You can tell a lot about a chef by the way they treat a potato. To Clare Smyth, who grew up in County Antrim, Northern Ireland, potatoes were their own daily religion. In more than 20 years working in professional kitchens, Smyth developed a ritual of eating a cooked one “plain” with salt and pepper before service. So it is fitting the humble tuber gets star billing on the menu of her first restaurant.

“We work with a guy who grows really amazing Charlotte potatoes in Sussex and we’re really celebrating that little potato, cooking it in seaweed — growing up in Ireland we’d always eat dulse. We’re serving it with herring and trout roe, not caviar, and with fermented potato crisp — I eat salt-and-vinegar ingredients all the time, so it’s a joke. It’s looking beyond foie gras, truffles — and we’ve not got turbot or pigeon on this first menu draft. This is where I’m at. I’ve served all the caviar in the world.”

Smyth can claim to be one of the best chefs working in the UK. For more than a decade she ran the kitchen team and consulted for the three-Michelin-star Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in Chelsea, but now she is putting her own name above the door. Core by Clare Smyth is the result, which to her signifies “the heart, the seed of something new; it’s been my life’s work to get to this point.” The project was “sitting in me and I had to do it”, she says in a cool, firm voice that one can imagine paying sharp attention to in a kitchen. “I’m so passionate about this industry. The fact that casual dining has taken off as a trend is a fact but it’s up to us to take fine dining forward.”