Norfolk-based restaurateur Carla Phillips, who won the Sunday Times Cook of the Year competition in 1981 and later cooked for the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret, has died aged 88. She also volunteered at the Wells Community Kitchen, preparing free meals for local people.
From New York to Norfolk: A Culinary Journey
Born in New York, Carla was the daughter of Viola (née Lucofsky), a teacher and artist, and John-Bernard Schwedel, a cardiologist. Their home was part of the artistic, intellectual and leftwing circles of postwar Manhattan. After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science and Antioch College, she worked for Women's Wear Daily magazine in New York, saving enough money to relocate in the early 1960s to Paris, where the US dollar went a long way.
Enrolling in a course at the Sorbonne to study the language and civilisation of France, she lived on the Left Bank, discovered French cuisine and met an Englishman, Bernard Phillips, who was working for leftwing Catholic organisations there. They married in 1962, had their first child, returned briefly to New York for the birth of their second, then in 1965 settled in Burnham Overy Staithe in Norfolk, where Bernard helped to run his family's hotel, The Moorings. Two more children followed.
The Moorings Restaurant and Cook of the Year Triumph
Carla helped make the family home a place of extraordinary hospitality, and from that generosity grew a passion for food. Together she and Bernard ran a shellfish stall from 1977 to 1979 and catered informally for weddings, preparing everything in the ramshackle family kitchen. In 1981 she had become so accomplished that she entered the east of England heat of the Sunday Times competition. She won the final in London, judged by Claudia Roden and Robert Carrier, with a cold starter of Norfolk crab and samphire, with a tomato mayonnaise coulis. Antonio Carluccio, who went on to grander things, was runner-up.
In 1986, with her husband Bernard, she opened the Moorings restaurant in Wells-next-the-Sea, building menus around Norfolk ingredients while drawing inspiration from international cuisines. After selling the Moorings in 1998, she provided for birthdays, weddings and private dinners. Over the years she cooked for people from all walks of life, including local grandees such as Lady Margaret Douglas-Home and Lady Glenconner (Anne Tennant) and, on separate occasions, for the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret.
Community Involvement and Activism
Carla also raised her children and became involved in local projects, including the foundation in 1973 of a community playgroup, the Burnham Market nursery school, aimed at helping the wives of farm workers, which is still going today. In 1981, with Bernard, she set up a free monthly local publication, the Paper, providing community news, articles about political activism and pieces on local history and the arts, which was sold in 1983.
Active in Fakenham for Nuclear Disarmament, a branch of CND, Carla was a member of Norfolk Women For Life on Earth, participating in actions at Greenham Common. In 1984, with a group of female activists, she spent a week in Holloway prison for refusing to pay a criminal damage fine for cutting perimeter fence wires at the RAF Sculthorpe military base in Norfolk. She also wrote cookery columns for the Wells town magazine, The Quay, and was a volunteer at the Wells Community Kitchen, making free meals for local people.
Bernard died in 2008. Carla is survived by their children, Josephine, Diana, Aaron and a fourth child.
