Stardom beckons for the chef who has cooked up a storm at London's Polpetto
Why's the pretty girl sitting on a kitchen worktop? Oh, to illustrate that she's a chef. Florence Knight has been cooking up a storm as head chef at London's Polpetto restaurant for a couple of years and now she's on the up.
How so? Polpetto is moving, so young Florence is on a sabbatical, developing the new restaurant and writing a cookbook about how to make tasty dishes from store cupboard items. "Tomato ketchup is underrated," she says.
A chef after my own heart. What else is she doing? She's got telly work in the pipeline and she's joining super-chef Rowley Leigh at Le Café Anglais on 1 August for one of a series of collaborative Cooking with Rowley dinners.
She's young to be a head chef. How did she get started? Florence studied at the London College of Fashion, realised it wasn't for her, and enrolled at Leiths cookery school. She spent her free time "turning up at restaurant kitchens with my knives and offering to work for free", and the rest, as they say, is history.
She says: "Professional kitchens are still very much a man's environment, so I think I had to work a bit harder to prove myself, but it's fine now."
Our restaurant critic, Jay Rayner, says: "Florence is a gem, the perfect combination of technique, good taste and an instinct to feed."
Visit florenceknight.co.uk. For details on Cooking with Rowley Leigh, go to lecafeanglais.co.uk