April Bloomfield

The Spotted Pig

314 W 11th street
New York, NY
USA
+1.212.6200393

An Englishwoman in New York, one of the few women chef at the top in America, with a good nose for business: together with restaurateur Ken Friedman she’s the co-owner of five restaurants and only one of these is outside the Big Apple. Still, the early career of April Bloomfield was entirely in her United Kingdom: born in Birmingham in 1974, to an engineer father and a bomboniere-decorator mother, she wanted to become a police officer. She changed her mind and began to study cookery at Birmingham College, and later worked in various restaurants in Northern Ireland and most of all in London, including the Kensington Place and Bibendum.

Her first great masters, however, were Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray of The River Café. In 2003 she moved to the States: she worked at Berkeley, California, at Alice Waters’ legendary Chez Panisse. This only lasted one summer: Mario Batali noticed her and soon her moving to the East Coast become real with the opening, together with Friedman, of gastropub The Spotted Pig, which two years later was awarded with one Michelin star. And never lost it.

In 2010 it was the turn of her second restaurant to receive the aspired acknowledgement from the red guide, namely The Breslin Bar and Dining Room, located inside the Ace Hotel in New York where in the autumn of the same year a third establishment was also opened, The John Dory Oyster Bar, two stars according to the New York Times. The latest openings are Salvation Taco inside the Pod 39 Hotel in December 2012 and, last autumn, Tosca Cafe, this time facing the other ocean, in San Francisco. In December, only a few weeks after its opening, Tosca had already received three stars from the local newspaper San Francisco Chronicle.

Proclaimed “Best Chef in New York City 2014” by the James Beard Foundation, April Bloomfield is considered one of the most prominent representatives of the New Yorker culinary scene, especially the female one, not forgetting that she’s one of the few American (though by adoption) female chefs to be starred. Food & Wine magazine had already nominated her “Best New Chef” in 2007. Her book, A Girl and Her Pig, was published in 2012.

by

Carlo Passera

journalist born in 1974, for many years he has covered politics, mostly, and food in his free time. Today he does exactly the opposite and this makes him very happy. As soon as he can, he dives into travels and good food. Identità Golose's editor in chief