The Sydney-born “natural truth-teller” overcame a 20-year history of addiction to create a mini empire of cookbooks and media columns, while overseeing a stable of restaurants in the UK.
The first Australian female chef to receive a Michelin star and one of the only recipients to call the highly coveted award a professional curse, Skye Gyngell, has died. She was 62.
“We are deeply saddened to share news of Skye Gyngell’s passing on 22nd November in London, surrounded by her family and loved ones,” the family said in a statement.
“Skye was a culinary visionary who influenced generations of chefs and growers globally to think about food and its connection to the land. She leaves behind a remarkable legacy and is an inspiration to us all. The family requests privacy at this time.”
Born in 1963 in Sydney into a family of broadcast royalty – her father Bruce Gyngell was the first person to appear on Australian television at its inception in 1956 – Gyngell shrugged her law studies in Sydney for a professional life in the kitchens of Europe.
Gyngell’s lightness of hand with produce guided an unlikely contender, a ramshackle cafe at London’s Petersham Nurseries, into the Michelin orbit in 2011. From that platform, Gyngell grew a mini empire of cookbooks and media columns, while overseeing a stable of three restaurants in the UK.
Talented and irreverent, Gyngell was a natural truth-teller who was unafraid to call a spade a spade in her adopted city. She once described the food at Mayfair’s fashionable The Wolseley as “unapologetically awful” and praised Nigella Lawson’s cooking while querying the sexy posturing onscreen: “She’s an intelligent woman … why does she do it?” Famed chef Marco Pierre White even copped it for promoting stock cubes.
The media lapped it up, with one article pondering whether Gyngell was the “Courtney Love of cooking”, while the London Telegraph described her as the “Wizardess of Oz” for transforming an old greenhouse at Petersham Nurseries into a culinary destination.
When Gyngell took on the Petersham Nurseries project in 2004, she was met with the challenge of a dirt floor, outside storerooms and puddles en route to the kitchen. In the early days, she brought her own pots and pans from home, dipping into a trusty toolbox of roasted spices, infused oils and tea smoke. It wasn’t long before word got out, with nursery regulars tucking into plates of rabbit with roasted fennel and bowls of cauliflower soup with pickled pears while jockeying for a seat with Mick Jagger and fashion designer Stella McCartney.
Gyngell always acknowledged the multicultural nature of her hometown in shaping her food. Sydney’s emerging food scene in the 1970s was turbocharged by being raised in a household where her father adhered to a healthy macrobiotic diet.
Less healthy were the dual paths her early life was taking. At 14, she reportedly left her exclusive private school after smoking marijuana; at 17, she began experimenting with heroin. None of it slowed Gyngell’s academic progress, her next stop: Sydney University.
“[Skye] was the intellect of the family, incredibly well-read, interested in learning and would try anything,” her brother, former Channel Nine chief executive David Gyngell, told Good Weekend Magazine in 2012. “Her food is honest and real, like her. In an industry full of ego, she has no airs or graces and is uncompromising about quality.”
Gyngell found a part-time job in a Sydney restaurant and, inspired by its female chef, kitchen life soon won over university. She began her training at La Varenne cooking school in Paris at 19, then worked at George V and the two-star Michelin restaurant Dodin-Bouffant in Paris, before moving to London, spending a year at the exacting Dorchester, under chef Anton Mosimann, then working for rising culinary star Fergus Henderson.
Gyngell struggled with drug addiction, taming it after her father’s death in 2000, and channelling her energy into food and raising her two now adult children, Holly and Evie. With a Michelin star in the bag, Gyngell’s career was in clear sky before her unfiltered honesty found voice in 2012, bristling after diner complaints from Michelin devotees more accustomed to polished surrounds and sparkling toilets than the rustic Petersham Nurseries cafe.
“OK, this is the worst thing I’m going to say: if I ever have another restaurant, I pray we don’t get a star,” Gyngell said.
While pointing out she was honoured by the award, the publicity over her comments didn’t stop her ascent. After departing Petersham Nurseries in 2012, Gyngell was appointed culinary director across several restaurants at Heckfield Place, in Hampshire. She opened Spring, at Somerset House, in 2014.
Typically, Gyngell forged new territory. Spring was the first single-use plastic-free restaurant in London. Gyngell’s heroes were women chefs: Maggie Beer and Stephanie Alexander in Australia, Sally Clarke in London and Alice Waters in California. And she championed women in her own kitchens.
Privately, the “freckled” girl from sunny Sydney was fighting a more serious battle: in 2024, a lump on her neck was diagnosed as Merkel cell carcinoma, a type of skin cancer. She had a long history of other skin cancers, a legacy of ’70s beach culture.
Gyngell didn’t hide away, penning an article in May for The Financial Times in which she brought greater understanding to the surgery, radiotherapy and loss of sense of taste she endured. The story was insightful, candid and quietly beautiful; a reflection of her refreshingly honest approach to life and cooking.
Her friend and former contributing international editor at Conde Nast Traveller and contributor for the New York Times Style Magazine, Bon Appetit and the Financial Times, David Prior, called Gyngell the “most internationally significant Australian female chef of her generation.”
“Skye was singular. She had the palate of a chef and the palette of an artist, and those twin, exquisite gifts met in food …,” he said. “She carried an ethereal, mercurial lightness that often belied the grit and unwavering purity of vision that saw her rewrite the rule book of dining in London more than once.
“It was that interplay that made her so beguiling, placing her at the heart of a movement she never sought to lead, yet in her own quiet, uncompromising way undeniably did.”
