RECIPE FELICITY CLOAKE PHOTOGRAPHS MAJA SMEND FOOD STYLING SOPHIE AUSTEN-SMITH STYLING TONY HUTCHINSON
Dear Gary
It feels a bit weird calling you Gary; I still think of you as The Cockatiel, an affectionate family nickname inspired by your trademark spiky hair, which seemed thrillingly exotic when it first popped up on TV in the late 1980s. How delighted you looked to hear the legendary French chef Albert Roux admit, “When I first met you, the hairdo that you had, I thought, he’ll never make a good chef this one. But how wrong I was!” That was during your rather premature episode of This is Your Life a decade later.
For my part, I was only six, so I hope you wouldn’t have minded – your excitable presence on screen captured my childish imagination. You made food look like fun; as Prue Leith put it, you were perhaps the first rock star of cooking, your infectious enthusiasm the antithesis of moody contemporaries like Marco Pierre White.