ELIZABETH HAIGH
Half-Singaporean, half-British Elizabeth Haigh (née Allen) is a chef and personality behind a mouth-watering YouTube channel. She has appeared on the British version of the TV show MasterChef, has been awarded a Michelin star while Head Chef at the East London restaurant Pidgin, and is now focusing on developing Kaizen House, a restaurant and pop-up company, with her husband.
Photographed by MING TANG–EVANS
It’s a Sunday afternoon, I’ve just made a cup of tea, and I’m about to talk to Elizabeth Haigh on the phone. Haigh has flown in from Australia after a “tech-detox” holiday with her husband and her one-year-old baby, Riley. Travelling from Australia to the UK is a desperately long journey for anyone, let alone anyone flying with a young child. After any flight that’s longer than seven hours, I always completely flop as soon as I get home and don’t move for the next twelve hours. Not Haigh, though. Before the interview she’s already posted a new video on YouTube and her social media is abuzz because she has announced that she’s launching a dinner salon with famed sommelier Honey Spencer of Bastarda.
Haigh is like a modern-day superwoman. Not a superwoman in a cape-wearing, lightning-flashing kind of sense (though I’m sure a blow-torch in the kitchen must be fun to play with), but in the sense that she always has her next trick up her sleeve and you never know what it’s going to be. She is a woman of many hats (mother, chef, co-founder of Kaizen House with her partner, among other things). Her Instagram and Twitter handle is @the_modernchef, and it has a nice ring to it, sounding rather like a superhero moniker. It is an intriguing decision – what was modern yesterday is not necessarily modern today, so to choose that adjective to define your online persona is a bold move. But boldness seems to be Haigh’s style.
It might be surprising to learn that Haigh began training to be an architect at university, but it was the inspiration from her family that encouraged her to change career tracks. Growing up as a half-British, half-Singaporean young woman, Haigh says”in Singapore, everything is about food. Even if you haven’t seen someone in years, before you even ask how they are, you say, ‘Are you hungry?’” Her mother is a “great cook with a fantastic palate – a terrible chef because she’s not organised in the slightest, but a great cook,” she laughs. Haigh and her sisters were incredibly spoiled by her with freshly cooked meals of three or four dishes every day. It was “humble food”– steamed fish, rice, soups, and plenty of fresh vegetables. On Sundays, her dad cooked a traditional British Sunday roast every week.
University, on the other hand, was a shock to her system – her indigestive system, to be precise. After the purity of freshly steamed fish and vegetables from her mother’s kitchen, chips and microwave meals were a stunning new discovery. Apparently she had really never had chips before! She learned to adapt but became the resident chef amongst her friend groups and was constantly ringing her mum for family recipes. Straight out of university, Haigh did what anyone with good pals does: they dared each other to apply for reality TV shows. Haigh was dared to apply for MasterChef, and in response, she dared her friends to apply for Antiques Roadshow. As luck would have it, she was invited to go onto the show in 2011. She chuckles as she tells me that her friends were not so lucky and didn’t get invited onto Antiques Roadshow. “It was a bizarre experience,” she tells me. “I was flabbergasted by all the cameras, the pressure – but being around people who were that passionate about food was life-changing.” She was convinced that she wanted to go into the food world. Shortly afterwards she became a chef and never looked back.
After MasterChef, during a new era of social media growth and opportunity (Instagram in particular), Haigh began her career as a chef. Starting at the bottom, in restaurants in Windsor, she worked her way up to Michelin star restaurants. She became Head Chef at Smokehouse Islington in London under Neil Rankin. “I really got my hands into the nitty-gritty of smoking down meat and cooking over charcoal, which is hugely inspirational for the work I’m doing now at Kaizen House,” Haigh says. Indeed, one of the first pictures I saw of Haigh on social media was of her holding an entire goat carcass. She was asked to open Pidgin, a small restaurant in Hackney, East London, which won a Michelin star in 2016. Haigh says humbly that she achieved everything that she wanted to there and that this recognition was “the cherry on top – an incredible achievement for the team and me.” At Pidgin the menu changed every week, which was refreshing but challenging, allowing Haigh to explore and experiment different styles of cuisine. During her time at Pidgin, Haigh honed her own speciality and left the restaurant in order to develop that.
