Clio Tegal
Make Yourself Comfortable - British Style

Although brought up in London, the one food Clio never ate at home was English. Growing up in London and Greece, with an American mother and a Czech father, with her parents having lived in Turkey and Greece before Clio was born, the food she grew up with was eclectic, never boring, and always home made. "I was taught that everything you ate, you made from scratch. To the point where when I made my first cheesecake, I baked the graham crackers (using real graham flour) beforehand to use for the base. Anything less, my mother considered not truly home made!" With a paternal Czech grandmother who baked up a storm, and a mother from Baltimore who was a phenomenal cook, Clio grew up eating Middle Eastern, Japanese, Greek, Italian, French, American and Latin American food. Clio ran a North African restaurant for several years in London for which she made several trips to Morocco, and never traveled to a country where she didn't pick up at least one recipe, be it chimichurri from Peru, kofte kebabs from Morocco, or souvlaki from Greece. When it comes to eating out, Clio's two rules are unprocessed food, and if the ingredients aren't what she would use to cook it herself at home, then it's not worth eating. "I have never not cooked my own dinner. Even after a long day at work, it's just ingrained in me to come home and cook my own food. Besides, what better meal than one you cooked yourself? It's always what you want, made just how you want it."