The chef and restaurateur Kenneth Bell, who has died aged 94, was one of a handful of cooks who brought sunshine and hope to a land still mired in gastronomical gloom in the decades after the second world war. His name was attached to two exceptional places to dine, the Restaurant Elizabeth in Oxford, from 1958 to 1966, and Thornbury Castle, north of Bristol, from 1966 until his retirement in 1986, and to a third, at one remove, when he opened Popjoy’s restaurant in Bath in 1973 and installed the young couple Stephen and Penny Ross to run the show in the elegant two-storey Georgian mansionette next door to the Theatre Royal.
At the Restaurant Elizabeth, borne up by an enthusiasm for French and Mediterranean cooking, he weaned many an epicurean, if not hedonist, Oxford don from the tired ornamentation of the college high table, as well as giving indigent students a taste for proper cookery. When he moved to Thornbury, the only sign of commerce was a small panel at the castle lodge announcing “K Bell: Restaurateur”, but the happy traveller was able to eat his or her fill in the last castle to be built in Britain, erected by a Duke of Buckingham who shortly thereafter lost his head to Henry VIII, who promptly installed Anne Boleyn for a weekend break.
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