Haigh pauses to find the words to describe her own style. “It’s kind of a bastardisation or mix of modern European and modern Asian” – she interrupts herself to add that she hates the word “fusion” when describing food. “It’s too undescriptive,” she says dismissively. She defines her style as “refined Australian-Asian BBQ” which includes “fresh red meat, spicy Asian flavours cooked over fire, not a greasy BBQ.” She has a flair for quite simple food with lots of complexity. “There’s a saltiness and an acidity as well as the sweetness.” Her descriptions match the meaning of Shibui, the name of one of her new restaurant projects: “beauty and simplicity.”
Japanese culture and philosophy has always fascinated Haigh and because of my own Japanese heritage I’m curious to ask her about Shibui and her company Kaizen House. She has always felt inspired by the Japanese philosophy of kaizen, the process of refinement. “Seasoning is a practice of kaizen.” As a chef, she wants to look back on what she and her team did really well and perfect that. Her understanding of shibui refers to something that you’ve put your heart and soul into – for example, it’s used to describe textiles, pottery, design, and food. She admires Japanese cuisine for its values, being clean, precise, and putting ingredients first. “Even if you’re serving chicken, for instance, it is beautifully presented, precisely cut, and there is real respect for the food and ingredients.”
Haigh co-founded Kaizen House with her husband, Steele Haigh – on their website they call Kaizen their “concept incubator brainchild.” I ask her about how she and her husband juggle family life and running a business together. “It’s tough because all we talk about is work,” she says, and then adds a moment later, “But when your passion is your work it never feels like work.” Her husband does all of the photography, editing, and filmography. I question what he balances out on her side, checking for a glimpse of some kind of superhero weakness. Her kryptonite? “I hate spreadsheets, he loves spreadsheets. It’s good for me,” she laughs. “I hate Excel and he helps me round up my business plans. I’m more of the creative. And obviously, the chef.”
Elizebeth was photographed by Jo Fetto at her flat in Islington, London.
Dress by THREE FLOOR, ring & necklace are Elizabeth’s own.
Haigh has been the primary carer of Riley for a year and says that she feels very lucky. “Riley has been to more meetings and restaurant viewings than any other baby,” she tells me. “Luckily he’s a calm-minded baby, loves restaurants and the kitchen, and he’s a very social baby.” In other words, he’s undergoing early training to become the next generation’s superhero chef. Haigh and Steele try to keep a sense of unity and family alive on their YouTube channel. She admits that running a business is “always tough to do with a baby.” There’s no maternity cover for a freelance chef and self-employed business owner. In regards to their YouTube videos, in which Riley makes cameo appearances, “we do a lot of the filming at night, which is tough, but we then do a lot of the eating at night after we’ve made the videos too, so that’s fun.” She time-manages very carefully, and being with Riley makes it all worth it. If she returned to working in a restaurant, however, childcare would be trickier.
I ask Haigh what advice she would have for her younger self, and she takes a long pause. ”If I could tell my younger self anything, I think it’d be to stand up for myself a little bit more because I did let the bullying get to me and I shouldn’t have. Communicate with people around you about what you’re feeling and experiencing. Your emotional health is as important as your physical health. Emotional health in our industry is very important and shouldn’t be taken for granted. Taking a break should be fine.”
This seems especially relevant because the media promotes a stereotypical image of macho aggression in the kitchen, demonising the industry. “When you’re working hard in the kitchen, it’s called the ‘push-push,’ – you’ve got to be hands in, that’s why it’s called a push, but you’re not behaving like that constantly,” she explains. “It’s more interesting to see pans being thrown around on TV but that macho environment is not what people like to work in. A good chef is like gold, and you want to treat them well and keep them on – I love training and seeing chefs blossom.” With a mind to inclusivity, she also notes that “a lot of focus in the media is on the chefs, not on the maître d’s, the sommeliers, the whole team.”
Haigh loves working with others and we circle back to talking about Shibui and her upcoming project, working with Honey Spencer, a London-based sommelier, to create a special event featuring an indulgent five-course dinner with suitcase wines. Haigh loves to be ambitious creatively and does not let anything get in her way, including today’s obstacle: jet-lag. As we say our goodbyes, Haigh says in a sprightly manner, “better crack on with the roast this evening!” Of course. The modern chef flies on.
INTERVIEWER NAOMI MORRIS OMORI
STYLIST MARISSA JIAN
HAIR & MAKEUP SAORI TANNI
This profile was originally published in The WOW N° 1, 2019.
NAOMI MORRIS OMORI
Naomi is half-Japanese and half-British, a graduate of University of Oxford and has recently completed a Master’s in Contemporary Literature, Culture & Theory at King’s College London. She runs a blog exploring biculturalism, food, and the arts.