ALMOST FAMOUS
Meet the South African chef who is so good she was booked to fly to Hollywood at a moment’s notice to cook Christmas dinner for a famous actor and his family.
Nicola got the call
in July last year. She’d been working on a new concept restaurant in Franschhoek, where she is now head chef, but back then it was still in its development stages, so she’d been out of the kitchen for a while.
A major Hollywood movie star and his family were looking for a private chef to cook for them for a couple of weeks in the house they were renting in Hout Bay. “The house was booked through Perfect Hideaways and Margot Janse [chef and former Eat Out Top 10 alumnus] is part of their team, so she recommended me,” Nicola says. “I remember her saying this was her reputation on the line, too.”
But Hollywood movie stars won’t let just any Prue Leith-trained, Margot Janse-vetted chef cook their lunch.
Nicola had to audition.
“The brief was healthy, family food – organic, simple, child-friendly,” she says, “but I also had to be able to step things up when entertaining.” On the day of the interview, “I was living in Franschhoek and had to cook lunch in Hout Bay, so I used a friend’s house in Constantia to prep. I was rushing but I still stopped at Banks to get chefs’ whites and then my friend accidentally locked me out so I was washing carrots under the outside tap!” This is a classic Nicola anecdote. Many of her cooking escapades sound like a crazy MasterChef pressure test crossed with an episode of The Amazing Race.
She made an Asian-style slaw with sticky chicken – reducing the dressing/ marinade of honey, soya, ginger and chilli to make a glaze – topped with sesame brittle. As a side, she served warm mapleroasted sweet potatoes dressed with crème fraîche, sriracha and lime (find the recipe on page 110). She got the job.
What followed was a cooking marathon that plays out like a season of MasterChef, complete with celebrity guest appearances and a surprise finale.
For more than eight weeks,
Nicola cooked three sit-down meals for around 12 people every day. The client was Vin Diesel, his family and entourage. After a few days she stopped asking what she should serve. “Paloma said to me, ‘I don’t need to tell you what to cook. We love your food. You know what we like’.”
Nicola took this compliment to heart, and after months of being away from the kitchen, she apparently decided to make up for lost time – cooking multiple courses, options and sides at every meal.
Diesel was in Cape Town to shoot the movie Bloodshot, in which he plays a reanimated superhero based on the Valiant comic. Some of the production crew mentioned that the Diesels are discerning when it comes to food.
They have chefs in their homes in California and the Caribbean, one of whom served the movie’s director – also an accomplished eater – a spread of Spanish tapas as good as any he’d eaten in Spain. In other words, they recognise a great chef when they meet one.
Nicola’s booking was initially for two weeks from the beginning of August, but
The brief was healthy, family food – organic, simple,
child-friendly”
she eventually plated her last dish at the end of September.
“I loved it,” she says, “they let me cook what I wanted to cook – there was no brief. I’d go to bed with a Donna Hay cookbook and wake up and read more cookbooks. I was always planning menus.”
As a self-confessed workaholic (and possibly a Jewish mother in a previous life) Nicola admits she can get carried away. And this was her dream – her chance to cook everything she’d always wanted to for an appreciative audience.
I witness some of this trademark perfectionism when she is cooking the food for this story: the meticulous prepping of ingredients, careful revisions to each recipe, the expert plating. No microherb is left unturned.
Which is why, at some point, the job stopped being a private cheffing gig and became Nicola’s chance to cook her heart out all day, every day. The Diesels were just the lucky beneficiaries.
She says she shopped for ingredients at the Hout Bay Woolworths every day. This is not just a shameless plug. Paloma called the house one day and asked what she could make that would be quick and easy. Nicola suggested a hotdog. Then she panicked. How to turn a hotdog into a Nicola-style dish? “I only had Woolies rolls,” she says, “but I made them with Woolworths’ bockwurst and onion three ways.” Fried, caramelised and pickled. When I met Nicola, the way she described that hotdog – and how much Paloma loved it – convinced me to write this story. I needed to taste that hotdog for myself (see the recipe on page 108).
Nicola made fluffy American-style pancakes for breakfast each morning with organic maple syrup and bacon
“crisp enough to snap”. She says, “I made blueberry-and-spinach smoothies and a beetroot-and-carrot juice for Mr D, plus a breakfast burrito for the road.”
Some days she would serve buffet lunches “Ottolenghi-style”. “I love his food and that’s how I love to cook too.” And in between – to keep busy – she’d bake cakes and “magic bars” (recipe on page 110) for tea-time and treats. She also prepped chocolate fondants to stash in the fridge for easy last-minute baking if she wasn’t working at the time. (Diesel was fond of the odd fondant.)
Diesel is also a big soup lover, and after being given free rein in the kitchen, Nicola made her mother’s minestrone soup and served it for dinner one night. He loved it.
There were also several “business” dinners with other stars and senior members of the movie production team. For one of these dinners, Nicola pushed the boat out further than usual. “I made pap and served it in mini potjies as canapés, with panko fish balls on banana leaves, plus langoustines and dim sum.”
