Bookshelfie: Women’s Prize Podcast - S6 Ep10: Bookshelfie: Ravinder Bhogal

Episode Date: June 1, 2023

From home cook to food journalist and eventually chef and restaurateur, Ravinder Bhogal  reflects on her  own experiences as an immigrant in London and how it influenced  a ‘no borders’ kitchen in her own restaurant. Ravinder is a journalist, cook and owner of the incredible Jikoni restaurant in Marylebone, in west London. She started her career as a beauty writer for More magazine in the early noughties before a TV cooking competition completely changed her life. Ravinder beat off nine thousand other budding chefs to be crowned “The New Fanny Craddock” on Gordon Ramsay’s The F Word in 2007. It catapulted her to fame, including an award-winning cookbook and a number of TV appearances alongside the likes of Ramsay and Jay Rainer, as well as her own series. Her new book Comfort and Joy is out now.    Ravinder’s book choices are: The Awakening by Kate Chopin Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys How to Eat by Nigella Lawson Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in her Head by Warsan Shire The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri Vick Hope, multi-award winning TV and BBC Radio 1 presenter, author and journalist, is the host of season six of the Women’s Prize for Fiction Podcast. Every week, Vick will be joined by another inspirational woman to discuss the work of incredible female authors. The Women’s Prize is one of the most prestigious literary awards in the world, and they continue to champion the very best books written by women. Don’t want to miss the rest of Season Six? Listen and subscribe now! This podcast is sponsored by Baileys and produced by Bird Lime Media.

At Harrison Health Care, we know that lasting health starts with personalized care. We're not just a clinic. We're your partner in prevention, helping you achieve your health and longevity goals. Our expert team combines evidence-based medicine with the compassionate, unhurried care you and your family deserve. Today and for many years to come. When it comes to your health, you shouldn't settle for anything less than exceptional. Visit Harrisonhealthcare.ca.ca.com.com. With thanks to Bailey's, this is the Women's Prize for Fiction Podcast. Celebrating women's writing, sharing our creativity, our voices and our perspectives,

all while championing the very best fiction written by women around the world. I'm Vic Hope and I'm your host for Season 6 of Bookshelfy, the podcast that asks women with lives as inspiring as any fiction to share the five books by women that have shaped them. Join me and my incredible guests as we talk about. talk about the books you'll be adding to your 2023 reading list. Hello and welcome back to the podcast. This year's 2023 shortlist is out now.

Have you read any of these six brilliant books yet? Well, if not, head over to the Women's Prize website to discover them now. Today's guest is Rivinda Vogel. Rivinda is a journalist, a cook, an owner of the incredible Jaconi restaurant in Marlebone in West London. She started her career as a beauty writer for Moore Magazine in the early noughties before a TV cooking competition completely changed her life. Ravinda beat off 9,000 other budding chefs to be crowned the new Fanny Craddock on Gordon Ramsey's

F word in 2007. It catapulted her to fame, including an award-winning cookbook and a number of TV appearances alongside the likes of Ramsey and Jay Rainer, as well as her own series. Suddenly, she went from home cook to food journalist and eventually chef and restaurateur when when she opened Chaconi in 2016. The restaurant is a reflection of Ravinda's own experiences as an immigrant in London, a no-border's kitchen which mixes Asian, African, Middle Eastern and British cuisine,

complete with the most beautiful table gloves and napkins you have ever seen. And a spin-off veggie home delivery brand to boot. And for those not able to dine out or take out in London, her FT and Guardian columns leave mouths watering all over the country and her new book, Comfort and Joy, is published. imminently. Welcome to the podcast, Ravinda. Thank you so much for having me. What is it about food and descriptions of food that is just the best of the English language? I really think that's when it comes into its own. Of any language. I mean, I speak food Italian. It's the only Italian I speak is food,

food words, and I think it gets you by, but there's such sensuality in food and I think the language around food is always so sort of generous and abundant and welcoming and Yeah. It's just, it's sumptuous and delectable. I love to talk about it because we've given it the language it deserves. Absolutely. Food is life. No, it is. And I feel like that's going to be a huge theme in this episode.

