Birmingham chef April Bloomfield has been named the best in New York.
Bloomfield, originally of Druids Heath, is arguably Birmingham’s most popular culinary export, boasting two Michelin stars in New York and this week being crowned the city’s best chef at the James Beard Awards, the Oscars of the US restaurant scene.
The chef, who has just turned 40, has one star at Manhattan gastropub The Spotted Pig and one at The Breslin at The Ace Hotel.
Making a name for herself as the “Queen of Meat”, Bloomfield wowed New York with her speciality burgers, serving chargrilled beef in brioche topped with crumbled Roquefort at The Spotted Pig and a version with lamb and feta at The Breslin.
The successful recipes have won celebrity backing from the likes of Norman “Fatboy Slim” Cook and Gwyneth Paltrow as well as her business partners, Bono, REM’s Michael Stipe and Jay Z.
Growing up in Birmingham, where her stepfather was an engineer and her mother painted china bonbonnieres for enamel firm Halcyon Days, Bloomfield wanted to be a police officer, inspired by Cagney and Lacey, but missed the West Midlands Police enrolment date.
Aged 16, she took up plan B, following her sisters, who were studying at Birmingham Food College – now University College Birmingham, into cooking.
Enamoured with this new direction, her first job came at Birmingham’s Holiday Inn, before she went on to London, working at Kensington Palace under Rowley Leigh, at Bibendum under Simon Hopkins and then clinching a position at the River Cafe under mentors Ruth Rogers and the late Rose Gray.
Travelling to New York to open the Spotted Pig in 2004, after the job had been turned down by Jamie Oliver and his head of food development, Pete Begg, Bloomfield won her Michelin star a year later, adding to it with another at The Breslin in 2010, making her, by Michelin’s standards, Birmingham’s most successful chef.
Following the success of her first book A Girl and Her Pig, she is now working on her second, A Girl and Her Greens.
