Fergus and Margot Henderson Win GQ Food Award

Briton Fergus Henderson is the godfather of nose-to-tail eating, New Zealander Margot Henderson the queen of understated, delicious cooking: the winners of the GQ Food & Drink Awards 2022 Editor’s Special Award have shaped Britain’s culinary landscape in their own gastronomic image, Natalie Whittle reports for the magazine.

If the restaurant world is a churn of fads and must-book tables, Margot and Fergus Henderson are the antithesis, utterly unchained to fashionable ideas, instead holding fast to a simple creed of good ingredients, well prepared. Rochelle is convivial, elbow-to-elbow dining on canteen tables, whereas St John is more restrained, the dining room encircled by waiters in white mess jackets. But they both have in common an old-fashioned, almost thrifty approach to cooking in which there is no frippery, no wastage and all the menus are written fresh each day. Margot reminds me of the exiled French chef in the 1987 film Babette’s Feast who slowly seduces an entire Lutheran village away from their extreme piety with her fish soup, before changing their lives with one umpteen-course banquet, Whittle writes.

Margot Henderson, 58, was born in Wellington.

Original article by Natalie Whittle, GQ, May 3, 2022.

Photo by Charlie Cummings.