Sally Clarke

By the age of ten, Sally Clarke had discovered Elizabeth David and was ticking her mother off for buying margarine instead of butter. In her early teens, the blueprint for the restaurant that now bears her name was already drafted in her mind. At seventeen, on her first morning at catering college, she stubbornly declined to crown her grapefruit segments with a maraschino cherry. A spray of mint would do better, thank you. Two years later, she had moved on to the Cordon Bleu School in Paris. Here she felt that her course in advanced cookery was not adequately testing. So she headed for Le Grand Véfour, one of the noblest addresses in Parisian gastronomy, walked in and, without the comfort of an appointment, asked to see its distinguished patron. M. Raymond Oliver was impressed and duly installed her at his son’s restaurant, the Bistro de Paris in the septième.