After a variety of schools, Cambridge, a spell of dairy farming and a misspent youth in the snooker halls of Fulham, Rowley Leigh got a job at the Joe Allen restaurant in Covent Garden as a grill and short order chef. He migrated to Le Gavroche and learnt classical French cooking under the inspired tutelage of Albert Roux before spells as baker, butcher and buyer to the group. He returned to the kitchen as sous-chef and then head chef of Le Poulbot in the City of London before opening the trailblazing Kensington Place in Notting Hill with Nick Smallwood and Simon Slater in 1987. He is still there, and is a director of Moving Image Restaurants; he is now food correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph after a spell with the Guardian and has won a Glenfiddich Award for the quality of his newspaper writing.
He has three children and lives with his partner Kate in Shepherd’s Bush in West London. No Place Like Home is his first book.
