Best streetfood chef
Robert Radoni, The Gorilla Kitchen, Brighton, worthing & steyning
Robert Radoni spent three decades as a chef in highprofile hotels and restaurants across Europe and in London. Born to French-Italian parents, he grew up around food and started cooking in Calabria at just 14 years old. When Robert saw some of the terrible versions of pizza being made around the UK, he was inspired to start his own street-food business (even if his first two wives didn’t agree). It was his current partner, Fiona Heselgrave, who encouraged him to follow his dream. Fiona had experience of trading on markets and they converted a shipping container on wheels into a kitchen with a wood-fired pizza oven. The Gorilla Kitchen moves between three Sussex sites from Wednesday through to Sunday. The busiest pitch is on the south side of Brighton’s London Road railway station, where Robert knows most of his customers by name – and their preferred pizzas
– and some of them even bring him back specialist ingredients such as charcuterie when they travel to France and Italy. Passionate about high-quality produce, Robert has been known to bring back truffles in his suitcase when he returns from Italy. With their four-day sourdough bases, tomatoes grown close to Vesuvius and wild oregano from Calabria, these are artisanal pizzas that wouldn’t look out of place in a high-end restaurant, and popular choices include Leanne, a white pizza topped with garlic, oregano, mozzarella, sliced fresh mushrooms, courgettes, Sicilian sun-blushed cherry tomatoes and torn ventricina salami. So busy is this pizzeria on wheels that Robert is now training two young chefs to help move the business forward. thegorillakitchen.com
Head judge Laura Rowe says: Robert is bringing a little bit of Neopolitan sunshine to the south coast and, understandably, had so many nominations from his army of fans. He’s not the first and he won’t be the last pizza van, but how many do you know curing their own meats, pickling their own pickles and serving organic wine alongside each slice?