Natasha Miller
Founder of Miller Libertine
Interview by: Katy Pryer / Photography by: Edvinas Bruzas
A firm believer in the synergy that’s created when you put food and people together, Natasha Miller of Miller Libertine sees food as an incredible sensory tool to amplify experiences. Describing herself as an artist and food designer, her award-winning business strives to deliver moments that last long after the dishes have been cleared away.
“Thinking back, I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t in the kitchen,” she says. Even the act of buying food has always been an experience, something immersive and tactile. She describes trips to Ridley Road Market in her formative years, watching her grandmother selecting the best feeling, smelling - and as a result – best-tasting produce.
Though her earliest memories are centred around the kitchen table, it wasn’t until 2010 that the notion of food as a career even crossed her mind. After taking a career break, she poured her energy into baking, spurred on by positive reactions from family and friends.
“It all changed when I did a stall at Spitalfields Market. One customer, who was the director of Eat Natural, expressed an interest in selling my cakes, and that’s when I started to think maybe this could be more than a passion project.”
During a project for Postcard Teas, Natasha began to join up the dots between food and storytelling. She describes this as a “voyage of flavours, where each patisserie was paired with a tea and represented a different part of the world.”
There were so many elements that came together to create the narrative, “what feelings food textures might convey, and how the tea pairing could elevate taste.”
Seeing people interact with flavour - the joy it brings them, and the emotions it might elicit is as important as creating the experiences themselves. Her ultimate goal is to create taste experiences that stay with people, even maybe changing their relationship with taste and flavour altogether, so they begin “making connections that they might not have made. I hope I’m giving people something extremely meaningful,” she adds.
For the National Trust, she told the story of the historic Fenton House and Garden in Hampstead and its silk merchant, slave trader and Quaker, Joshua Gee, through Georgian confectionery, using ingredients that echoed Gee’s interests, travels and investments.
In another, she worked on a multi-sensory bespoke taste experience for Liberty and the LDNY Foundation, celebrating the creative talent of young people from underprivileged backgrounds. Her menu of sumptuous patisserie was featured alongside, and complemented, cocktails devised by Cointreau.
Whilst something currently in the making is more of “an audio storytelling project about food and nostalgia, how food can connect us to our deepest memories.” She continues: “It’s a really rich experience and shows food in a completely different light. I’m really into audio storytelling, I think it has such an intimacy to it.”
When we start to look at food through the same eyes, it becomes something much more than sustenance. Her work reveals a transportive quality to flavour - it can take you anywhere in the world and even back in time! And when combined with tech, as she intends to do next, who knows, it might even give a taste of the future too.
