Alastair Little, a well-known British chef, died in Sydney on August 2, 2022. He was 72 years old. In the 1980s, his famous Soho restaurant and appearances on British TV helped him get known.
So far, we don’t know what caused Little’s death, and we don’t have many details about his funeral.
His father was an officer in the British navy, and both his mother and grandmother were well-known chefs. At the age of 11, he went to a boarding school. At Downing College, Cambridge, he studied social anthropology and archeology. During his last year, Little lived in an old friary and cooked in the kitchen.
He first wanted to be a film editor, so he started working as a messenger at a Soho film studio. He worked as a waiter at Small’s, a café in Knightsbridge, and later became the place’s assistant manager.
Little also worked at the Old Compton Wine Bar in 1976. When the chef left, he was hired to replace him and kept the menu simple.
He then worked in a few more restaurants and used Marcella Hazan’s Classic Italian Cookbook to learn about Italian food. He met Kirsten Pedersen and Mercedes Andre-Vega while working at 192. In 1985, the three of them opened a restaurant called Alastair Little on Frith Street in Soho.
People thought the restaurant was unique because it only served soup, salad, fresh fish, meat, and desserts. There were no tablecloths and the menu changed twice a day. Customers were given paper napkins, and they could see what was going on in the kitchen from the dining room. In 1995, the three of them opened a second restaurant with the same name in Ladbroke Grove, which is in West London.
But the partnership ended in 2002, and Alastair then opened a deli in Notting Hill, West London, called Tavola. In 2017, he and his wife Sharon moved to Sydney and opened a pop-up restaurant called Little Bistro. Little was also a co-owner of the Potts Point restaurant Et Al. Little started a service called ByAlastairLittle in 2019 to deliver things to people’s homes.
In addition to being a well-known chef, he wrote for The Guardian and Noble Rot. Little has also been on Masterchef, Hot Chefs, and Ready Steady Cook, among other shows.
In 1998, photographer Barry Madsen took a picture of him. That picture is now on display at London’s National Portrait Gallery.
People pay their respects on Twitter
Alastair Little became well-known over the years for how well he cooked, and many journalists and other chefs praised his work. When people heard that he had died, there were a lot of tributes on Twitter.
People called him one of the “trailblazing chefs,” and others remembered eating at his restaurant. This shows that the chef had a big impact on many people’s lives.