‘Someone thought I was the waitress’
Barrister-turned-tv restaurateur, Nisha Katona, was spurred on by prejudice, she tells Anita Singh
Nisha Katona, rising star among television chefs and owner of a burgeoning restaurant empire, recently went to an industry dinner. “I was in a room of 1,000 people. I think there were maybe three female restaurant owners. And someone tried to take a glass off me, thinking I was a waitress.” Dispiriting? Not for Katona, a woman who has made a habit of defying expectations.
A barrister for 20 years, and with no formal chef training, she began making Youtube cookery demos in her kitchen. Within 10 minutes of seeing one, Jamie Oliver’s agent was on the phone to sign her up. There followed recipe books (three), the Mowgli chain of restaurants (six, and more in the pipeline), and a string of TV jobs – the latest of which is her own series, The Recipes That Made Me, which begins on BBC Two next week.
The programme sees Katona visiting British families with roots in India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh to taste the food they eat at home – a far cry from the generic fare on most restaurant menus. “What is sold in the curry houses, even down to the names, is completely contrived and there to salve the English palate,” she says. “It’s born out of humility – as Indians, we want to feed you, and we want you to like us because we feed you. But it’s a complete misrepresentation.”
She is on a mission to demystify Indian food. Katona, 46, calls herself a “curry evangelist”, and brims with enthusiasm. But you don’t make it in business on passion alone. Her ability to push on in spite of challenging circumstances began early; growing up in a village on the outskirts of Skelmersdale in Lancashire, her parents were Indian doctors.
“We were the only Indians in the village. My earliest memory was of a brick being thrown through the window with ‘Paki’ written on it. Twice a week, we’d have firebombs thrown at us as we played in the garden. It was the norm, and it was terrifying,” she recalls. Sometimes they found a grim comedy in it. “I remember my mother saying that on the way to surgery someone was shouting and throwing stones at her, and then she got in and that was her first patient.”
Skip forward to her first work placement, and the adult Katona found that prejudice still existed. “After my first day, the head of chambers sent a note to my pupil mistress saying, ‘Your pupil is female and Asian. You need to tell her she has no place at the Bar.” While others might have struggled to overcome such persistent knock backs, Katona has used them as fuel. She had a happy childhood, she says, in spite of the taunts, and later became the first female Asian barrister in Liverpool. “I think many immigrants of my generation have this kind of resilience. It’s not bloodyminded, but you take failure, you take people telling you you’re rubbish with a pinch of salt, and you get on. We’ve got thick skin, but we’re also quite sympathetic and human because we have been terrorised as children.
“You’re constantly conscious of other people’s discomfort, you want to be kind and to be liked. And that’s not such a bad thing.”
It was food that helped her family to be accepted. Her parents would invite the neighbours over for supper, and curious friends accompanied Katona home from school and tucked in to her mum’s recipes. “[Mum] used to open Findus Crispy Pancakes, put curry sauce in, then shut them back up,” she laughs. “Nothing was unaltered. Chips would always have turmeric on them. The irony is, turmeric-fried chips are the mainstay of the Mowgli menu, and yet I was mortified.”
Mowgli is Katona’s restaurant chain, launched in 2014. It serves the kind of dishes you don’t find in your local curry house, from chilli-flecked cheese on toast to rhubarb dal. She ploughed her life savings into the first branch in Liverpool while continuing to work as a barrister.
Her husband, Zoltan, a classical guitarist from Hungary, has been unstinting in his support. But some of her Indian family remain baffled that she gave up being a lawyer, and Katona still grapples with it herself.
“In social circles, when you look like some kind of bimbo,” she laughs, gesturing at her short skirt, “it helps if you can say, ‘I’m a barrister.’ Suddenly they treat you like an equal. And it’s crazy because I’m still emotionally just swinging from rope to rope working out how I’m supposed to feel in situations like that, because my esteem came from being a barrister.” She is certain about one thing, and that’s how to run a kitchen, opting for a “maternal management model” that treats staff with kindness. “As women, the gift that we have is the ability to verbalise
‘Twice a week, we’d have firebombs thrown at us as we played in the garden’
emotion and to weave that into business language.” It is the antithesis, she says, of the image created by famous male chefs, of kitchens as “this testosterone-driven place for personality disorders”.
Her time spent in the family courts has left her with a policy of “zero tolerance on aggression”, she says.
“What many chefs would say is, ‘I kick off because I’m a perfectionist.’ I just think, I’m sorry, that’s b-------. That is tyrannical. That is the mantra of domestic abuse: ‘I’m only shouting at you because I care.’” In keeping with her own gentler approach, she named her restaurant Mowgli after the pet name she gave her two daughters. The decision was more than a simple tribute.
“Your children will ask, ‘Why are you not home at teatime any more?’ So they need to love the thing that you do. They chose the logo and they named the dishes. We need as businesswomen to be out there showing people that you can do it. And not just that you can do it, but that you should do it.” The Recipes That Made Me begins on BBC Two on Wednesday, 8pm