The main course was beef fillet served on Himalayan salt slabs with miso-date butter. Ambitious for anyone cooking for a group, let alone movie stars.
“I was cooking in the kitchen and watching the fire at the same time,” she says. “I needed to get the langoustines ready to serve by 9 pm and I had timed it so the coals would have burnt down enough for the langoustines to go on at exactly the right time. Then I saw that someone had added a whole pile of wood to the fire!” This is another of her wideeyed tales of imminent disaster, which are both endearing and entertaining,
I’d make a beetrootand-carrot juice for Mr D and a burrito for the road”
but never actually end in anything other than triumph. She is the master of the proverbial Hollywood ending.
This cooking marathon is even more impressive when you consider that this was her first ever job as a private chef. “I’ve never done it before, but I just loved it,” she says, not for the first time. “I even made the kids stywepap!”
On the day the family was moving out of the house, the kitchen was all packed up – food included. “I was getting ready to leave and [the manager] came to me and said ‘Mr D would like soup and a main meal’.”
She tells me this story wide-eyed again, as though she didn’t think she could pull it off, but the truth is she loves a challenge and she’s proud of what she served.
I ask her what she made: “A dirty Asian broth with ponzu sticky beef, mushrooms, crisp-fried onions and sprouts, followed by a rustic chicken pasta with lemon and charred baby marrows.” No sweat.
For Nicola, cooking is not work.
She is also a latecomer to her beloved career. She did a few months at Prue Leith Chefs Academy in Gauteng, where she became team leader but had to drop out due to logistical issues. She registered for a more “pragmatic” schoolteaching course partly at her mother’s suggestion, but possibly also motivated by her belief that because she loves it so much, cooking doesn’t feel like a real job.
After graduating, she taught at a nursery school where she became the principal, but always pined for her first love, the one that got away – cooking. “I was running a school but I was also sitting in my office reading TASTE magazines and googling recipes. I was the school principal who went to all the classes delivering home-made, footlong pistachio, cherry, cinnamon and chocolate biscotti.”
She called a chef she admired,
Marlene van der Westhuizen, for advice. “She told me not to go back to chef ’s school,” Nicola says. “She said she’d had a cancellation on her cooking course in France and suggested that I come. After that she was doing a book, Secrets of a French Cooking Class, and said perhaps I could help her with it.”
Marlene’s second piece of career advice was for Nicola to call the restaurants in Joburg that she loved and ask for a job, which she did. She walked into the kitchen at Moema’s in Parktown and told the chef that she loved their food, loved cooking and would work her butt off if they hired her. They did.
As it happened, the pastry chef at Moema’s had worked for Nicola’s food hero, Yotam Ottolenghi, and through sheer chutzpah, she managed to swing a stint at the famous chef ’s London restaurant before work permit issues got in the way.
She ran her own cooking classes before moving to Cape Town and landing the job as head chef at the new restaurantbrewery, Hey Joe, which opened in Franschhoek in February. Which is where she returned after her strange and wonderful winter hiatus spent cooking for the Diesels.
Then, as Nicola was about to go on leave in December, she got another call. This time from Los Angeles. They had asked her to come over for Thanksgiving, but she’d had to decline due to work commitments, but this time was different. “It was 22 December and [the family’s manager] said, ‘Could you still come?
And could you leave tonight?’” Nicola says her bags were already packed.
Two days later she cooked Christmas Eve dinner for the Diesels. Because despite the incredible food city in which they live, where they could have called any number of accomplished chefs, they only wanted Nicola Spilsbury. They missed her and her cooking.
“When I arrived, the kids ran up to the car shouting ‘Nicola! Nicola!
Did you bring PAP?!’”
The description of that Christmas dinner is like the grande finale of pressure tests. “The turkey was 7.5 kg!” she says, “I had to brine it in a cooler box, it was so big. I also did roast beef and macaroni cheese balls for canapés, a warm smoked tomato soup with basil and Parmesan as the starter, and then all the sides. Carrots roasted with cumin and vanilla with torn fresh mint, Brussels sprouts with bacon and cranberries and potatoes roasted in beef fat.”
She also made two desserts: “one was a chocolate panettone bread-and-butter pudding with caramel sauce and crème Anglaise, and the other was a Christmas wreath pavlova with candied pecan nuts and caramelised baby apples.” Just your average Nicola Spilsbury menu.
After Christmas, she flew to the Caribbean to cook a final New Year’s meal there before returning to reality. A reality that would involve opening a 295-seater Belgian-style restaurant in under two months.
She says Paloma still messages her from time to time. Nicola describes her as a great cook. “We developed a kind of friendship, which I treasure,” she says. “She told me once, ‘We can see that you put your heart on the plate and that is why we love your food’.”Their connection is clearly one based on a shared love of unpretentious food; food made with love and generosity.
Nicola still seems dazed by the whole experience, as though waking up from a dream: “I feel so grateful that I had this opportunity. I loved doing it and I will never forget it.”
“When I got to LA the kids ran up to the car shouting: ‘Nicola! Did you bring PAP?!’”