Restaurants & Food: Cooking with Rowley – a series of one-off dinners with guest chefs at Le Café Anglais

We love Rowley Leigh’s Bayswater restaurant, Le Café Anglais, just as we loved his previous abode, the hugely influential Kensington Place. We love Leigh’s cooking (it’s him you have to thank for creating that now ubiquitous dish: seared scallops with pea and mint purée), and Le Café Anglais is about as nice a room as you can eat in in London. Plus, Leigh is well-known in the restaurant world as not only a fabulous chef but a generous one. He shares recipes and secrets, and is a natural teacher. So it’s great news that he’s continuing his series of one-off dinners where he collaborates with a guest chef to create a special menu that the two chefs then cook together. On 20th March, he’ll cook with Skye Gyngell, who won a Michelin star for Petersham Nurseries, but who is now the Culinary Director at Heckfield Place. On 14th May, it’s the turn of the chef, writer and broadcaster Allegra McEvedy, and later in the year, Thomasina Miers and Rick Stein will both be at the stove, though the dates of their dinners are still to be confirmed. Frankly, we’d like to book for all four of the dinners (annoyingly, we missed Rowley cooking with the incomparable food writer Rose Prince earlier this month), as it would be great to see and, crucially, taste the singular results of each collaboration. Dinner at these special events isn’t given away, but at  £50 a head includes all food, wine and service, so in fact works out cheaper than the equivalent meal at any other top London restaurant. Besides, there aren’t any equivalent meals! To book a table, call the number below – sooner rather than later.