A lot of what we talk about. Does food feature much in your reading? Because obviously you write about food. Yes. I mean, I think there are food authors that I really love to read. Nigella Lawson being one of them. Nigel Slater reading toast, you know, all that. that they sort of really formed my sort of early years of food writing.

You know, it was those books that really kind of made me think about food and literature. And I think there are passages in great books as well where I always notice things like restaurants. Like I think I remember reading The End of the Affair by Graham Green. And I loved it because it's such a London book. And, you know, them eating steaks with onions or her not having onions because her husband and like the smell of them at the Café Royal and places like that. I love all of that. What sort of books do you gravitate towards?

What genres, aside from food, do you find yourself just revelling in? Gosh, I think I like books that are very real to life. So some people like magic realism. I think I like realism. I think the books that I often pick up can be quite dark. I recently discovered Leila Slemani as an author. And I remember picking up her book at an airport. And it sounded like it was going to be a romp because it was about a woman who's a sex addict.

And I thought, oh, this will be a romp. It really wasn't. It was really, really dark about a woman who has such sort of pain and anger which she sort of turns in on herself. And this addiction to sex is actually a really, really. horrific thing that you witness in the book is that you know you learn more about the character but i really like books that sort of tell stories of people's experiences and the lives of others i guess it's i'm quite voyeuristic i think i would say it's a great way it's the most important actually that we can walk a day in other shoes that we can understand that we're all different

and and as such practice empathy and kindness through reading characters Absolutely. Do you find reading to be a grounding for you or an escape? Definitely an escape. Also grounding. I think an escape I'd say because libraries I think have been the most important part of my life. So when I came to this country age seven, it was very difficult. I came from this very lush landscape, Kenya, to a very urban, haggard London. And, you know, when you're an immigrant, you feel alienated, sort of very disjointed. You're aching for what you've left behind. There's a lot of pain. You watch your parents trying to grapple and trying to settle.

And it was a very difficult transition. And the library, the local library, became my escape. It was where I felt safe. And I think that's why libraries are so important. They're not just about the books. They're places for people to go. and feel part of a community for children, especially

at that time I felt very safe with the librarians. I felt like I had a little world there that I could just escape to and shut the door and forget about everything else that was going on and lose myself in the reams of books on the shelves. It's a little sanctuary, isn't it? It's a haven

that every child deserves. That's why it's so devastating to know about the cuts to the funding, to know about the closure of libraries. How does it make you feel? What does the little Rivinda inside of you? What would she feel knowing that? It just, it makes my heart ache because I know how important libraries were to my formative years. The chats with the librarians, the ability to be able to have books for free, you know, for a child who didn't

have very much, to be able to take a stack of books home that didn't cost anything was life-saving for me. It was an education. It was a way of escaping, you know, into other worlds, a way to travel, to, you know, feed my imagination. But they really are the fabric of communities. And I think when you have, I think of, you know, libraries and restaurants are quite similar. They're almost like an ecosystem. And if you have something healthy in a community, like a great restaurant that's doing good, which is what I like to think we do at Giaconi, in a similar way, a library, that will flow into the rest of

the community, you have a healthy community. You have this central point of a community that is doing good. And I think that's what libraries do and it's so important that we keep them open. We do everything in our power to keep them open. Describing it like that, describing it as this beating heart of a community is, I think, really apt and more people need to see it like that. We can't just let them go. So as a child, you were visiting the library, you were finding solace in these books. when you went home were your parents big readers? Did you have a lot of books on the shelves of your home? No, my mother didn't have an education. She was married when she was 16, so she didn't read or write at all. And my father was a very literate man, but I only really discovered this sort of other side of my father after he died.

He was actually deeply romantic, very poetic, but his own father died when he was in his early 30s, and he had to shoulder the responsibility for a very large extended family. And he was an aeronautical engineer, and then he went into business and property and all sorts. But he just carried the weight and the burden of all these things, which made him sort of shut away his artistic side. And it was only after he died. I sort of discovered like little books that had like little schools of Urdu poetry

and things like that, which was a very hidden side of him that I never really got to know. But I think maybe I get it from my father. I just didn't know. He just didn't know that all time. What a thing to discover posthumously. I know, right?

