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In a 26 December 2024 interview with Time+Tide, chef Clare Smyth explains how she makes ambitious cooking feel welcoming: familiar ingredients become the focus, while guests are not expected to know specialist food or wine language. The conversation also connects her approach to a watch she wore for the interview, the Hublot Big Bang Integrated Tourbillon Full Carbon.
What Clare Smyth says makes fine dining welcoming
Smyth’s account of Core, her restaurant in London’s Notting Hill, starts with the guest rather than the performance of expertise. She says the atmosphere is deliberately relaxed because some people experience fine dining as cold or pretentious. Guests should be able to enjoy the meal without knowing food or wine terminology: “Because they shouldn’t need to know anything about food or wine to come and enjoy dining in our restaurant.”
That hospitality principle sits alongside a serious commitment to craft. Smyth puts the emphasis plainly: “The food is the art form, that’s what we do.” In the interview, the reporter describes Core’s informality as a contrast to the technical ambition of its cooking—not as evidence that the cooking itself is casual.
How humble ingredients become the center of a dish
Smyth describes her cooking philosophy as turning everyday ingredients into something exceptional through technique, knowledge, and creativity, rather than depending solely on conventional markers of luxury. She explains the idea through 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.”
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- Winner of the 2009 James Beard Book Award for Best Book: Reference and Scholarship
Potato and Roe
The 2024 profile describes Potato and Roe as a Charlotte potato served in its skin with herring roe, homemade salt-and-vinegar chips, and shoots of sorrel, chives, and rocket. Time+Tide reports that the preparation takes around 25 hours. The dish also draws on Smyth’s childhood memories of potatoes on the North Antrim coast. These are details from the interview, not a current menu listing or recipe.
Lamb Carrot
The profile describes Lamb Carrot as a carrot slow-cooked in lamb glaze, served with sheep’s milk yoghurt, carrot-top pesto, and lamb jus. Smyth traces the idea to carrots braised in sauces and stews for kitchen staff: the carrots were flavourful, but would otherwise be discarded. Her dish gives that overlooked ingredient a starring role and makes resourcefulness part of the finished plate.
The career behind Core
Luke Benedictus’s profile recounts Smyth leaving home at 16 to train in England, working at The Fat Duck and The Waterside Inn, then joining Gordon Ramsay’s kitchen in 2002 and becoming head chef at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay. The article says she later became the first woman in the UK to run a restaurant with three Michelin stars. It also reports an MBE in 2013, catering for Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding reception in 2018, and being named best female chef at that year’s World’s 50 Best Restaurants awards gala. These milestones are presented as the profile’s historical account.
Smyth told Time+Tide that she had spent 15 years of her life working in three-Michelin-star restaurants before opening Core. The interview also discusses Oncore at Crown Sydney in Barangaroo, describing it at the time as occupying the 26th floor. Sydney Morning Herald critic Terry Durack’s description of Oncore as “Completely over-the-top, excessive, luxurious, a tiny bit naf and damn good fun” is his review language, relayed by the interviewer—not Smyth’s own characterization. The profile’s restaurant descriptions and ratings are from 2024, not a check of present status.
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The Hublot watch in the interview
The article identifies Smyth as a Hublot ambassador and the watch she wore as a Hublot Big Bang Integrated Tourbillon Full Carbon. Benedictus describes its case and bracelet as carbon fibre and Texalium and reports a weight of 66g. He gives a price of US$132,000 at the time of publication on 26 December 2024; that is a dated figure, not current retail pricing or confirmation of availability.
The watch connection is part of the interviewer’s framing. Benedictus draws a parallel between Core’s welcoming approach and Hublot’s expressive luxury identity, connecting Smyth’s decision to give a potato center stage with the watch’s distinctive materials. That is the writer’s analogy, rather than a claim that Smyth’s culinary philosophy and Hublot’s design are identical.
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About the interview
“How Clare Smyth turns humble, everyday ingredients into something special” was written by Luke Benedictus, a Time+Tide Senior Contributor, and published on 26 December 2024. The publisher says it first appeared in Issue 9 of Time+Tide NOW Magazine. Read the interview at Time+Tide.
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