Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
From barrister to SPICE GIRL
Nisha Katona swapped the courtroom for the kitchen when she hit upon a simple formula for curries – now she has her own chain of restaurants and a career as a TV chef
Until recently, Nisha Katona thought she had a good idea of how her life would pan out. ‘I’ve got two teenage children and I’d been in the same career for 20 years, so I thought the next major life event for me was going to be retirement – and the menopause,’ she smiles.
Not quite. Instead, the 45-yearold former barrister’s recent ‘life events’ have proved altogether more exciting. For a start she’s a published cookery author. Then there’s Mowgli, her string of Indian ‘street food’ restaurants that have opened in Liverpool and Manchester in the past two years. She’s also become a TV chef with a regular slot on Lorraine Kelly’s daytime show, and now she’s about to appear on ITV’s new series The Secret Chef.
The hour- long shows follow someone with no culinary skills who’s given just five weeks to learn to cook a grand restaurant meal. They’re taught in secret by a top chef – and the family and friends who come to the restaurant to eat the meal have no idea it’s been prepared and cooked by their loved one who’d struggled to boil an egg.
Nisha’s pupil is Julie Green, a 51-year- old council worker who lives in Rochdale with her husband Gary and their daughters Courtney and Ledeane. Julie, a self-confessed hopeless chef whose husband does all the cooking, gets a crash course in Indian cookery. ‘There were times when I thought, “Is this going to happen?” because it was so bad at some points,’ says Nisha. ‘ But she did it and it’s changed her life. Julie even appeared at the Rochdale food festival afterwards. She’s making chapatis every night, and she and Gary cook together now which is a huge change in their relationship. The fact that she had the guts to enter the process behind his back is no small thing.
It was with the intention of changing her life. She told me, “For the first time I feel proud and I’ve never felt proud about anything.”’
All this is quite a turnaround for Nisha, who until three years ago was a family court barrister and nothing more than an enthusiastic home cook. ‘My life has changed quite a lot too,’ she says. ‘My family in India think I’m mad. Their view is, “Why would you give up all the respect of being a lawyer for this?” But I love it.’
Raised in Skelmersdale, Lancashire, by her Indian parents – both GPs who came to this country in the late 60s – Nisha grew up learning to cook recipes that had been handed down the maternal line for generations. Her parents expected their daughter to follow in their footsteps and train as a doctor, but a work placement at a solicitors’ office soon put paid to that. ‘I had this epiphany within about five minutes of setting foot in the offices. I fell absolutely in love with it.’
Once qualified, she and her husband Zoltan Katona, a renowned Hungarian classical guitarist she met while studying, settled in Liv- erpool, where Nisha juggled her career with raising the couple’s two daughters, India, now 15, and Tia, 13. Food remained a passion, though. ‘ Before dinner parties I used to phone my mother and get some recipes, and there came a point when I thought one of the few things I can pass on to my girls are these recipes,’ she recalls.
It was while transcribing them one evening that she had what she calls her ‘Archimedes’ moment. ‘I realised that all Indian cooking basically boils down to a formula,’ she says. ‘Suddenly I could see it like a road map and I thought, “People need to know this.” So I started to put classes on for my friends and to write a book.’ That formula, it turns out, is this: ‘Every curry breaks down essentially to three spices,’ she explains. ‘The mother and father of all curries are turmeric and chilli, so those two spices never change, and then the third spice changes depending on what ingredient you’re cooking – so if it’s brassicas like cabbage or cauliflower it could be mustard seed, if it’s lentils it’s cumin seed.
‘But I didn’t know what to do with this book I’d written, so I looked in the front of a Jamie Oliver cookbook, Googled the names, found his agent and sent her a proposition, saying I’ve found this three-spice formula.’ Ten minutes after she pressed ‘send’ the agent phoned to ask for a meeting and three days later Nisha had a book deal.
Then, of course, there are the restaurants: she opened the first Mowgli – her pet name for her daughters – in Liverpool in 2014 while she kept up with the day job. She only left the law when, three months after that first branch opened, there were long queues at both lunchtime and in the evening. Even now, though, two years on, she prefers to call it a sabbatical. ‘Today, if you asked me at a dinner party what I do for a living, I would say I’m a barrister,’ she says.
At least her mum has taken on board the change of career. ‘The other day at a party somebody said, “So what do you do?” and my mum said, “She’s a restaurateur,”’ Nisha says. ‘It was a lovely moment.’