Tebo & Lebo Ndala
Tebo and Lebo Ndala are qualified chefs, food stylists, sports nutritionists, owners of a catering company, cookbook authors and – as you may have gathered from the photos – twins.
They grew up in Mamelodi in Pretoria East with their mom Elizabeth, grandmother Koko and two siblings, Dimpho and Kgomotso. They have always been close. ‘Annoyingly so,’ they say, laughing. ‘It was always us against our siblings.’
‘We competed for everything,’ Lebo says. ‘Who gets the remote first, who gets leftovers first…’ Tebo says. ‘Who is seen as the good child by my mom and grandmother,’ Lebo finishes the sentence.
Whereas their siblings preferred sports, Tebo and Lebo found their happy place in the kitchen. ‘Our mom loved to cook. We would watch her and ask if we could help,’ Tebo says. She would let them stir the pot and knead the bread.
They also have their hospitality studies teacher to thank for inspiring them. ‘Mrs Le Roux wasn’t just the cooking teacher,’ Lebo says. ‘The way she taught us and how she explained everything encouraged us to pursue cooking professionally.’
The two of them studied at a culinary school in Stellenbosch before they cut their teeth in the hospitality industry in Cape Town, and worked at the V&A Waterfront food market over weekends, making flatbreads for tourists. Then they moved to the United States for a few months and studied through the University of California, Los Angeles. ‘That’s when we discovered our love of travel,’ Tebo says. ‘We started saving up money and went to a few countries… Thailand, China, even Russia.’ They sampled the local cuisine and started taking notes and writing down recipes.
Back home, they began blogging and posting content on Tumblr. ‘And then one day, NB Publishers called and asked if we wanted to do a cookbook,’ Lebo says. ‘We never expected our scribblings to be turned into a book.’ And that’s how Food Stories: Our Favourite Recipes, With Love from the Twins came about.
Living together and working side by side running their catering company can make it hard for the sisters to strike out on their own. ‘We’re often treated like one person,’ Lebo says. She laughs. ‘Some of our friends don’t even call us by our names; they just call us “Twins”!’
So, how do you go about proving that you are your own person? ‘We’re still trying to figure it out,’ Lebo says.
They have no problem with spending so much time in each other’s company. ‘Even now that we’re grown-ups, all we want to do is hang out with each other – and that’s because we like the same stuff,’ Tebo says.
They love drinking coffee in beautiful places, going to bookshops, watching people... ‘We dream about vacations and food,’ Lebo says. ‘We’d rather stay at home and watch soccer than go out,’ Tebo adds. In a nutshell? ‘We’re just nerds and other girls our age don’t get us,’ Lebo says.
‘Even now that we’re grown-ups, all we want to do is hang out with each other.’