Dua Lipa was already mid-negroni before a single potato hit the tray. Standing in her kitchen for a Vogue cooking session, the London-born artist made a case that the best home cooking is essentially cowboy-style: whatever’s in the fridge, a bit of confidence, and enough gin to sharpen the instincts. This is the dish she returns to again and again, a whole roasted sea bass laid over potatoes, and it turns out the recipe is far simpler than her tour schedule.
The tray that holds it all together
The process moves in two stages, and both fit inside a single roasting tray. Potato discs go in first, sliced into rounds and spaced apart so they get heat on all sides. They roast for about 30 minutes before anything else joins them. While they soften, the fish gets prepared: salt pressed into the cavity and rubbed across the skin so it crisps in the oven, plus a whole unpeeled garlic clove tucked inside to roast along with it. The remaining garlic cloves get smashed and left skin-on, because, as she puts it, they roast into something ‘soft and gooey’ that way. Once the potatoes have their head start, the fish goes on top, surrounded by chopped tomatoes, kalamata olives, capers, anchovies, a scatter of chili flakes and rosemary, a pour of olive oil, and a few basil leaves. Back in the oven it goes, and that is genuinely it.
The anchovy placement is deliberate. Laid across the potatoes rather than buried under the fish, they break down in the heat and add what Lipa describes as ‘that extra bit of saltiness’ to the base layer, a detail that quietly elevates the whole dish without announcing itself at the table.
What touring taught her about eating well
The recipe exists in the context of a life spent in motion. Night-after-night shows, new cities, the particular adrenaline comedown that sends her straight to an Epsom salt bath and a handful of magnesium. But the upside of constant travel, she explained, is an obsessively maintained mental index of restaurants, sandwich spots, and bars in cities across the world. ‘More often times than not,’ she said, ‘I’ll have like the most extensive list of all time and you’ll have a great time.’ The fish dish is the counterweight to all of that: something fast and familiar to cook at home, the kind of meal she misses when she is away.
Not every home cook moment has gone smoothly. Last Christmas, Ruthie Rogers, the renowned chef, arrived unexpectedly while Lipa was about to put the potatoes in. The roasting tray she had bought and was proud of would not fit in her oven. Her family circled Rogers and kept her talking while the tray was slowly forced in. ‘It all worked out,’ Lipa said. ‘I did impress her in the end.’
The negroni she mixed before cooking was equal parts gin, Campari, and vermouth. Halfway through the session she made a full jug for the room.
One garlic clove, still in the fish
A whole unpeeled garlic clove, tucked into the cavity of the sea bass, roasting undisturbed inside the fish while everything else cooks around it.
She pulled the tray from the oven, tasted the fish straight from the dish, and delivered the verdict with no hesitation: ‘That’s banging.’ The skin had crisped exactly as intended, the potatoes had absorbed everything around them, and the whole thing had taken one tray and just over half an hour. ‘You literally have to just throw everything in a tray and roast it,’ she said, and she was not wrong.
