Following a stint as a restaurant critic for "What's On?" (a precursor of Time Out), she moved to Oxford, where she set up the city's first espresso bar. Gravitating back to London, she worked as a sub-editor for Housewife magazine. In the 1960s she ran a hippie restaurant on Portobello Road and catered for many of the major pop festivals. In the 1970s she worked as a restaurant critic for Gault Millau and cooked for the actors at the Royal Court Theatre.