THE JOURNEY CONTINUES
Celeb chef Zola Nene talks about her new cookbook
Zola Nene first caught our attention as the bubbly resident chef on Expresso – we’ve spent many a morning watching her whip up incredible dishes. Her ready smile and passion for food has served her well: nine years after joining the breakfast show team, Zola is an award-winning cookbook author, a judge on two highly popular reality shows and now even has her own cooking programme. Her new book, Simply Zola, like its predecessor Simply Delicious, isn’t just a cookbook; it tells the story of Zola.
Zola’s earliest memory is of helping her grandmother in the kitchen.‘My grandparents lived on a farm in Amanzimtoti, KZN, and whenever they used to harvest their mielies, I would help my grandmother make mielie bread. She had this old-school corn mill and she’d let me turn the wheel of the grinder to grind the mielies, and then she’d mix the dough and we’d steam the bread.’
When it came to choosing a career path, being a chef just didn’t seem like an option at the time. ‘Because I was very argumentative – I talked a lot and I enjoyed a challenge – I thought to myself that being a lawyer was what I should do,’ she says. She enrolled at Stellenbosch University, but by her second year she knew she’d made a mistake. ‘I loved going to school, but there was no way that I was going to be a criminal lawyer.’
Zola called her father, unsure of how he would react. Her parents had traditional careers; her mom is a retired teacher and her father an engineer. ‘Growing up, he’d say to us that whatever career we chose, it should make us happy because we were going to do it for more than half our lives.’ He told her to come home. ‘When I got home, he asked: “What do you love to do? What do you enjoy doing?” And I replied that I loved cooking.’
To get some experience, Zola went to the UK, where she worked in a brasserie in Knutsford, Cheshire. She started at the bottom, peeling carrots and potatoes. But her drive to learn didn’t go unnoticed and she quickly moved up the ranks. Zola worked in the HOT section, learned how to make starters, ran the pass and eventually became the head pastry chef – all in a two-year span .‘ I knew that this was what I wanted to be: I wanted to be a chef and I wanted to cook every day.’
Zola headed back to South Africa and enrolled in the Institute of Culinary Arts in Stellenbosch, majoring in food media. After graduating she got a job as food assistant at Top
Billing magazine and six months later moved to Joburg to be with her boyfriend at the time. ‘But it was difficult to adjust. My boyfriend was a chef too, so he worked chef hours and had no time for me. I felt very alone.’
She called her friend, food editor of Top Billing magazine Katelyn Williams (of The Kate Tin fame), to tell her she was returning to Cape Town. Her timing couldn’t have been better: the magazine closed, but the team was conceptualising a new breakfast show called
Expresso. Zola went on to release her cookbook Simply Delicious in January 2016. She won the award for Best TV Chef Book in English at the 2017 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards and first prize for TV (English) Celebrity Chef. Later that year, she joined the team of The Great South African Bake Off and is currently the food judge for local show The Wedding Bashers.
‘Often I’ll be sitting at a traffic light and I’ll realise that I’m living my life, and I’m so blessed. I’ve had the most incredible opportunities and I’m so grateful for every one of them.’
A second cookbook was always on the cards. ‘I knew I wasn’t going to just write one book,’ she says. ‘I was ready to tell this story because my life has changed so much since book one. I hope people can create their own menus from the book. Recipe books are just a guideline and should be the inspiration for the reader to create their own feasts, to tell their own story.’
Her own cooking show seemed like the natural next step. Celeb
Feasts With Zola is part talkshow, part cooking show. ‘I invite a celeb into my kitchen and they bring along their mentor, someone who influenced their life in some way,’ says Zola. ‘We cook a meal together while talking about how they came to be who they are and how this person has impacted their life.
‘My food philosophy is to make food less intimidating. I don’t want people to be overwhelmed by what chefs are doing or what the cookbook says. I want them to feel at ease.’