Leon: Ingredients & Recipes By Allegra McEvedy | Used | 9781840915020 (2024)

'Leon serves food that is fresh, seasonal, locally sources and really good. The twist is that your food is served really fast. The double twist is how delicious it is.' - Vogue

The first Leon restaurant, in London's Carnaby Street, opened its doors in July 2004. For its founders - Henry Dimbleby, John Vincent and Allegra McEvedy - the aim was to change the face of fast food, by bringing fresh, wholesome cooking to the high street. Six months later, Leon was named the Best New Restaurant in Great Britain at the Observer Food Monthly Awards. The menu is based around bold flavours, using simply-cooked fresh, local, natural ingredients with an emphasis on seasonal dishes; it also reflects how our eating habits change as the daylight house get longer and shorter.
This is a book of two halves. The Ingredients Book arms you with everything you need to know about the basic building blocks of any recipe. LEON chooses its ingredients above all for their flavour and healthiness but also with a view to the world we live in, so that such shark-infested waters as sustainable fish are tackled and easy to navigate. LEON's top 250 fruits, vegetables, fish, meats, dairy and store cupboard ingredients are all given their own entries. Nutrition, a bit of history, flavour and the best way to get the most out of them are all covered, seasoned with a fair amount of random miscellany.

The second half is The Recipe Book, where you can put your newly found knowledge of ingredients to great use with over 140 recipes: some are familiar favourites taken from LEON's menus such as the Original Superfood Salad, Moroccan Meatballs or Magic Mackerel Couscous and, for LEON Lovers everywhere, at last a recipe for the coveted LEON Better Brownie. Plus there are some recipes from the founders, their friends and those who helped make LEON what it is today, like Fred's Millennium Octopus and David Dimbleby's Spanish Omelette.

LEON's food message is a simple and honest one - cook and eat with the best ingredients available and don't forget the naughty bits that are so necessary for a fully-rounded life.

When Henry Dimbleby, John Vincent and Allegra McEvedy opened their first restaurant on London's Carnaby Street in July 2004 their aim was to change the face of fast food. Six months after opening, Leon was named the Best New Restaurant in Great Britain at the Observer Food Monthly Awards (by a judging panel that included Rick Stein, Gordon Ramsay, Nigel Slater, Heston Blumenthal, Ruth Rogers and Jay Rayner).

There are now 43 Leon restaurants.

Allegra McEvedy is a chef, writer, broadcaster and culinary explorer. She has been cooking professionally for 20 years, doing her apprenticeship in some of London's best restaurants, before packing up her knives and moving to the US. After working in New York and San Francisco, she came back and opened The Good Cook in a London community centre, with her ethos of 'the best food to the most people'. In 2000 she became Chef-in-Residence at The ICA, leaving in 2003 to co-found LEON.

She has had weekly columns in the Evening Standard and the Guardian and is a regular guest presenter on BBC Radio 4's Loose Ends. As well as appearing on a miscellany of television shows, in summer 2009 Allegra co-presented Economy Gastronomy, a BBC series about spending less and using ingredients wisely. Her books include The Good Cook (2000), Allegra McEvedy's Colour Cookbook (2006, winner of an IACP award), Bought, Borrowed & Stolen and the best-selling Economy Gastronomy (2009).

Allegra is a spokesperson for the Fairtrade Foundation and in 2008 was awarded the MBE for services to the hospitality industry.