Clare Smyth on fine dining and opening her restaurant Oncore in Sydney
The ‘best female chef in the world’ label doesn’t sit well with Clare Smyth, but her new restaurant in Sydney will be unashamedly ‘fine dining’.
Clare Smyth. Hardly a household name. No Gordon, Jamie. No Heston. It’s not really the way Smyth rolls.
Maybe if I say Clare Smyth MBE it will help. Clare Smyth, who catered the wedding of Harry and Meghan. Clare Smyth, who recently cooked for the Johnsons, as in the Downing Street Johnsons.
Clare Smyth who was the first, and to today only woman chef in the United Kingdom to have earned three Michelin stars for her own restaurant, Core. Clare Smyth, who has been called “the best female chef in the UK, possibly the world”. (For what it is worth, the World’s 50 Best Restaurants organisation did anoint her “World‘s Best Female Chef”, in 2018.)
Clare Smyth, who, at 43, just opened her second restaurant. In Sydney.
“I don’t think there’s such a thing as best,” says Smyth over the phone from her Notting Hill restaurant late at night as the last main courses go out to the lucky 54 who had a reservation for dinner (£175 per head, plus wine and VAT, so let’s say something like $600 each, depending on thirst).
“It’s very subjective, isn’t it? One person likes something, another person likes something else, it’s very much a personal taste. I think restaurants are people’s personal taste. I just try to appeal to most people’s tastes.
“I’m not there to change the world of food; I’m there because I want to please a lot of people. I want people to enjoy the food they eat. I want to cook food that I feel comfortable with and just do it really, really well.”
Like Gordon (Ramsay), Jamie (Oliver) and Heston (Blumenthal), Smyth has gone down the well-worn path of British star chefs to have put their name on an Australian restaurant or two with Oncore at Crown Sydney. And as a frequent flyer to Sydney over the years – she lived here for six months at the turn of the millennium in the lead-up to the Olympics and has many friends in Sydney – she’s well aware of the pitfalls. She plans not to fly too close to the sun.
“All we can do is try,” she says.
“We’ve obviously opened it because we believe it can work and we are prepared to put the work in to see what we can make out of it. It’s a very welcoming restaurant and hospitality is number one for us, and we want to really develop a good local clientele base and good relationships.
“When we opened Core (in 2017) we didn’t know what we were going to be, we just worked hard every day to try to please every customer, and all the little bits add up to make something successful. We’ll certainly put as much effort into it (Oncore) as we can to make it successful. I think that’s all we can do.”
Smyth was courted by Crown to consider a joint venture after several of the company’s high-flyers visited her small Notting Hill restaurant with the very big reputation in 2018. The restaurant got its third Michelin star this year. But having installed a star team on the 26th floor of Crown Sydney, where undoubtedly bucketloads of money had been spent creating the ideal antipodean version of her London digs, Smyth of course couldn’t be here for the pre-launch and opening. It must have felt weird.
“Of course, and it’s heartbreaking as well, but particularly when you’ve been working on something for three years and put so much into it. It’s not ideal. But the team was there and they are a brilliant team,” she says.
“Even just for their own health and wellbeing, to give them something to look forward to, an opening was really important, regardless of whether I was there.”
Smyth’s career post-Australia is a relatively straightforward timeline. She came here for the experience and to broaden her culinary skills, but it was always with the intention of going home and going hard. Which she did by going to work for Ramsay, eventually ending up heading the kitchen team – as head chef – at Ramsay’s most prestigious, three Michelin star, Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, in Royal Hospital Road.
And having done that, and maintained the rank, she stepped away to open her own place. Fine dining, an expression and concept that’s taken a battering over the past decade all over the world, is in the Northern Irishwoman’s DNA.
“It (Oncore) was always going to be high end. It’s what I do. Like, this is my area of expertise. I do fine dining, it’s what I’m passionate about, it’s what I’ve spent my whole life doing, really. At the very top level. And the space just really lends it self to a fine dining restaurant.”
But is it what Sydney wants or needs?
“It’s obviously a different dining culture but I think quality is the thing. Australians really know what quality is. And I think quality will always outshine everything else. I know that.
“Yes, there are trends that come and go but we’re not really interested in that,” she says, sounding delightfully old-fashioned.
“I really want to build long-term relationships with people, with guests, and I just want to have lots of regulars like I have at Core. To me that’s what having a great restaurant is all about.”
And she fundamentally believes in the ethos, the business model, of fine dining. She rhapsodises about a recent weekend in Paris at L’Ambroserie and a favourite bistrot, Le Bon Georges (“absolutely brilliant, I just love that place”).
But it was another recent weekend on the Cote d’Azur, she says, that epitomises her passion and pursuit. She and husband Grant do not have children. “A couple of months ago I ate at Mirazur (Menton) Alain Ducasse à l’Hôtel de Paris (formerly Le Louis XV) in Monte Carlo and La Vague d’Or (Saint-Tropez) in one weekend. Three Michelin star restaurants are my absolute passion and I feel so privileged to be able to do it.”
It may sound a little pretentious but the farmer’s daughter (her mum was a waiter in a local restaurant in County Antrim) who left school at 15 to start cooking is anything but, as those who have met her will attest.
“La Vague d’Or was the first three-star I ate in after we had the time out because of Covid and I sat there and was quite emotional. I sat there and thought ‘this is absolutely why I do it; it’s what it’s all about’; incredible fine dining, that’s why I so love gastronomy and that’s why I love eating in those kind of restaurants. It’s an art form, it’s an experience and it’s a real privilege to be able to do it.
“(Yes) it was a very expensive weekend. But it’s my thing, and it’s what I kind of live for.”
And yet Smyth, like many in the cooking profession who have devoted most of their lives to their careers, says she loves the values of traditional restaurants run by families. “To be honest, I absolutely love what I do. It’s part of my life and I’ve always done it. I started cooking when I was 15 and with my husband, that’s all he’s ever known me to do.
“We very much have a family atmosphere at Core, which I really love, it is always like a home. It is intense, of course, the standards are really high but people are people and you can enjoy their personalities in a family atmosphere at work. That’s how you make it sustainable. You’ve got to love what you do and make it part of your life.”