Tina Pemberton

Chef/Owner, The Cafe at Brovey Lair

My restaurant is based in Norfolk UK - hence the English spelling. The following is a profile my PR sends out in his Press Pack: Tina Pemberton, who is fluent in 5 languages, spent over 15 years as a hotel and restaurant reviewer for airline and bank customer loyalty programmes. She claims to have dined in as many as 2,000 restaurants and stayedin more hotels than most people do in a lifetime. A lot of the hotels were superb she says but only a few of the restaurants were totally memorable. She has a remarkable and rare talent many chefs only aspire to which is the ability to taste a dish and recognise every ingredient. After many visits overseas she would return home and practice the recipes she had collected always adding her own signature and often improving on the original. Like some equally accomplished chefs Tina did not have a formal training. She says she has always had an affinity with fusion cooking and instinctively knows how to blend flavours with spices to produce some highly original tastes. Friends were unanimous in their efforts to persuade her to open a restaurant and at last in 2002 she created The Café at Brovey Lair, at a stunning property tucked away in the largely undiscovered Breckland fens close to Thetford forest in south Norfolk. In 2004 Tina was the only woman among 7chefs named by a national glossy as “pushing international barriers” along with Heston Blumenthal and Rainer Becker. She believes it is the food people come for though overnight guests also enjoy the luxury her contemporary suites offer. Because of her internationality she knows a thing or two about customer expectations having experienced every kind of accommodation, as she recalls, from a motel in Florida to the Jumeira Beach Hotel in Dubai with its 20 restaurants. The Good Food Guide 2008 endorses Tina’s cooking with a mark 5 for a fourth year while Michelin’s Red Guide writes about her “accomplished” cooking and “a unique dining experience.” Her restaurant was picked in September by The Times as one of 10 best pan-Asian in the UK and the Daily Telegraph in its review earlier this year described it as ‘a little gem’. In its summer selection Square Meal in conjunction with BMW motors chose Brovey Lair as one of its top 50 restaurants outside London. “It’s beyond my wildest expectations”, Tina explains. “I have always taken risks in life and I’ve chosen one of the most precarious professions. I believe we have a really special and unique product and, if we can support the time it takes to build the business, Brovey Lair will begin to attract food lovers from all over the country as well as visitors to the UK.