April Bloomfield doesn't do flowery. Asked to explain her cooking to anyone who hasn't come across it before, she says: "Earthy… clean… vibrant. With a bit of fat thrown in. I use everything pretty much, animal or plant." From a chef regarded as one of the queens of New York, it comes as a surprise that Bloomfield was born and brought up in Birmingham and became an American culinary hero by accident.

Shortly after the turn of the millennium, the New York chef and restaurateur Mario Batali and his business partner Ken Friedman were looking for a cook to take on a gastro pub project in Greenwich Village. Jamie Oliver suggested Batali take a chance on Bloomfield, who was then part of the brigade at the River Café. Batali eventually did as he was told, bringing the young chef to his home town in 2003. The Spotted Pig, which serves crispy pig's ear salads and a legendary burger with Roquefort sauce, went on to win a Michelin star. Today Bloomfield flits between there and the Breslin and John Dory Oyster Bar in downtown Manhattan.

Bloomfield insists it was her time at the River Café, working with Ruth Rogers and the late Rose Gray, that defined her. "Nobody was cooking punchy food like that." The recipe for ribollita, below, was taught to her by Gray, who died in 2010. "When I cook it she's back with me."

Asked if she thinks it was easier to make it to the top as a female chef in New York rather than London she shrugs. "I don't think about it. I just keep doing what I'm doing." Right now that includes promoting her new cookbook, A Girl and Her Pig, to be published here in the autumn, and musing on plans to open a restaurant in London. "It wouldn't be a gastro pub," she says. "That would be teaching my grandmother to suck eggs."

thespottedpig.com; thebreslin.com; thejohndory.com