On 26 May 2012, Polpetto, perhaps the buzziest, most intimate restaurant in Soho, temporarily closed its doors. After a couple of years of serving just 28 diners, plus any drinkers in the French House pub downstairs who got the munchies, the plan was that the owners – Russell Norman and Richard Beatty of the Polpo empire – would look for bigger, better-appointed premises. They hoped to reopen by Christmas, but that date came and went and, a year on, a new site for Polpetto had still not been confirmed.
No one felt this hiatus more keenly than Polpetto's head chef, 26-year-old Florence Knight. Accustomed to working long hours in professional kitchens since the age of 19, Knight suddenly found herself with a new sense of freedom. No more bolting her breakfast at 6am or eating lunch at 11am; she could see friends during the evening or at the weekend. She hated it.
She would wander round Soho, where she lives, often bumping into her old suppliers. She bought a second dog. Sometimes, inexplicably, she would burst into tears.
"I lost the people I worked with," she explains. "I'm used to being in a big team – I'm from a big family [she is the fourth of five children] – so I felt quite lonely. I've been going mad because I haven't had a kitchen."
But things are looking up. We are having tea at Maison Bertaux, Soho's most venerable cake shop, while her two dogs, Edna and Guinevere, look on from a nearby lamppost. Knight is dosed up on painkillers for a combination of ailments that include glandular fever, impacted wisdom teeth and mouth ulcers – but she is in high spirits. This giddiness may relate to the forthcoming publication of her first cookbook, One: A Cook and Her Cupboard, or to the fact that she is marrying her sort-of-boss Beatty in a couple of days, or because there's a promising lead on a new site for Polpetto, now due to reopen by the end of the year. Or it could just be the codeine.
Knight's precocious ascent is a story that inspires disbelief – and some envy – in London food circles. When she was plucked from almost-but-not-quite obscurity to run Polpetto in 2010 – previously she had worked as a pastry chef at Raymond Blanc's Diamond Club at Arsenal FC – the goal was to create a mini-clone of Polpo. Modelled on Venetian wine bars or bacari, with style cues from Manhattan's West Village, Polpo had opened the previous year and had helped jolt the moribund Soho dining scene into life with its unpretentious food, exposed brickwork and egalitarian no-bookings policy.
But above the French House – in the same kitchen where St John's Fergus Henderson made his name in the 90s – Knight had a more ambitious plan. "Polpetto was literally meant to be a little Polpo, a sister restaurant serving meatballs and pizza, exactly the same menu," she explains. "Over time, I developed it into my menu. I'd say to Russell, 'Oh try this…'"
The turning point was when she nailed a gnarly Venetian staple called baccalà mantecato. It's salt cod soaked in water for days, then poached in milk with onions and bay before being beaten by hand and finally slowly mixed with olive oil infused with garlic and milk. The dish is so complicated that Norman had called it "the holy grail".
"Russell said: 'No one can make this other than the Venetians,'" Knight remembers. "So I had to do it. I texted Russell when I cracked it and he came straight over. I had to put it on the menu all the time. It was a pain in the arse."
One is equally ambitious, a first cookbook with more than 100 recipes, including the secrets of baccalà mantecato. Writing it caused Knight to examine her approach to food. She is trained in classic French cooking, but her style has been influenced by multiple research trips to Venice, New York and the more adventurous restaurants in Paris.
"I'm a magpie," she says. What defines One is that the recipes are simple, all based around three or four central ingredients. "I see food in almost filmic terms," she writes in the introduction. "A good story always has a single lead, normally with two supporting roles. Any more and the plot becomes confusing."
Something else that is tied up in her cooking is the importance of family. Knight grew up near Godalming in Surrey. Meals were often shambolic, but food was shared out from a central plate, an informal style of dining not too far away from the Polpo restaurants today.
"My poor mum gets a roasting for her cooking, but it wasn't good," says Knight. "My dad was a typical man in the sense that he'd cook and before you had it in your mouth you had to worship him because it was so amazing. He'd say, 'Is it good, is it good, is it good?' And we were like, 'Oh my God, yeah it's good.'"
Knight's father, who worked in advertising, died when she was in her late teens; hit by a car coming home from work. She was studying at the London College of Fashion, but his death inspired her to switch to cooking.
"In a way, it was good for harnessing anger," she continues. "I was so angry, but the kitchen was the right place to be because it was so full of emotion and drive. It was total escapism."
The professional kitchen is where she belongs, where she feels at home. "You are with these people for such long hours," she says. "It's a dysfunctional family but it's a family you come to love."
