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| FEATURES | BY RUTH GORB |
 Clare in her kitchen  On the Formula One circuit in 1985 |
Now, as the past has gleefully been dragged into the newspapers yet again, she takes a pragmatic view of it all. “I’m just amazed that anyone is interested after all this time,” she says. She is more interested in the here and now, and in the unique little empire she has created in Primrose Hill that she calls Clare’s Kitchen. First-time customers think they have made a mistake. Surely this is a private house, and they have walked straight into the kitchen. There’s grandma sitting on a kitchen chair, and a bunch of friends chatting and eating pieces of homemade cake. Which is exactly what Clare Latimer wants you to think. When she first opened her business 18 years ago in Chalcot Road it was meant to be just that, the premises for her catering business. But over the years it has turned into a meeting place. People come once, then come again and again. Builders come in for a mug of tea (a bad mistake once when Earl Grey was met with an outraged, “I don’t want f**king titled tea”), cabbies for a Cornish pasty (made in Cornwall with all Cornish ingredients). Nearby office workers for some chunky vegetable soup, frantic young executives on their way home for a portion of steak and kidney pie, or coq au vin, or whatever Clare has cooked that day. And there are the pensioners. Local pensioners, many of whom can no longer cook for themselves, can’t believe their luck. Never mind the warm welcome and the chat, the food is so good and cheap. Their appetites aren’t as hearty as they once were, so a half portion of something is just right, something like roast chicken with cranberry and wine sauce for £2. “It’s so important that they eat properly,” says Clare. “They have their hot meal at midday, then I see that they take home a £2 cup of soup and a tub of fresh fruit for the evening, and a slice of cake for tea – and that looks after their nutrition for the day. “Much cheaper, and nicer, than pre-packed supermarket stuff and probably no more than buying ingredients and cooking it themselves – which they can’t.” The friendly atmosphere and the sense of community have a lot to do with Clare’s personality (giggly head-girl crossed with glamorous earth-mother) and with the way she started the cooking business in the early 1970s in her own little house in Julia Street, Kentish Town. There were three fridges in the sitting room, a pile of a thousand plates in the kitchen, stores all over the place. “I cooked with my front door open all the time, people drifted in and out for a cup of coffee. It was a happy time. But I had to move on,” says Clare. Funny, she says, the way it took off. She never learned to cook. Her childhood was idyllic but volatile: her father was the ineffably English, handsome actor Hugh Latimer, her mother (propitiously, as it turned out) a wonderful cook. Clare was born and brought up in a big house in South End Road, Hampstead, opposite the Heath where she was allowed to run wild. There were, perhaps, signs of a future entrepreneur in the small girl who picked flowers in her mother’s rose garden, then nipped out into the street and sold them to passers-by. When she left school she moved to Cambridge, bought Triumph cars, sprayed them purple and sold them at a profit. She progressed to buying antiques in Cambridge market which she then advertised for considerably more than she had paid, and did, she says, “rather well”. So what brought her to cooking? Pure chance. The stammer that had plagued her since childhood made her long for a quiet life. She abandoned her role as car saleswoman, and moved to Cornwall, where she had spent sailing holidays with her parents. And there, she says blithely, “I ran the Helford Sailing Club. Why? Because I was asked to. I started by cooking for two people a day, and by the time I left three years later it was 300 a day.” She wonders now how she had the nerve to do it. She was only in her early 20s when she came back to Kentish Town and started Clare’s Kitchen. She cooked, and still does, for directors’ lunches and politicians’ cocktail parties, for law firms and the Conservative Party in Smith Square. She got onto the celebs’ wedding circuit (Peter Sellers was a customer) and on one famous occasion spilled meringue all over Donald Sinden’s black carpet. That was not the only excitement. In 1985 she was asked to cook for the Formula One racing car team. Every weekend she went all over Europe, the only woman with 29 men, all of them with different culinary requests. “The mechanics wanted baked beans, the drivers would only eat pasta, the engineers tried anything, the sponsors wanted the best of everything,” she recalls. “It was tough. If a car crashed, I had to stay up all night and feed them to keep their spirits up. I had to take one driver to hospital in a helicopter. I was treated like one of them. ‘Just get on with it!’, they said. Very character-forming.” It was all happening at the time of her move to Chalcot Road. “I bought a derelict hairdressers with a tramp and rats in the basement for £30,000, and spent another £30,000 on making it look like my kitchen in Julia Street,” she says. She now has three cooks working with her, and three staff to deal with ‘on location’ catering jobs. She still does the weddings and the elegant little dinners (£18.50 a head for three courses plus home-made bread and home-made chocolates, all dropped off at the door for locals) and the big parties – she talks with admirable cool of a dinner for 350 and a buffet for 400 in Prince Charles’ apartment in St James’s. But, she says, the emphasis has changed. The shop has taken over. She walks across Primrose Hill from her flat to work every morning and knows there will be familiar faces, people airing their problems. “It’s a community centre for the area,” she says. “And I give them the food to match the home-like atmosphere. See that cake? A bit lopsided and with the filling oozing out a bit? That’s what our customers want. If it looks to perfect, they won’t buy it.” n Clare’s Kitchen is at 41Chalcot Road, NW1, 020 7722 9833, open Monday to Friday 9-5pm. www.clareskitchen.com |
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