‘Weekend curfew is eleven strict and none of us is rich,’ Brad said. ‘But we usually find a way to have fun. Are you with us?’

‘I guess,’ Charlie said, nodding as she swallowed another mouthful of steak and gave a thumbs-up. ‘Dead cow and Coca Cola. This is what freedom tastes like!’

16 CHEF CHANNING

Kirsten had bought a seven-bed house in Jaguar Heights, one of Vegas’s poshest developments. Set on a three-acre hillside lot, there was a four-car garage, basement home cinema and an infinity pool jutting over the hillside, giving clear views towards Charleston Peak.

Harry often felt the contrast with the little three-bed terrace he’d shared with his aunt in London. Especially when he remembered a sleepless night, a couple of weeks after his eleventh birthday.

He’d come downstairs at 3 a.m., trembling from a nightmare where he’d been trampled by a bull. He’d found Kirsten wrestling her accounts at the kitchen table, with tears streaking her face.

Kirsten Channing’s restaurant in London’s Primrose Hill had won awards and was always busy, but the sums didn’t add up after the landlord hiked the rent. Harry overheard talk of Kirsten selling her house to raise money and of having to go live with his grandparents in Devon.

Then Kent Clark stumbled into Kirsten’s restaurant on a trip to London. The Vegas-based billionaire liked the food so much he bought a half share in Kirsten’s business, on condition that she moved to Vegas and opened a restaurant inside his new casino.

Kirsten’s old London restaurant sat twenty-eight guests; Channing’s at the Algarve Casino Las Vegas cost $14 million to fit out and could seat four hundred. It won Best New Vegas Restaurant the year it opened and Best Overall the year after that.

While many tourists never left the mega-casinos and tourist traps on the gridlocked four-mile stretch of Las Vegas Boulevard known as The Strip, locals steered clear. But Harry and Matt decided to drive The Strip a couple of days after Harry got his licence and he welled with pride when he saw a glammed-up version of his aunt on the Algarve’s two-hundred-foot-tall video billboard, dressed in her chef whites and tossing a pan of fancy seafood.

After three years in Vegas, Kirsten had started building an empire. There was Channing’s English Pub, for casino guests with more modest budgets, a copycat Channing’s in Kent Clark’s Macau casino, while her original London restaurant had reopened inside a five-star Chelsea hotel.

Plans for a fourth Channing’s in New York had been put on hold, because fear of catching SNor had dented the restaurant trade, but Kirsten regularly made TV appearances on Chef Challenge and Gourmet Chef Secrets and had signed a deal for three recipe books.