April Bloomfield
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April Bloomfield (born 1974), is a British chef best known for holding a Michelin star at two restaurants, The Spotted Pig and The Breslin. She had previously worked at a number of restaurants in the United Kingdom, including The River Café and Bibendum.
A native of Birmingham, England, April began her culinary studies at Birmingham College. From there, she went on to hone her craft through cook positions in various kitchens throughout London and Northern Ireland, including Kensington Place and Bibendum. It was under the guidance of Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray at The River Café where she learned to appreciate the beauty and simplicity of food.
Before moving to New York, April spent the summer of 2003 in Berkeley, California at the legendary Chez Panisse. In February 2004, April and restaurateur Ken Friedman opened New York City’s first gastropub, The Spotted Pig. Under April’s direction, The Spotted Pig has earned one star from the Michelin Guide for seven consecutive years, and since 2010, April & Ken’s The Breslin Bar & Dining Room also earned one star two years in a row in the esteemed guidebook. As Food & Wine Magazine’s ”Best New Chef,” April continues to receive widespread attention for her food. In fall 2010, she and Ken opened The John Dory Oyster Bar, which joined The Breslin at New York’s Ace Hotel and earned a glowing, two-star review from the New York Times. April’s first cookbook, A Girl and Her Pig, was published by Ecco in April 2012.
Chef Bloomfield is also noted for achieving the highest score of any single challenger in Iron Chef America history, accomplishing the feat during her 56–53 victory over Michael Symon in 2008.
A Day in the Life of Chef April Bloomfield
Famous for her New York gastropubs, the English chef is going global with a San Francisco eatery, a PBS series and a forthcoming cookbook devoted to vegetables
10/10/2013 | The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304213904579093573862146500
CHEF APRIL BLOOMFIELD’S New York City gastropub the Spotted Pig is known for its famous investors, Jay Z and Bono among them.
So it should come as no surprise that Bloomfield and her business partner, Ken Friedman, acquired their newest restaurant in San Francisco with some celebrity help: When Sean Penn discovered that one of his favorite watering holes, Tosca Cafe, was closing its doors, he rang up his pal Friedman, who immediately began hatching plans to take over. After a summer-long kitchen renovation, Tosca reopens this month. With it, Bloomfield, 39, returns to her Italian cooking roots—a style that most Americans, blinded by the beauty of the burgers she serves at Michelin-starred the Spotted Pig and the Breslin Bar & Dining Room, likely aren’t aware she has.
Bloomfield’s rise to fame began at age 16, when she missed her deadline to apply to the police academy and opted to enter cooking school in her native Birmingham, England. By her late twenties she was crafting risottos and raviolis at the renowned River Cafe in London, where fellow Brit Jamie Oliver also cut his teeth. There, Friedman and Mario Batali discovered Bloomfield while searching for a chef for the Spotted Pig. She apprenticed at Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse in 2003 before making history the following year by introducing New Yorkers to their first gastropub: “the Pig,” as it’s known. Bloomfield now presides over four of the city’s most popular kitchens, having opened the Ace Hotel’s John Dory Oyster Bar in 2010 and Salvation Taco earlier this year.
As if all that weren’t enough, this month Bloomfield will also be featured on the PBS travel-cooking series The Mind of a Chef, which took her from New York City to Sarasota, Florida, and back home to England. On October 26, she’ll participate with 40-plus chefs from around the world in Cook It Raw, a chef’s summit in Charleston, South Carolina. And next summer, she’s set to publish her second cookbook, A Girl and Her Greens, the vegetable-heavy antidote to her glowingly reviewed A Girl and Her Pig.
While Bloomfield was working to get Tosca off the ground, she lived out of her suitcase at Hotel Zetta, eating poached-egg breakfasts and morning buns at her favorite local eateries and rolling up her sleeves to do everything from inspect her new restaurant’s custom-made white-enamel Viking stove to befriending the town’s top butchers.