Meet Abigail Hill, London's Buzziest Chef With A Fresh Approach To Prove It
I only watched four episodes of The Bear before I began to feel too stressed,’ confesses Abigail Hill, the 30-year-old head chef at London’s Sessions Arts Club restaurant, while discussing the wildly successful kitchen drama that turned a spotlight on the joys and pains of being a chef. ‘There aren’t many kitchens that are like that anymore, but there are elements of it that ring true,’ she says. As the head chef of the creative crowd’s favourite eatery for the last 12 months, Hill too has found herself in the spotlight. ‘When people hear you’re a chef, they soon have 100 more questions,’ she laughs.
We’ve met on a terrace overlooking the 18th-century courthouse that’s now the restaurant’s home – the perfect vantage point to watch a busy service play out. Hill is taking the reins from her predecessor, friend and mentor Florence Knight (Knight left her role as head chef at the end of January 2024, with a new restaurant to be announced). It is a big task: Sessions Arts Club is a culinary favourite amongst fashion people, music makers and theatre lovers. Thankfully, all have fallen for Hill’s fresh approach to cooking, making her one of the most exciting figures on the food scene right now.
Hill’s approach is seasonal; she allows time each week to sit down with the restaurant's produce and rewrite recipes to work with what’s new in. Highlights on the menu today, she says, are a crab, galia, lovage and almond dish and a girolle and corn risotto. Each plate is an explosion of vibrant colours against milky solutions, with a fresh execution. ‘If you’re treating things with respect, then they’re going to taste good,’ she says. ‘Our style isn’t fine dining, but it has to have a thing that’s a bit different, a bit stylish. Sometimes it’s in the plating, sometimes it’s in the ingredients. It all starts for me by touching, peeling, cutting.’
Hill’s favourite ingredients to play with grow near the restaurant. ‘The fig trees rarely muster up anything more than unripe, tasteless fruit, but the leaves are always bountiful and offer a moreish, hard-to-place scent that can be infused in anything, from oils to creamy desserts,’ she shares enthusiastically. Soon enough, a fig-infused cordial arrives for me to try. Had we met in other circumstances, I might have wondered if her classic chef’s whites were from the new drop by Phoebe Philo, here worn layered over a simple white vest top, with Bottega-like silver earrings (to be removed before service, she says) and chunky work boots.
Food runs in Hill’s family. She grew up on a working farm in Buckinghamshire, where a clear understanding of, and passion for, produce was fine-tuned by hours spent in the kitchen with her mum, a professional chef before her. ‘My parents are big entertainers and nothing is ever too much for them when it comes to having people over. So hospitality has just been intrinsically built into me,’ she shares. ‘It was always about feeding people by making the best of what we had, like great beef and lamb, rather than trying incredible recipes.’
Hill trained in Paris, moving from England to study at Le Cordon Bleu as her friends all went to university. ‘I decided that I was going to do the cooking thing. My parents were super supportive,’ she says. Hill stayed in Paris, working in kitchens straight after, including Bones, a trendy take on Parisian gastronomy from Australian chef James Henry. ‘Being in Paris, surrounded by their culture of food, opened my eyes to a lot of things. Food in that city runs through the veins of every person. It’s their whole lives, but it was also the first time I remember feeling so out of my depth. I knew that either it would be terrible or it would be good, but I’d learn something whatever,’ she says. ‘In the end, all those things were true. I learnt a lot about food, but in a lot of ways, I learnt more about work and being under pressure.’
Hill lives 10 minutes from the restaurant in King’s Cross. After service, she seldom cooks for herself at home. ‘I love all the old classics like Ciao Bella, and love that I live close to a Roti King.’ Even when she’s in her own kitchen, the finesse of Sessions rarely makes an appearance. ‘I do crave a lot of vegetables, but I’m sad to say that tends to mean frozen peas by the mass,’ she laughs. ‘The best thing about being the one who cooks is I’ll usually have my boyfriend to do the washing up.’
Throughout our conversation, we’re regularly interrupted by her team, popping by to enquire about that evening’s service. Each visit is its own testament to the work culture Hill has built, her exacting taste, but also the breadth of a head chef’s workload.
‘We were in the kitchen testing recipes yesterday and I found myself looking at the team and just thought, “this is so cool,”’ Hill says. ‘We’re a team that doesn’t look like you’d expect in a big kitchen like this. We’ve got so many women, people from all over the world, of all different sexualities. Everyone is just being nice to each other.’
Of the toxic, male reputation her industry has, Hill is adamant that things are shifting forward, away from the stereotypes and yells on The Bear. ‘I’m not the conventional head chef. I’m trying to lead from a place of trust, kindness and creativity.’
Sessions Arts Club is at 4 Clerkenwell Green, London EC1R 0NA
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