One presumes the late Queen’s permission was sought as to whether it was okay for Tom Parker Bowles to write a recipe book themed around the history of royal food. Though the man himself—author, cook, son, father, brother, stepbrother, godson, general family man, now at the heart of the family—can’t entirely recall how the process worked, but, yes, he definitely did ask, he says with a near-imperceptible eye roll. “Thanks for checking.”
“It was about when the late Queen’s jubilee was,” he recalls, of “running it up the flagpole” with the royal household in early 2022, and getting the official go-ahead to detail the eating habits of monarchs from Queen Victoria onwards (reader tip: get the aspic ready). “It was her final [jubilee]. I can’t remember which,” he recalls. “Diamond, maybe?” Platinum, Tom. “Platinum! That’s right.” He smiles, hyper-nonchalant, always respectful. Classic TPB.
We’re sat at the corner table (of course) of 45 Jermyn St (of course) at 11 a.m., a sodden St James’s looking untouched by time behind him. Two years on from getting the all-clear to pen Cooking & The Crown and now he is the son of a Queen himself (a scattering of Her Majesty’s recipes even appear—one is for porridge). It’s a turn of events that feels as soothing in its narrative arc as it does unimaginable when you compare it to his explosion into public life in the ’90s, back when King Charles III was his godfather (His Majesty married Camilla, Tom’s mother, in 2005) and being a rave-loving late teen who got recreationally high guaranteed a front page fever for the tabloids.
Oh, what a difference a decade or three makes. Now 49, a touch of the eternal partier remains. “I still look back on those raving days as some of the happiest of my life. It was ten thousand people in a warehouse, or a field, dancing together. I still love dance music, I still love Ibiza, but things are very different. I think DC10 has got a VIP area now.” He looks absolutely disgusted. “It’s appalling.”
Trips to the island—as he made this past summer—tend to involve one too many rosés at the villa now. Co-parenting (he has a teenage daughter and son with Sara Buys, a former fashion editor, who worked at Vogue early in her career), writing (he is the restaurant critic for the Mail on Sunday, among other gigs), television work (he pops up on Masterchef, and has filmed food shows in the US and Australia), to say nothing of the general slog of keeping one’s midlife going, don’t conspire for letting loose. Fifty looming, predictably he recently found himself on a health kick, though less relatably his began in the run-up to the Coronation last year (global television audience: 400 million).
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