Thoroughly good eggs

Tom Parker Bowles meets the mother-and-daughter connoisseurs who supply ethically farmed caviar to the Crown

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WHEN I started out, I really didn't like caviar,' confesses Laura King with a smile. 'In fact, I hated the stuff.' Which wasn't exactly the ideal start for a career spent selling the most expensive fish eggs on earth.

But now, 30 years later, King's Fine Food is the UK's largest importer of caviar, with a turnover of nearly $3 million. 'I must have tried thousands of varieties and have come to love and appreciate caviar. But I still get so excited when trying out new batches.' It's a couple of weeks before Christmas and King's headquarters, on a small, nondescript Twickenham industrial estate, is deep into its busiest time of the year. Every surface is covered with boxes, labels and invoices and in vast fridges, hundreds of different-sized tins-from tiny, two-bite 10g minis, to mighty 1kg monoliths-are piled up, ready to be couriered to the likes of Fortnum & Mason, Harrods, Claridge's, The Ritz and Scott's.

'Everyone mucks in here, from taking pallets to the tip to packing and labelling,' says Mrs King, clad in a hairnet and white coat, and sitting behind a vast 1.8kg tub of Belgian Oscietra caviar. She's been decanting the contents into smaller tins and it takes all my resolve not to dive headfirst into that slategrey mass of gloriously gleaming eggs. For the caviar lover, this place really is Nirvana. But Mrs King seems to read my mind. 'It's hard work,' she notes, and not at all glamorous.