'I remember my grandfather's restaurants in Budapest. They were huge elegant cafés, open all day - just like you'd find in Paris and Vienna. I was four when we left Hungary to join my father in London. I thought the food in Britain was very odd. I was used to very rich Hungarian food. Everyone appeared to eat sandwiches, so I would have green pepper and salt on rye, while my friends ate jam on white sliced.

Food was very important in my family. When I was about eight, my father opened a restaurant opposite Harrods, where I went for lunch every Sunday. It was quite unusual then to see children in restaurants but in our family it was the norm.

It was when I was about 17 that I started to go to restaurants other than my father's. I was an actress, and to be in that crowd in the Sixties was fantastic. We had such a great time. We would hang out at restaurants like Alvaro's and the Aretusa on the King's Road in Chelsea. We always ate out in big groups in those days. The Beatles would be there - it was that kind of crowd. I also used to go to an actors' club called The Pickwick in the West End. All we seemed to eat was steak - steak and salad, or steak and vegetables.It was important not to put on weight. Everyone seemed to be on a diet.

It wasn't until the early Seventies that I became interested in good food again, but only one type of food: I became a hippy and then a vegetarian. Dick [Edina's husband] and I would throw dinner parties all the time - Ossie Clark would come, and George Harrison with Patti [Boyd]. We'd serve vegetarian food and no alcohol, and we would sit on cushions on the floor.

I remember my father coming to meet me before we went out for supper one evening. He sat on my cushions wearing his smart suit. I decided to take him to a vegetarian restaurant - it was probably the only one in London at the time. You sat on wooden benches and ate lentils and brown rice from wooden bowls. After ten minutes he got up and demanded we leave: he said he'd rather have a yoghurt and sit on the floor of our flat.

It wasn't until the Eighties that the restaurant scene took off. The fashion crowd was always at Le Caprice or San Lorenzo. It was fun, but it wasn't like the Sixties when it was so cheap to eat out that you could do it all the time.'

· Edina Ronay's collection is available from The Cross, London W11 (020 7727 6760). Her new range for Allders is out next year.