Angela Hartnett

ANGELA HARTNETT was born in Kent in 1968 to an Irish sailor father in the Merchant Navy and a Welsh mother, whose parents were immigrants from Bardi in Italy. After her father died when she was eight, Hartnett and her siblings were brought up by their Italian maternal grandmother while their mother worked long hours as a dinner lady and nanny. Hartnett herself spent a year as an au pair in Italy before graduating with a degree in history from Cambridge Polytechnic.

Hartnett turned to gastronomy relatively late and learnt on the job at a hotel in Cambridge and then at the Sandy Lane Hotel restaurant in Barbados. In 1994, she returned to the UK, and began working alongside Marcus Wareing at Gordon Ramsay's first restaurant, Aubergine. She went on to support Ramsay at Zafferano and L'Oranger, then joining Wareing as his sous chef at Petrus. After launching Amaryllis in Scotland with David Dempsey in 2001, Hartnett helped with the launch of Ramsay's Verre in Dubai.

In 2003, Hartnett won the 'Best Newcomer Award' and the Square Meal Guides’ BMW Best New Restaurant award for the two restaurants at The Connaught. A year later, she achieved her first Michelin star. In early 2007, she was awarded an MBE for Services to the Hospitality Industry. That same year, she opened Cielo, a Ramsay Group restaurant in Boca Raton and made her first television appearance in the first series of ITV1's Hell's Kitchen, also alongside Ramsay. She later went on to star in the BBC's Kitchen Criminals and Take On The Takeaway.

The Connaught Hotel closed in September 2007 and, in August 2008, Hartnett launched Murano, a fine-dining Italian restaurant in Mayfair. This was followed a month later by the York and Albany pub, close to Regent's Park

Hartnett is also author of Cucina: Three Generations of Italian Family Cooking.