It’s hard to create a successful restaurant. It’s damn near impossible to open, maintain and then continue to run what then becomes a classic restaurant. The Spotted Pig is a classic, perhaps the most recent addition to New York City’s canon of dining landmarks — and in February 2014, it turned 10 years old. That’s how rarely a new classic comes along.

The people who created The Spotted Pig, April Bloomfield and Ken Friedman, are like a living yin and yang symbol applied to the restaurant world. Bloomfield, the chef, devises menus comprised of tantalizing dishes, while Friedman, the restaurateur, obsesses over the feel of the space. As Bloomfield puts it in the “Restaurateur” episode of Mind of a Chef, “We have a weird but wonderful relationship.” A relationship that epitomizes what it means to be a Food Thinker, which of course involves thinking first about food, and then about everything else around the food.

The Spotted Pig features a now-legendary burger (Roquefort cheese, char-grilled beef, a brioche bun, no condiments allowed) and a gnudi dish (cheese, butter, sage, magic) that can make your knees buckle. The restaurant’s décor is somehow contemporary and historic-feeling; as you walk in the front door, the sounds of a buzzing room and the smells and the clinking of glasses make you feel like a Very Important Person. In New York, The Spotted Pig became known as the first real “gastropub” — which Americans used as shorthand for an English style bar that also served great food.

Bloomfield says it was something of a misleading characterization. “I really didn’t want to do gastropub food,” she recalls of the lead-up to The Spotted Pig’s opening. “Everyone’s menu in England was the same. So I decided to cook high-quality, tasty restaurant food that I was familiar cooking, but in a casual setting, and kept my fingers crossed that people would enjoy it.” They did.

The duo have gone on to parlay their symbiosis into similarly homey and effortlessly chic The Breslin, in NYC’s Ace Hotel; the nautical-themed John Dory Oyster Bar, also in the Ace; Salvation Taco, a casual Mexican spot in another New York hotel, Pod39; and the just-opened Tosca Café in San Francisco, their first effort away from New York City, an Italian restaurant in a classic bar that Bloomfield and Friedman hope to transform into a classic restaurant. Early indications, and glowing reviews, indicate that they might very well succeed.

How did they get here, this American former record company executive and this Birmingham, England–bred chef who admits in one episode of Mind of a Chef that she almost became a policewoman before she found her calling in the kitchen?

According to Friedman, it was a series of twists of fate, along with a midlife crisis. When he decided to transition from music to food, he sought to find a chef-partner, and he called on some high-profile advisors in Mario Batali and Jamie Oliver — the latter suggesting that he attempt to lure a young chef from The River Café to America. When he did his research and discovered that Bloomfield not only had been working her way up at his favorite Italian restaurant in London but that she’d previously cooked in other places he’d frequented during a stint living in the city, he was hooked.

“I was in love with the idea of April being my chef before I even spoke to her,” he says. Still, that didn’t mean she’d necessarily want to disrupt her rise through London’s fine dining scene. “I was asking her to quit a job at one of the best restaurants in England where she would have been the head chef eventually, and move to New York, a city that she didn’t necessarily want to come to, and work for some music business guy who’s having a midlife crisis. I think Mario helped explain to her, hey, this guy Ken Friedman is serious about it.”

Asked to reflect on what’s made the partnership work, Bloomfield says, writing from San Francisco, “The key to our relationship is balance. Ken is energetic and always socializing, handling the front of house. I’m also always moving, but I’m a little bit more reserved and I tend to stay in the kitchen. We both love the industry we’re in, and enjoy creating new restaurants together. We’re also supportive of each other and provide feedback in terms of what each of us could be doing to make our restaurants as good as can be.”

“We don’t always agree on everything, just like Mick Jagger and Keith Richards don’t,” Friedman offers, summoning a music reference. “That’s what make the Stones great, and it’s what makes a great partnership.”

It’s worth noting that while Friedman knows rock stars — The Spotted Pig’s minority investors reportedly include Bono and Jay-Z — and while Bloomfield is now routinely referred to as a “celebrity chef,” stardom and celebrity are two things she has little interest in.

