A taste of Silvena

With her agate blue eyes, and a shock of spiky platinum blonde hair that adds inches to her 6ft frame, Silvena Rowe is hard to miss – not that you’d want to. The outspoken chef, who’s already a favourite among fans of Saturday Kitchen, is about to go global. She’s one of the hottest chefs in Britain, with projects aplenty on the boil, including a new cookbook, Orient Express, that’s so lushly beautiful it would tempt the pickiest of eaters. In June she flew to LA to film the pilot of Time Machine Chefs for ABC. Pitched as a rival for MasterChef and US reality competition Top Chef, it will challenge contestants to cook dishes from different eras – and Rowe will be among the panel of judges rating the results.

It’s hard to know where she found the time to make the trip, though. Last month also saw her launch Quince, in London’s Mayfair Hotel. The vast space was completely revamped to her specifications – she asked for warm colours and a “sexy” open-plan kitchen – by Martin Brudnizki, one of the biggest names in the business. The menu abounds in the rich and varied flavours that are the hallmarks of her Ottoman background (she’s half Turkish, half Bulgarian).

The two words that best describe Rowe, who is in her late forties, are sensuous and passionate. Introducing her cookbook, Purple Citrus & Sweet Perfume, Heston Blumenthal writes: “Everything she does, be it writing, broadcasting or cooking, she approaches with the same boundless energy and enthusiasm and her infectious passion is impossible to resist.” Ask her a question about food and she’s off, there’s hardly a pause for breath, while her lilting accent bestows every ingredient with added exoticism. This is a chef whose avowed mission is “to find the G-spot in food”, and who insists that a meal without dessert is like sex without orgasm.

We met on a press trip years ago, when Britain was seeing an influx of Eastern European immigrants. Our conversation focused on the culinary heritage of her native Bulgaria – borscht, perogi and the like. With Feasts, she presented that cuisine to a Western audience, winning a Glenfiddich award for the book in the process. But with the passing years, Rowe’s focus has shifted. She reconnected with her Turkish roots and began making foodie pilgrimages to Damascus, Istanbul, Ankara, Beirut, Aleppo, Cairo and Amman to soak up recipes, source ingredients and observe methods.

“I lost my father, and this shook me a lot, and brought me back to his roots,” she says. “We’ve done Tuscany, we’ve done the south of France, we’ve done a chalet in the mountain somewhere, now it’s time to explore the farther Eastern Mediterranean shores, the Bosporus, the Adriatic. My father was Turkish and my mother’s Bulgarian, but remember, Bulgaria was under Turkish rule for 500 years, and my home town, Plovdiv, has always been very Turkish influenced because it’s only 375km from Istanbul. In Communist days the two cultures were not mixed, but now the food, the habits, and certain parts of the language are similar.”

Rowe never planned to be a chef, and studied library science. But food was always important. Her father was a passionate home cook, using recipes he’d learned from his mother. In Orient Express she describes sitting at her father’s knee as he read to her from One Thousand and One Nights: “My imagination ran wildly through the treasures of the bazaars and spice markets that the characters inhabited. To my young self, none of it seemed all that far removed from reality, as my father was descended from a long line of aristocratic Turks and I’d grown up eating the sort of dishes the sultans of the stories would have enjoyed. The flavours of those markets were never far from my palate.”

In her late teens she met Malcolm Rowe, an Englishman, fell in love and moved to Britain, where she’s lived ever since. She and her husband have two adult sons.

Even if she becomes a television star in America she will be eating, sleeping, and dreaming Quince. “I can’t just give another chef my recipes and expect them to know how to cook them. I want to make sure the standards are as they should be. It’s my food, and I’ll be cooking it,” she insists.

To prepare herself, she spent time shadowing iconic US chef Mario Batalli in Manhattan. “He is fabulous. I have been three times, because I wanted to see his front and back of house systems, and how the kitchen works. We saw a very interesting system of training the staff on a daily basis, so we are going to be doing the same thing. All the food at Quince will be food I’ve seen on my travels, and food I was brought up with, but with a very strong Westernised emphasis, so that it is modern and light.” Rice will feature heavily, for not only is it her favourite food, it’s one of her signature dishes. “I have a feeling for rice,” she says, matter of factly informing me that her pilafs are “to die for. It’s how you treat the grains. Rice is the ultimate source of umami, because it contains so much goodness. If I can I will eat rice every day – I’m insatiable about rice.”

Rowe is appearing today at Taste of Edinburgh in The Meadows. And who knows which budding restaurateurs she might inspire while in Scotland? As she jokes, never in a million years did she dream you could go from being a greedy child to a professional chef.

Visit www.tasteofedinburgh.co.uk for more information, Rowe’s newest cookbook, Orient Express, is out now from Hutchinson, priced £20. Quince is within the Mayfair Hotel, 70 Stratton Street, London W1J 8LA, tel: [phone], www.quincelondon.com