Leiths School of Food and Wine

Prudence Margaret "Prue" Leith, CBE, DL (born 18 February 1940) has been a restaurateur, caterer, television presenter/broadcaster, businesswoman, journalist, cookery writer and novelist. She was born in South Africa, but her working life has been spent mostly in London. She is Chancellor of Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh. In March 2017, she was confirmed as a judge for The Great British Bake Off after Mary Berry had left the show.

Her father Sam worked for African Explosives, a subsidiary of ICI producing dynamite for use in mines and ultimately served as a director. Her mother, Margaret 'Peggy' Inglis, was South Africa's best known actress of her time. From the age of five until she was 17, Leith attended St Mary's School, Waverley; an English independent private boarding school for girls in Johannesburg run by Anglican nuns. She left with a first class matriculation and studied at Cape Town University where she failed to follow for any length of time courses in drama, fine art, architecture or French. She persuaded her parents to allow her to attend the Sorbonne (formally, the University of Paris), ostensibly to better learn French while studying the Cours de Civilisation Française. While in Paris, she finally realised she wanted a career in the premium food industry.

In 1960, Leith moved to London to attend the Cordon Bleu Cookery School and then began a business supplying high quality business lunches. This grew to become Leith's Good Food, a party and event caterer. In 1969, she opened Leith's, her Michelin starred restaurant in Notting Hill, eventually selling it in 1995. In 1975, she founded Leith's School of Food and Wine which trains professional chefs and amateur cooks. The group reached a turnover of £15m in 1993, which she then sold. In 1995, she helped found the Prue Leith College, (since renamed Prue Leith Chef's Academy) in South Africa.

...
Wikipedia