How to host it – A winter feasting special
November 22, 2024
Sally Clarke’s Kensington Thanksgiving
The British pioneer of seasonal cooking throws an American feast for local friends …
Tim Auld. Photography by Daisy Wingate-Saul
Published NOV 22 2024
In the Wine Room downstairs at Sally Clarke’s Kensington restaurant, now celebrating its 40th year, the lights are low, the flower arrangements are a fire of autumn colours and the scene is set for a Thanksgiving feast.
Clarke trained in Croydon, then Paris, before working for Prue Leith and Caroline Waldegrave in London. But the thing that changed everything for her was when she took a job at a restaurant in California in 1979. “Los Angeles was stuck in a bourgeois French over-sauced, over-cooked mĂ©lange,” she says, “but Michael McCarty [considered by many to be one of the founders of contemporary Californian cuisine] was a breath of fresh air, bringing contemporary art to the walls and bright colours to the plates. I was introduced to Alice Waters of Chez Panisse – as soon as I touched the door handle I knew this was it.” [Subscribers to the FT can read the article in its entirety, here … ]
Entertaining and giving THANKS … November 2024
Photos – Daisy Wingate-Saul for the FT
It was there also that she was introduced to Thanksgiving. “It seemed to me to be the most wonderful, all-embracing celebration: everybody seemed to be invited, everybody was willing to bring something, and the more I learned about it, the more I felt it was an international celebration for every creed, every colour, every age. Every year since opening the restaurant, we’ve served a Thanksgiving dinner.”
“The best music is the clink of the knife and fork on the plate and gentle chatter”
— Sally Clarke
The party tonight is a local affair, bringing together Clarke’s ‘family’ of friends who live or work on Kensington Church Street: one of them, Tuggy Meyer of Huntsworth Wine Company, had his first home there; another, David Dawson, the late Lucian Freud’s studio assistant and model, now lives in the artist’s house a few doors down.
Very thankful … friends for 40 years
Photos – Daisy Wingate-Saul