star restaurants for 15 years of my life,” she explains. “So I knew exactly what that was about, which was usually using luxury ingredients – lobster, caviar, foie gras, turbot, all these things. I knew I could do that, but it just didn’t mean anything to me personally. And I had the confidence in myself as a chef that I could take any material and turn it into something.”
Having grown up on a farm in Northern Ireland, Smyth wanted to make food that reflected who she was in an authentic way. As a girl, she recalls, potatoes were part of her diet “every single day”. So she opted to direct her years of classical French training onto the humble spud.
The result is what has become Core’s signature dish, Smyth’s “Potato and Roe” creation whose apparent simplicity belies the fact that it takes around 25 hours to make. It’s inspired, she explains, by the potatoes she once enjoyed as a girl on the North Antrim coast of Ireland where the soil is enriched with the minerality of the ocean. To replicate that salty tang, Smyth tops a Charlotte potato still in its skin with a spoonful of herring roe. Slivers of homemade salt-and-vinegar chips and baby shoots of sorrel, chives, and rocket are then used to freshen up the dish and cut through the buttery starch of the potato. “I wanted to take a potato – an everyday ingredient easily grown everywhere – and turn it into something spectacular by applying my skill, knowledge and creativity,” she says.
Another dish that displays similar bravery is Core’s “Lamb Carrot”, in which a single carrot is slow-cooked in lamb glaze and served with a dollop of sheep’s milk yoghurt, carrot-top pesto and lamb jus. The idea, she explains, came from the fact that when making sauces or stews in the restaurant, carrots would often be braised and then discarded before the final dish was used. “But as a chef, I’d always eat these carrots as a snack, because they absorbed all the stock and meat juices. So I thought, well, if I think these carrots are the best bits then surely I should serve them to the customer.”
The thing about simple though, as Steve Jobs memorably said, is that it can be “harder than complex”. Smyth has the pedigree to pull it of. She left home at 16 to train in England, where she worked at Heston Blumenthal’s The Fat Duck and Michel Roux’s The Waterside Inn. In 2002, she moved to Gordon Ramsay’s kitchen and impressed the notoriously hard taskmaster enough to be named head chef at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay. In the process, she became the first woman in the UK to run a restaurant with three Michelin stars. Since then, the accolades have kept rolling. In 2013, Smyth was awarded an MBE, and in 2018 she was invited to cater Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding reception at Windsor Castle. The same year she was named the best female chef at the World’s 50 Best Restaurant awards gala in Bilbao.
Today she oversees two restaurants – Notting Hill’s Core and the deftly named follow-up, Oncore, that is perched on the 26th floor of Crown Sydney in Barangaroo. Terry Durack, The Sydney Morning Herald’s restaurant critic, was effusive with his praise, giving Oncore the top rating of three chef’s hats. “Completely over-the-top, excessive, luxurious, a tiny bit naf and damn good fun,” he wrote in his review.
Now re-read Durack’s line and apply some of those words to Hublot. Weigh them up and see if they don’t feel utterly spot-on. “Completely over-the-top, excessive, luxurious”? Yes, yes, and emphatically yes! Hublot positively screams those characteristics whether that’s through delivering mad sapphire-cased collaborations with tattoo artists or that $5 million diamond lightshow that Beyoncé famously gave as a birthday present to Jay-Z. “A tiny bit naf?” Well, only in that Hublot isn’t a brand that aspires towards quiet discretion and po-faced examples of impeccable taste. But surely that’s a good thing in an industry that still feels overly stiff and buttoned up? If Hublot was a restaurant, you can bet it wouldn’t have starched tablecloths either. That’s mainly because it’s also “damn good fun”, and probably believes tables are really made to be danced on.