'I Believe That The Future Is Female'

MasterChef South Africa finalist and entrepreneur, Claire Allen, chats to Julia Bain about her London pop-up restaurant, being the ‘Skinny Chef’, and her plans for the future

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Claire Allen, 31, grew up in the tiny town of Dundee, Kzn, before her family moved to cape town at the age of nine. She started her events management company Signature Productions during matric, before graduating from varsity college with a diploma in public relations. in 2014 she became a finalist on the third season of Masterchef South Africa, which helped her launch her career as a food entertainer. claire has appeared on Sabc3’s expresso, presented live at the Good Food & Wine Show, and, along with Masterchef South Africa runnerup Siphokazi Mdlankomo, she’s created her own live cooking show and Youtube channel, Short chef, Skinny chef. She also runs a social media content creation service, called hmmm delicious, under the Claire Allen brand. claire recently returned from a three-month trip to the UK, where she hosted Share a taste of home, a successful pop-up restaurant in London that served seven courses of South African food paired with drinks. claire lives in Fresnaye, cape town.

When I was a kid I wanted to be a model, a tv presenter, and host my own cooking show.

I used to pretend that I was cooking on my own show and I’d ‘present’ to the kitchen pass-through as if I were talking to a camera. My earliest memory of cooking was making fresh pasta with my cousin. My gran showed us where all the ingredients were and she let us try figure out the recipe, but we couldn’t understand the concept of pasta not being hard like the store-bought kind. My gran ended up having to step in and help us out – it didn’t taste great but you have to start somewhere!

I love that I experienced farm life while growing up.