Angela Hartnett brings the taste of Italy to our 12-day street food festival

Acclaimed chef Angela Hartnett is to bring her Michelin-starred skills to Britain’s biggest ever street food festival in June.

The founder and executive chef at Mayfair’s Murano, famed for her Italian-influenced cooking, has also been named the 2017 London Food Month Hero for her decades of trail-blazing achievement in the capital’s competitive gastronomic scene.

She will showcase dishes from all her restaurants in rotation at a stall at the London Food Month’s Night Market in Perks Field in Kensington. The Angela Hartnett London Food Month Hero Kitchen will be one of about 50 stalls serving food at the market, which runs from June 7 to 18 over 12 evening and two daytime sessions, each with a capacity of 10,000.

​Hartnett, 48, said she and her team would be doing food preparation at the stall because “that is much more interactive than just heating tray-loads of food”. She added: There are lots of different food festivals around the country but never a proper one in the middle of the city like this because the logistics are so hard. I think it will be really exciting.”

Pop-up street food versions of her four restaurants — Murano, Cafe Murano St James, Cafe Murano Covent Garden and Merchant Tavern Shoreditch — will all take turns over the 12 days of the Night Market. There will also be guest appearances from Murano’s former head pastry chef Sanjay Gour and current head chef Pip Lacey. Dishes will include salt cod fritters from Cafe Murano, roast quail aioli from Merchants, Murano rabbit tortellini, and Murano cannoli pistachio vanilla.

​Hartnett grew up cooking alongside her Italian grandmother and aunts and started her career in London with a one-day trial at Gordon Ramsay’s first restaurant Aubergine in 1994.

She made her name as chef patron at The Connaught, where she won her first Michelin star aged 36. She launched Murano in 2008 before leaving Ramsay’s stable two years later.

Grace Dent, one of the two creative directors of London Food Month, said: “When I think of Angela, I think of this incredible, whip-smart, force of nature in charge of her own empire, cycling around London between her many restaurants, fizzing with ideas.

“Angela combines classic, old-school technique and hospitality with a true passion for everything fresh, frightening and as yet undiscovered about London. She is London Food Month distilled in one human being and for that reason, she is our very first hero.”