‘Retirement? Not for me’: meet the top chefs who won’t hang up their aprons
Head chef, Paradise at Daleside, Yorkshire
Frances Atkins has been cooking professionally almost every day for almost 40 years. Yet it remains an essential outlet. “It’s not about feeling useful. I can be very lazy. I need to do my job because that’s within me. I need to create. An artist needs to paint. I need to cook.”
“Age doesn’t come into it,” she says decisively. Atkins won’t specify hers (“what I put on the plate is what matters”), except to confirm she is past retirement age and has no intention of retiring. Instead, the Ilkley-born chef, who held a Michelin star at the Yorke Arms for 16 years, is now cooking six days a week at Paradise, near Harrogate.
Opened last year, thishandsome daytime cafe at Daleside Nurseries is a partnership between Atkins and her colleagues of more than 20 years, chef Roger Olive and manager John Tullett. After leaving the Yorke Arms in 2020, the trio wanted to cook in a simpler style, working shorter hours (Paradise’s only dinner service is on Fridays), but staying true to Atkins’s produce-led ethos of “uncomplicated natural flavours; showcasing the ingredient’s full beauty and all its potential expressions”.
The workload is still intense. Paradise might serve 80 at lunch with plates of, for example, cod with dill, coriander, charred cabbage and bergamot, or lime and ginger-seared scallops, artichoke, potato and apple. “I’m the first to admit, I get tired,” says Atkins. “It’s a hard week. I’m doing the same work as twice-my-size, 47-year-old [Olive]. But if you can get your sleep, you can survive. You manage yourself.”
Monday yoga helps with muscular aches and pains but, given Atkins chooses to work, she views exhaustion as a psychological issue. “You can wonder why you’re doing it.” The
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