Chloe Dahl is the Venice Beach based restauranteur and keen surfer whose love of lobsters found her opening Los Angeles first lobster speciality restaurant, Knuckle and Claw, alongside her fiancé and business partner Nikki Booth. From its beginning at a farmers market to the two restaurants that exist today - one in Silverlake and the other in Santa Monica – Chloe and Nikki are satisfying the appetites of LA natives and tourists alike with their much-needed take on New England comfort food.
My mother’s Shepherds Pie takes me back much simpler time when all I had to worry about was my home work and soccer practice - simplicity.
She was kicked out of boarding school in Britain at 14 for lighting it on fire and so my grandfather put her in a cookery school in London. Cooking has always been a huge thing for her and we were always involved in the process.
The sound of silence makes me feel the happiest.
It's something thats so undervalued, we’re not always conscious of how sound is always in our ears all the time. Nikki and I surf early every morning, and to be able to sit on the edge of the Pacific Coast afterwards and listen to nothing else but silence is just something that can’t be purchased.
I have no idea what it is, but Nikki’s perfume really takes me back to falling in love.
When you’re falling in love with someone and you're just starting to notice their eye colour, trying to figure out who they are and everything about them, because you want to. It’s the smell of excitement and promise.
The most special place in the world for me was being in the pinky swear tree in the fairy forest.
When I was little, my mom would take my sister and I around a forest in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts where we grew up. We’d look for fairies and climb a tree where we’d always make a pinky swear to each other and as far as I know, we kept them.
I've jumped off a cliff inside a cave and never felt so free.
Jumping from the cliff, which is inside a cave in Jamaica, there’s a moment where you can see the crystal blue sea in front of you. You feel so light, empty free and capable of anything. In those few seconds where you haven’t yet been caught by the water, it clears your mind, all of your stresses and thoughts.