Here’s a personal anecdote about April Bloomfield: A year or two ago, a woman I know from college was having a going away party in NYC’s West Village, as she was headed off to start a job for an extended period in London. The woman throws a mean party; she hired the Taim food truck to park outside and make delicious falafel sandwiches for guests. Among the guests was Bloomfield, who mostly kept to herself amid the revelry. I was hanging out on the front steps with some friends not associated with the food world, when Bloomfield emerged with the host’s dog on a leash and disappeared down the street. “Was that April Bloomfield taking [the host’s] dog for a walk?” someone wondered, as if it were a big deal that a celebrity chef would be performing such a menial task.

Here’s how Bloomfield responds to my related question about whether she feels like a celebrity chef who’s too well-known or privileged to walk her friend’s dog: “Did someone really say that? [The host] is my friend and I love her dog. When I take him for walks, we stop off at the shop down the road from where she lives and the owner gives him a little treat of freshly sliced ham! I think he’s the celebrity. I’m just a regular person walking the dog.”

Watching Bloomfield’s episodes in the Mind of a Chef series, you see this kind of humility, and subtle humor, at play in every frame. She’s dead serious one moment, slyly mischievous the next.

She teases rather than jokes, but then pivots away from any comment that could be construed as even the least bit mean-spirited to a compliment or an observation. She used her Mind of a Chef episodes as an excuse to drop in on her mentors and heroes, gently shifting attention away from herself or at least sharing the limelight with friends, with people she respects. Why? “It was a no-brainer really,” Bloomfield says. “My cookbook, A Girl and Her Pig, was basically built as a way to say thank you to all the people who made me into the chef I am today. I just picked the amazing people featured in my book, such as Marcella Hazan, Rowley Leigh, Ruthie Rogers…”

As if to underscore the importance of such gestures, Bloomfield’s segment with Hazan was among the last the legendary cookbook author would film, as she passed away in September at age 89. The resulting scene of Bloomfield making her famed gnudi for Hazan is bittersweet and charming, while other kitchen visits from the series may be the first stand-and-stir tearjerkers recorded on film.

Bloomfield’s return to River Café to cook with Ruthie Rogers features the usually unflappable chef choking up. “Food and cooking in general build up emotion for me,” Bloomfield says.

“Especially when I’m in the presence of someone that’s dedicated their whole life to food that they have perfected and have poured their heart and soul into. Their food is art, passion, perfection, and deliciousness all rolled into one.

“Never in a million years would I have ever thought that a girl from Birmingham, England would ever get to work with the likes of Chad Robertson [of San Francisco’s Tartine, who appears in the Restaurateur episode] and Marcella Hazan, and that makes me feel like I have so much work to do as a cook. It’s a very humbling experience.”

It’s obvious now that Bloomfield chose the right career path — or perhaps it chose her — but surely the stress and demands of running five kitchens, now including one 3,000 miles away from her adopted home, must make her wonder at times, what if she’d done something simpler? Like, what if she had taken the police exam and become an officer back home in Birmingham. What if instead of reinterpreting fish and chips as one of the many highlights of the menu at The Breslin, Sgt. April Bloomfield was visiting the local chippie during her lunch hour?

“Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been if I actually did get into the police force,” she says. “Where would I be? But, I don’t wish that at all. I work hard, and if you work hard in this business it can treat you really well.”

When I ask Friedman to share what he thinks are some of Bloomfield’s key personality traits, he doesn’t hesitate. “She never lies,” he says, pausing for effect. “Which is very important and very rare.”

Bloomfield’s cooking, her passion, humility, and honesty have all played a role in the creation of a classic restaurant, a growing portfolio and partnership with Friedman, and a hell of a lot of memorable dishes and meals and experiences for diners from London to New York to San Francisco.

“It’s worked great,” Friedman says of their mission. “We sought to do something, we told the world what we’re gonna do, and we did it.”