Sculptor Cullen, 52, proposed to chef Kerridge, 49, six weeks after they met at a bar. They have now been married for 22 years and have a young son
The night Tom Kerridge met his future wife, Beth, he had just finished his shift as a chef in Covent Garden, London, and he wanted to go home – but it was his friend’s birthday and his flatmate dragged him out. “We went into Camden, walked into a bar and there was this loud northern woman,” says Tom with a laugh. “She went: ‘You’re Tom. Give me £3 for the stripper.’” (To be fair, this was 1997, when it was still considered ironic to get a stripper for a friend’s birthday.) “That was the first sentence Beth said to me.”
Beth Cullen, a sculptor, worked with Tom’s best friend’s brother as an assistant for the artist Sir Anthony Caro. That night, she says, they “talked for ages, and somebody actually said: ‘How long have you been going out?’ We were like: ‘We’ve just met!’ We just hit it off.” What did they talk about? “I have to be honest, it was 25 years ago and I was quite a big drinker then, so I have absolutely no idea,” says Tom. But obvious flirtation? “It was like it was already there,” says Beth. “We were flirty, but it was already a done deal.” Tom adds: “It was like we’d known each other for ages.”
