Not long ago, the young chef April Lily Partridge worked a memorable shift. The 21-year-old from Chingford runs the sauce section at the Club at the Ivy in London’s West End, and on the first morning of service after the August bank holiday, having an idea her station would be empty of its chutneys and purées, its stocks and salsa verdes, she got up early – 4am – to bus in from Essex. She was cooking by six. At 3pm Partridge checked the kitchen rota to learn she was booked to work the evening shift too. She didn’t leave her sauce station until after midnight, home by 3am. “I love this job,” she says.
Currently chef de partie, Partridge has impressed within and without this famous members’ club – selected by OFM’s awards judges, including Angela Hartnett, Tom Kitchin and Nathan Outlaw, as the most promising newcomer to their industry. Within the Ivy she is ’Pril, the one-day work experience who never went away, a highly regarded protégé to executive chef Gary Lee, a keen experimenter. The day we meet, Partridge tells me she’s been trying to concoct a sort of chocolate fondant that tastes like a toffee apple. She plans to serve the dish (with cardamom ice cream, “autumn on a plate!”) to the judges at this year’s final of the Young National Chef competition. Partridge shows me pictures of early test runs. “At school I did art, so plating food comes naturally, I love plating food. But getting the flavour right? You’ve got to nail that.”
She grew up eating flavourfully. Her mother is a catering manager, her stepfather a head chef. Partridge saw food as a “nice perk” to life, until the end of her GCSEs, when it was time to choose a work experience placement. She signed up for a fortnight in the kitchen at the Reform Club in Pall Mall, a hectic experience that Partridge looks back on now as “a light-bulb moment”. As soon as she walked into a steamy kitchen, “I knew”.
The Reform Club sent a positive report back to her school and the school entered her for a nationwide cookery competition. Partridge won the London heat, where Gary Lee was a judge, and her prize was to spend a day in his kitchen at the Ivy. She did her day. Then another. Then a whole summer’s worth of shifts... Partridge asked for a regular job when she was 17 (“I told Gary, this is it for me”) and was rewarded with an Ivy scholarship. “My friends saw my life go bang,” remembers Partridge. “I was alive. Maybe I missed out on my teenage years a little bit, but I don’t regret it at all. I’ve loved every minute so far.”
She stands up to return to her station, where she has a mushroom sauce bubbling, a veal stock reducing, a chilli con carne braising in the oven. Only about 50 minutes to go until she clocks out today.
