Bon Appe-Tote, Your Best Bets For Winning And Dining At Royal Ascot

Is it just me or do you remember what you ate at Royal Ascot almost as much as the horses who won? The pre-match picnics and asparagus rolled in soggy brown bread, picking flies out of warm Champagne, dribbling mint-choc-chip down a once-a-year waistcoat and forgetting about it until the following June, smuggling yourself into a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend's box in time for a swollen-footed tea, then ricocheting across Car Park One from gazebo to car-boot for ever more misguided imbibements; and, eventually, the agonising walk into a service station on the M25 for Big Macs and chocolate and crisps, bedecked in race badges and ridiculous trousers and trying hard not to look like the bumbling toff who used to have to spit-shine Jacob Rees-Mogg's brogues at Eton.

There was the year four of us serious-minded industry professionals spent an entire afternoon teetering on bar stools with numerous bottles of Bolly and several plastic boxes of almost-as-plastic seafood and didn't see even one actual live horse until it was time to stop laughing, mop ourselves up and find our way home. Absolutely no idea what won. Or the time I was fed a pissaladière so perfect that I had to nab seconds from the picnic basket and stuff it in my pocket to eat later down by the track: never have I been so happy to be hampered in the final furlong.

My wife, a newspaper fashion journalist, once spent the whole of Ladies Day quite literally in the Ladies, reporting the behind-closed-doors gossip and impending style disasters as they happened. But even she didn't enjoy herself as much as when, a few years back, I bumped into an American chum in the queue for racecards and had the good fortune to be whisked away to a super fancy grandstand restaurant where, can you believe, a Michelin-starred chef served us never-ending fingerfuls of fairy-dust-sprinkled deliciousness while we gazed down on the sport from a balcony on the fifth floor, so high you feel you could reach over and pick your horse up like a small toy and place him in the lead.

That chef, it turns out, was Phil Howard, for decades the two-star chef patron of The Square in Mayfair, who was cooking in the Royal Ascot restaurant now called 'ON 5' for the first time. And I was dining, as it also turns out, not as the guest of my big-mouthed bonne vivante Bel Air babe buddy but, in fact, of her English Rose companion for the day, Kirsty Stanley-Hughes, who has the nearly unique profession of being a gastronomic talent agent, finding gigs for her constellation of multiple-Michelin-starred gourmets to cook in amazing places and at glittering events all around the world.

I called Kirsty last week ('Ah yes, all my racing friends seem to get in touch at this time of the year!') and, as I tried not to lick my lips too much, she told me she will have five chefs at Royal Ascot in June, the racecourse having developed new restaurants in old places (Holyroodhouse, the Old Press Room, the Pavonian), as well as serving racegoers on the Royal Enclosure lawns and on the infield and up on my cherished fifth floor. All her culinary luminaries have got day jobs (and, notoriously, long-into-the-night jobs) in some extremely upmarket addresses, and as she ticks off their form and pedigrees it's very tempting to abandon the idea of going to Royal Ascot for the racing and just be completely singleminded about lunch. Nieves Barragàn Mohacho has a Michelin star for her work at her own restaurant Sabor, just off Regent Street in the centre of London, and will be serving Spanish cuisine, champagne and sangria in the Queen Anne Enclosure overlooking the racecourse; her tapas-influenced tasting menu will be hot to trot with all the comings and goings of race day. The Old Press Room, where my wife once typed up her notes, has been converted into an exclusive space for just 40 diners, where the many-starred Tom Barnes–exec chef at Simon Rogan's celebrated Lake District bolthole L'Enclume–will be on duty, bringing his sommelier team with him to arrange hold-the-front-page wine pairings. His boss, meanwhile, is hosting at ON 5, where, I'm told, at least one long-in-the-tooth owner-breeder has relocated from his own private box on account of the sumptuousness of the setting and the splendiferousness of Chef Rogan's three Michelin star offerings.

Kirsty herself is as steeped in racing's traditions as any respectable jus is in half-decent claret. Her grandfather, George Owen, won a pre-war Cheltenham Gold Cup as a jockey, and a postwar Grand National as a trainer, when crime writer Dick Francis was, of all things, his secretary. Charlie Milbank, trainer of the upset 1980 French Derby winner Policeman, is her uncle. It was through Charlie that Kirsty started working in racing in Chantilly. Well, I say, 'working in racing': she was a door-to-door debt collector for a satellite dish company, picking up unpaid subscriptions to the British bookmakers' live feed.

By force of personality and a keen taste for fine living, Kirsty ended up as 'the girl with the keys to the Dom Perignon cellar'. Her job was to arrange for the best of chefs to be flown out in the Dom Perignon private jet and come and cook in the Dom Perignon private chateau. The idea was to source exactly the right vintage for each dish and not to stop until you'd found it. Well, you wouldn't want to get it wrong, would you? (You can quite see why she's made to measure for Royal Ascot. The perfect pairing.)

That, plainly, couldn't possibly last long into the 21st Century, and poor Kirsty now has to work for a living. Well, I say, 'work for a living': she goes around beautiful cities eating in splendid restaurants procuring brilliant young chefs, then spiriting them away to championship sporting events to cook for adoring hedonists. Well, somebody's got to do it.

Back to Royal Ascot, 2022. Stanley-Hughes says, “The director in charge, Jonathan Parker, is 100% pivotal to why Ascot has so many incredible restaurants. The lovely JP used to be at Wimbledon–now he's my partner in crime!”

Two-star Brett Graham, the Australian co-proprietor of Phil Howard's The Ledbury in west London, is cooking in Holyroodhouse, with a balcony overlooking the Royal Enclosure gardens, and Ollie Dabbous, co-founder of the Michelin-starred Hide, on Piccadilly, is holding court in yet another new Royal Enclosure setting, The Sandringham, modelled, I'm told, on an English country orchard. The deal is Kirsty brings her chefs–complete with front-of-house and all the sous chefs and pastry chefs, commis chefs and station chefs they desire–and JP stumps up for them and provides the waiting staff. 'I do have to make sure they all behave,' she says, before adding, disappointingly, 'But I don't have a single tricky chef on my books.'

When Charles Dickens wrote about the 1851 Derby, he reported that there were 350 pigeon pies and 'a large tub and a birch broom for mixing the salad'. That exceeds the number of pigeon pies at Royal Ascot 2022 by some 350 and the number of birch brooms to mix salad by precisely one. The racecourse puts up all the chefs locally, and–however much Kirsty protests–chefs will be chefs. Last year, by some accounts, it got just a little spicy and we've all seen enough Gordon Ramsay shows to know that a fly-on-the-wall commission to report from their hotel bar on Friday night, after a full week slaving over a hot stove, would be just the job for any journalist who can't face spending the afternoon with my wife in the lavatory.

So, with the hors d'oeuvre more like horse d'oeuvre and the starters under orders, I wish you happy racing and happy lunching–bon appe-tote!–and much winning and dining at the chef's table of Kirsty's chef stable.

To book lunch in one of the Royal Ascot restaurants, go to www.ascot.com and click on the link for 'fine-dining'. If you need a Michelin-starred chef (or five) at your international race meeting or major sporting event, go to www.kshmanagement.com.