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My mother, Anne Lo, who has died aged 84, co-founded a pioneering Chinese cookery school in Britain and three restaurants, in London and Portugal. She was the power behind the writer, TV chef and restaurateur Kenneth Lo, whom she married in 1954; he wrote of her "infectious laughter and indiscriminate friendliness" and described her as "a tower of strength".
She was born Anne Philippe Hempsted Brown at Rose Hill, a large Bedfordshire farm. Her early years were spent with her father hunting moles to make gloves and riding shire horses. Always the adventurer, as soon as she was able she left for wartime London, working as a chambermaid in Bloomsbury, then with Egon Ronay at the Marquee, and dancing the nights away at the Hammersmith Palais. She met my father at Student Movement House and together they hosted multicultural evenings.
Mixed ethnicity marriages were not easy in the 1950s. Both families objected. Nevertheless, those were happy years. Belsize Park was full of young socialists, writers, sinologists and musicians. Richard and John Contiguglia, the identical twins and duo pianists trained by Myra Hess, lived and practised in our back room. With a growing family to look after, my mother turned her seamstress skills to making Chinese costumes for films while assisting my father with Cathay Arts, his shop in South Kensington.
A downturn in fortune saw the family move to Surrey, where my mother took to fostering Ghanaian families and cooking school meals. She would serve up to 1,000 lunches a day to schoolchildren in Epsom before returning home to feed her own unruly gang of teenagers.
In the 1980s my parents embarked on their most successful enterprise. First they opened the exclusive Chinese Gourmet Club, exploring London's Chinese restaurants. This soon led to the opening of their first restaurant in Ebury Street. Ken Lo's Memories of China became one of London's most celebrated restaurants. Two more were to follow, along with a cookery school. My mother shifted seamlessly between unblocking drains and playing hostess to Belgravia society.
In her middle years, she travelled to China and Tibet. My father's death in 1995 was, however, hard to bear and she also suffered a stroke. Nevertheless, still passionately independent, she spent her last years in Snowdonia, where she was often to be seen heaving a heavy lawnmower up the slopes of her mountainside garden.
She is survived by four children, Robert, Michael, me and Jennifer; nine grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.
