Clare Smyth is a British chef and operator of a Michelin-star-winning London restaurant, Core. She also appears in With Love, Meghan’s Season 2, and as it turns out, she’s been friends with the Duchess of Sussex for years. Smyth organized the meal for the Sussexes’ wedding reception at Frogmore House. Not only that, but Smyth took an interest in the Together cookbook, and she even accompanied Meghan to the Hubb Community Kitchen in November 2018 (those photos are below). Well, the Times of London profiled/interviewed Smyth this weekend, and Smyth is perfectly pleasant about Meghan, which pissed off the newspaper and left them scrambling to editorialize and bad-mouth WLM (because Smyth refused to do so). Some highlights:
Meghan’s knife skills: From the moment she stepped into the spotlight, the Duchess of Sussex has shown herself to be full of surprises, but the thing that most impressed Clare Smyth, a British chef, was her knife skills. “She’s pretty good at filleting a fish,” says Smyth, who runs Core, a three-Michelin-starred restaurant in Notting Hill, west London. “Meghan is actually really good at cooking and she’s creative, with a good palate,” says Smyth, who teaches her how to make a “very healthy poached halibut with seasonal vegetables and bone broth” in a forthcoming episode.
Her years-long friendship with Meghan: Smyth’s relationship with Meghan goes back several years. The duchess and duke were regulars at Core before Megxit and they hired her to cook for 200 guests at their private wedding reception at Frogmore House in Windsor. Does she consider Meghan and Harry to be friends? “Yeah, I would do … I’ve known them for a long time,” she says, after some careful thought and another long pause. “We stay in contact.” Meghan “personally reached out” to ask her to be on the Netflix show “right from the beginning, but we couldn’t get the timings to work”. Eventually, she flew to California late last year.
What she “taught” Meghan on WLM: “The idea was to teach Meghan how to do fine dining and what goes into that, rather than just something you can make at home,” she says. They went to the fish market to buy fresh halibut and picked loads of herbs and vegetables from the Sussexes’ garden in Montecito. “It was about showing her that level of detail and giving her tips on presentation and skills … she was really interested in that,” Smyth says. Meghan also wanted to recreate Smyth’s speciality sourdough recipe served at Core that the duchess “loves” — but Smyth had to explain that it used a 20-year-old starter. “I told her the process would be too long for the show,” Smyth says, so they made Parker House bread rolls, another Core speciality, instead.
The Sussex wedding reception menu: At the time of their wedding, it was widely reported that Smyth cooked wagyu beef burgers for them. It is a rumour that clearly irks her. “It wouldn’t take a lot to figure out that we probably didn’t cook burgers,” she says, rolling her eyes and gesturing around the 54-seat dining room. At the wedding, she actually served some of Core’s signature dishes including “potato and roe”, a jacket potato that takes 25 hours to prepare (24 of it for marinating), and roast chicken with a twist — a nod to Harry’s proposal, which apparently took place while he and Meghan were roasting a chicken on a cosy night in.
Smyth defends WLM: Smyth is so uncomfortable discussing MasterChef that it is unclear how she will cope with appearing on a programme as widely mocked as With Love, Meghan. The first series was subject to heavy criticism when it aired in March, with critics describing it as boring, vapid and “an exercise in narcissism”. The line-up of guests for the second series, which includes Chrissy Teigen, the American model turned celebrity chef, has been labelled “underwhelming”. “I’m not bothered about that at all,” shrugs Smyth. “It’s a show that’s quite sweet and nice … It’s easygoing and lighthearted.”
This is such a fascinating case study of a British person who refuses to pay the “Sussex tax” with the British press. That tax being “you have to say at least one negative thing about Harry and Meghan before you talk about anything else.” Smyth doesn’t play along, and I think it’s cool that she actually made the effort to fly to California to film an episode of WLM. It’s good exposure for her as well – she might very well be a famous chef in the UK, but WLM will give her international exposure. Incidentally, I keep seeing those pathetic stories about “why aren’t A-listers appearing on WLM??” A lot of Meghan’s guests are very serious food-industry people, and it’s awesome to see them on this show, and not on the Food Network’s Cupcake Death Battle.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Netflix.
