The notion of celebrity doesn’t sit easily with Allegra McEvedy. The lesbian chef’s career has flourished since she last spoke to DIVA in 2006, but the mere mention of the c-word gets her off her seat. ‘I am not a celebrity chef. What makes a celebrity chef?’ she asks. ‘It’s like putting two words together, like friendly fire — they sound good but they don’t mean anything. I hate celebrity.’

Eventually, we agree that she is quite a famous chef who is well respected. ‘If you say that I am respected and well known, that’s different. That really does make me happy, and respect from my peers makes me happy. But why “celebrity chef”? It just winds me up,’ she insists.

Currently, McEvedy is still busy promoting the first cookbook from Leon, the healthy fast-food restaurant chain she co-founded in 2004. Leon: Ingredients and Recipes, took a good couple of years to research and write, and hit the bookshelves in October 2008. It contains all the most popular recipes from Leon, plus a comprehensive and educational ingredients section. It’s a lovely, fun and colourful book — much like the Leon restaurants – and, in fact, much like Allegra herself.

Writing has become an important part of her career. ‘Being someone who fucked up at school — I got thrown out three weeks before my A-Levels — and who didn’t go to university, it is really nice to have come full circle,’ she says. ‘I’ve been successful, I’ve ended up writing books and writing for newspapers – and I now have letters after my name.’
The ‘letters’ she refers to is the MBE she went to collect at Buckingham Palace the week before our interview, and which few would have predicted when she got kicked out of St Paul’s School in Hammersmith, aged 16.
‘My mum had died the year before, I had just realised I was gay and it was all a bit much for me,’ McEvedy explains. ‘I just had trouble tattooed across my forehead, and I really tested the school.’
So, while her friends went off to university, Allegra headed to Manchester for what is known in her family as the ‘wilderness years’.

‘I went up to Manchester to do some general misbehaving away from my father’s eyes. The city had a great gay scene that London didn’t have in the early 1990s. There were these four or five gay bars and clubs all within walking distance of each other, and it was much more mixed, so we used to have these fantastic nights on the trawl,’ she remembers.
Her father, a psychiatrist and historian, let her get on with it. But when she came to London to meet him for lunch on her 21st birthday, talk turned to the future. ‘He did, at that point, look pretty drawn and disappointed. He just said to me, “You enjoy cooking and people like being around you. Why don’t you go to cookery school? Learn the kitchen bit, learn the front of house bit, and you can open a restaurant.” I just went, “Yeah, okay then.” So I totally fell into it.’

It soon became clear that in cheffing, McEvedy had found something she loved. After completing an intensive nine months of training at the Cordon Bleu cookery school, she got her first job in a restaurant. ‘I really liked that the kitchens were full of such mavericks. I liked the bonkers hours, the fact that you all had a drink together after service and I absolutely loved the stress,’ she recalls.
Going on to work for top London restaurants, including the River Café, Greens and the Belvedere, she got her break as head chef at the Cow in west London, aged 24. Then she left it all behind for New York.

‘I was born and bred in London, and apart from Manchester I had never lived anywhere else, so I just felt it was a good idea to take myself out of the equation for a while and get some life experience.’
Having proved she was ‘an alien of extraordinary ability in the culinary arts’ she secured a job at Robert de Niro’s Tribeca Grill in Manhattan. She loved it there. But running the kitchen in a gigantic restaurant, regularly doing 500 covers a night, also sowed the seeds for what would later be the Leon restaurant group. In a moment of epiphany, she realised that actually, she didn’t want to be serving up exclusive food to the rich and famous. She wanted to serve the best food to the most people.

With that in mind, on her return to London she set up a restaurant in a Notting Hill community centre. Later came the Good Cook restaurant, and in 2004, she opened the first branch of Leon in Carnaby Street, with partners Henry Dimbleby and John Vincent. Today, there are eight Leon restaurants throughout London, with two more to come in 2009. They do 50,000 transactions every week, and the focus is now on keeping the Leon identity. ‘It is a challenge to still keep the food tasting homemade, fresh and lovely,’ McEvedy admits. ‘It is very easy to lose that as you expand. That’s the most important thing for me.’
McEvedy is resident chef at the Guardian’s G2 magazine, where she also has a monthly blog. She’s been doing an increasing amount of television – later this year she’ll be appearing on another series of Supersizers on the BBC, and a regular primetime TV slot is in the pipeline.

If her professional life has settled down in recent years, so has her personal life. In May 2006 she married her partner, Susi, whom she met during her stint as Chef in Residence at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and who readers of Allegra’s various columns and blogs will be familiar with as ‘the missus.’
‘I have always been comfortable being out, because I think anything else really doesn’t help the cause,’ she says. ‘No one’s demonstrated that better than Daffyd in Little Britain. Often when people come across prejudice, it’s because they are not confident about their sexuality. If somebody is in two minds about you, and you come out but are apologetic about it, it feeds the prejudice. Then it’s, “Oh, yes. Filthy, dirty bastard homos.” I have always walked down the street holding my girl’s hand and given her a snog against the wall if that’s what I wanted to do. I feel that I have as much right to have a snog wherever you might see heterosexual couples kissing. That may be right or wrong, but it has always been my attitude,’ she says.

McEvedy reveals that she doesn’t know any other lesbian chefs. ‘There aren’t that many women in restaurant kitchens anyway, but I would have thought it’s nearly impossible to be gay and not be out in the kitchens. You’d have to tell a lot of porkies and live a double life to keep that charade up. These people become your friends, because you are honest and truthful with them. There’s not really anywhere to run and hide.’
The MBE, awarded to her for promoting affordable food and talking about ethical sourcing in the UK, has made her think about how she can use her profile to push for some positive changes.
‘I think we need some general balancing-out in the world,’ she explains. ‘Jamie Oliver has taken on the schools and how we eat, and I agree with him, but I’ve been doing some work with the Fairtrade Foundation. I went to Malawi with them. People there haven’t even got a roof over their heads, and when it’s monsoon season, everything they have gets ruined and they’re cooking over a fire. The experience particularly touched me.’

Although it is clear she enjoys doing good, the schoolgirl in her still digs her heels in at the notion of responsibility. ‘To me, “responsibility” makes it sound like a chore, something you don’t want to do.
I don’t feel like I owe it to anyone, but for me it is actually a source of joy, something that makes me so bloody happy. It’s about giving something back, but I don’t want to think of it as a responsibility because it is my choice,’ she says.
What must have really brought it home that she’d proven them all wrong was when the same school that threw her out asked her back last year to speak about careers.

‘At first I thought, “You must be having a fucking joke. Do you realise how hard you made it for me?”’ she admits. ‘But it’s a long time ago, so I went and spoke to the girls.
I would think that if I had any part to play as a role model, it would be to show that you don’t necessarily have to take the straight route to be a success. The majority of successful people have obviously worked very hard, but most of them have also pretty much taken a straight path. I’m proof that you can be successful even if you don’t.’

Leon: Ingredients & Recipes is out now from Conran Octopus, £20