Charles and William’s row over BURGERS, Diana’s secrets & Queen’s treats – royal chef reveals all
NO ONE knows the inner workings of palace life quite like a royal chef.
Mervyn Wycherley, who worked at the palace for 33 years, has lifted the lid on his time at the palace, including how King Charles and Prince William had a row over burgers.
Speaking on The Sun’s Royal Exclusive show, Mervyn also shared what it was really like working for the late Princess Diana, and the treat he would make the Queen.
The burger incident, Ken revealed, was a “treat” for Prince William as he didn’t always get to eat that type of food.
Former royal protection officer Ken Wharfe recalled: “I remember the Prince – now King – was very peculiar about the food that he wanted, and what his family and the staff to eat.
“As William got older, he was very keen to go to burger bars and pizza places, but that didn’t really sit that comfortably with his father.
“And I remember coming back from the pizza place and the burger bar in Kensington High Street, which was Bill Wyman’s place, The Rolling Stones, The Sticky Fingers.
“And William came back, and the prince was there, he said, ‘Oh, where have you been?’
“He said, ‘Oh papa we just had his amazing burgers’.
“And there was this sort of look of disdain with him across the prince’s face.
“And he said, ‘I don’t know why you eat that food when I have this marvelous army of chefs at Kensington Palace’.
“I think he probably now realises that’s how it was in the late 80s and 90s.
“Diana really wanted to experiment, away from Mervyn’s food at the palace at that time.”
Chef Mervyn added: “They really didn’t often do that sort of thing, all their friends used to do it.
“They stuck at home and had real nursery food, treacle tart and things like that.”
Diana would eat in the kitchens
Mervyn explained that the likes of the Queen, Charles and Diana would get a menu book to choose their meals from each week.
However, while this may seem fairly formal, Princess Diana liked to enjoy a down-to-earth mealtime.
Former Royal Protection Officer Ken Wharfe, who worked for the royals from 1986 until he retired in 2002, shared how she would eat in the kitchen.
He said: “I remember the princess would very often come in and sit in the kitchen with you [Mervyn] and whatever you’d written down in the book, he would knock it up in the kitchen, and she would eat it, you know, astride the chest freeze or whatever.
“So it was quite informal really.”
He claimed that Diana would tell him that he wanted the chef, the driver, “to be part of this wider family.”
Ken added: “Which was quite opposite what the Prince of Wales wanted that time. But this was Diana style.”
Mervyn replied: “The Princess spent a lot of time in the kitchen, reading The Sun.”
Charles would pick his own veg
Ken shared how Charles wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty in the garden and find his own produce.
The protection officer added: “Where I witnessed, his particular interest in food, because at Highgrove there was a very sizable vegetable garden, immaculately, brilliantly maintained by a fleet of gardens.
“He would go down with a wooden basket and select certain vegetables for him and turn back to the kitchen.”
Mervyn added: “It always had the fresh veggie, which he literally just picked, and he would have that in his dinner 10 minutes later.
“It was a bit of a worry. He’d rush upstairs to change, come back down, and it’s all ready.”
Queen’s treats
When he worked for the Queen, Mervyn used to prepare a tasty tea for Her Majesty to tuck into, but this stopped when he worked for Charles.
He explained: “Tea was just a cup of tea.
“It was never a full-blown tea like Her Majesty the Queen used to have with cakes and scones for the corgis.
Diana got her own snacks
Mervyn shared how he stocked up a fridge of Princess Dians’s favourite snacks in case she wanted to eat between meals.
He explained: “I always had in the kitchen, there was a small fridge, and I used to leave things in the fridge that she liked, cold lamb cutlets and things like that.
“So she could just snack whenever she wanted to.”
Staff got royal chef meals too
It wasn’t just the royal family who got to tuck into tasty meals prepared by royal chefs.
Ken shared how he also got to eat Mervyn’s food, and said: “We, as policemen and other members of staff, enjoyed [it] very much.
“How lucky were we?”
Mervyn added: “Well, one of the main things that His Royal Highness always insisted that the staff be well-fed.
“‘An army marches on its stomach’.
“And if you’ve got a happy staff, they’ve been well fed, they will go that extra mile.”
What it is like being a chef for the royal family
COOKING for royalty means that everything has to be perfect as former royal chef Darren McGrady well knows.
Darren, who worked for the royals for 15 years and cooked at Buckingham Palace, Sandringham and Balmoral, has revealed that when it came to banqueting events he had to prepare no less than 150 plates of food for the late Queen.
Speaking to Coffee Friend, Chef McGrady said: “There were no food tasters, no.
“Some Royals had their food prepared separately away from guests at big banquet events.
“However, with the Queen, we would prepare 150 plates and the Queen’s page would come in and pick one at random.
“That way, if you were to tamper with the food you would have to tamper with all of them.
“From our perspective, it also meant we had to get the same standard across every plate, not knowing which one the Queen would be eating.”