By Leigh O’Connor, Editor.
Australian Chef Skye Gyngell, who has died aged 62, cooked the way people wish they lived: attentive to season, generous with detail and always in conversation with the natural world.
Born in Sydney and trained in Australia and France, Skye made her name far from home, becoming one of the most influential Australian voices in modern British food. Her death this week has been met with grief across kitchens on two continents.
A life led by ingredients
Skye’s cooking was never about display. It was about clarity. At a time when dining rooms were chasing foam and fireworks, she was quietly building plates around what was best that morning: a bunch of bitter leaves, a day-boat fish, a bruised peach that still smelled of Summer.
Colleagues and diners alike came to recognise her signature - food that looked simple, but was tuned like a well-made instrument. Seasonal, produce-first cooking wasn’t a marketing line for Skye; it was her moral centre.
After moving to London in her late teens, she worked in a succession of demanding kitchens and private houses, honing a style that married European technique with an Australian instinct for freshness and restraint.
Petersham Nurseries and the Michelin moment
Her wider fame arrived at Petersham Nurseries Café in Richmond, where she became Head Chef. In that glasshouse-like sanctuary of vines and terracotta, Skye’s food felt like a direct extension of the garden outside. In 2011, she earned a Michelin star there, a watershed moment that made her the first Australian-born female Chef to receive the honour.
Yet even that accolade revealed something essential about her: she loved cooking more than the machinery around it. She spoke candidly about the pressure the star brought and later stepped away from it, choosing the work over the noise.
Spring: beauty with backbone
If Petersham was where Skye’s voice was heard, Spring - her restaurant at Somerset House, opened in 2014 - was where it fully unfolded. The room was elegant, but never stiff. The cooking, too, carried that balance: refined, but deeply human. Dishes came alive through restraint - perfect vegetables, slow-cooked meat, bright broths, pastries that tasted like memory.
Spring also showed her fierce commitment to sustainability long before it was standard practice. Under Skye, the restaurant became an early leader in refusing single-use plastics and in building waste-reducing menus that treated leftovers as creative starting points rather than shameful by-products.
Writer, teacher, believer in the table
Skye was not only a Chef but a writer of rare intimacy. As Food Editor for Vogue and author of influential cookbooks, she translated kitchen knowledge into something literary - recipes that read like letters, headnotes that felt like confidences. Her words carried the same values as her plates: time, place, honesty.
She mentored young cooks, especially women, with a combination of exacting standards and hard-won tenderness. Many who worked with her describe a Chef who pushed for rigour but never forgot the person holding the knife. In an industry that too often rewards bluster, Skye’s authority was quieter and more lasting.
A fierce private courage
In recent years Gyngell spoke openly about living with illness, describing the vulnerability of a cook whose senses are her livelihood. Even so, she remained rooted in work and in family life, continuing to cook, to plan, to imagine, to pass on knowledge. Those close to her have spoken of her final months as shaped by the same instincts that guided her career: love expressed through food and care shown in the small, deliberate acts of feeding others.
The legacy she leaves
Skye Gyngell is survived by her daughters, Holly and Evie. She also leaves behind thousands of people who cooked from her books, ate at her tables, learned in her kitchens, or simply found their own approach to food sharpened by her example.
In the end, her life’s work is there in the way we now talk about vegetables, the way we build menus around season rather than ego, the way a meal can be both utterly beautiful and utterly grounded. That is a legacy that doesn’t dim.