It's incredible. I think that a lot of the time when I was growing up, I had this very distant relationship with my father. But, you know, the last two years when he was sick, I was very lucky I got to spend a lot of time with him and repair a lot of the misunderstandings between us and now that he's gone I sometimes think that no one really ever dies because genetics is such a strong thing you live on through your children or your family or you know who comes

after you and I sometimes look at myself or I find myself saying or doing things which are exactly like my father and that frustrates me to hell sometimes but he's very much alive and kicking in me Well, on the subject of legacy and a life continuing, so often they continue through the words and the pages of the books that we love. So let's talk about the books that you love. Your first book, Shelfy book, is The Awakening by Kate Schofen. Published in 1890, this seminal book depicts a young woman's struggle to achieve personal and sexual freedom in the oppressive American South. It was condemned at the time for its depictions of marital infidelity and sexuality, but has now considered. considered a landmark of early feminist fiction.

When did you read this book? I was a bit about it. Gosh, I was 19 years old when I discovered this book. And it's a really small book. It's not, you know, it's not many pages. But it was revolutionary for me because I had grown up in a household, which was very patriarchal. It wasn't even just a cultural thing.

I think often people are afraid of very strong women. Like to have a woman who has her own mind is a very, frightening thing for a lot of people. It's a revolutionary and dangerous thing. And I think we were always brought up with the word of your father is the word of God. And you don't go against that. You don't question it. You don't, you know, you live the life that we are going to set out for you and you fill that mould. And I remember this book just having such an effect on me because it, for me it was about a woman and looking for autonomy and looking to be something other than a wife and a mother and finding a room of her own and that really spoke to me. It was almost like, you know, when you first discover the thing that is boundaries and it's like a revolutionary thing because I remember that happening to me this moment where I sort of discovered, yes, you can have boundaries with people and it's okay.

Not a revelation, eh? It's such a revelation. But that was like this book for me. I was like, well, you can have a life and you can be a rebel. Even quietly you can be a rebel. And you can think for yourself and want things for yourself that are outside of what other people have planned for you. And I think that's how it really impacted me. And there are so many themes in it.

I think even the word, the awakening, like now we talk about wokeness. And I think that this book has a kindred spirit in what's going on today. So, you know, all these movements for women, for trans people, for, you know, Black Lives Matter, all these movements, I think, have kindred spirits in what was going on back then and the awakening. And I just think that this book is still so relevant today. It's a really important one to read, I think. So you read it at 19 and it was an awakening of sorts for you. So tell me about your sense of self and identity and autonomy prior to that up until 19.

I don't think I had one. I'm one of four sisters. I'm the youngest of four sisters. And we've kind of crossed a generation. My eldest sister is 60 so she's much older than me. She just turned 60 the other day. So there was a big generation gap and I think my mother got married when she was 16. And there was very much this desire to have a son.

So they kept on going until they had eventually a son who came after me. And so the women were very much like, you know, brought up across generations. My mother was pregnant across generations. And nothing changed in the upbringing from the eldest to the youngest. So it was like, well, that was the rule for your elder sister. And this is the route you have to follow. and I just sort of nodded along thinking, well, that is what happens to girls. This is what we must do.

And there were these very strict rules and codes of conduct of the things you needed to do and achieve. And for me it was very much, you need to learn to cook, you need to learn to sew, you need to, you know, all these things. There's an amazing poem by, oh, Jamaica Kincaid. It's a little, it's called Girl. And it reminds me of this, the mother telling you have to do this. To do this, you have to do this. You mustn't spit in the air. You must be this and you must.

And I just kind of went through the motions of following. And I think also it comes from being an immigrant and trying to settle in and you see your parents are stressed and they're trying to grapple and they're trying to figure things out. And you're just trying to not trouble them in any way. You're trying to be quiet and not seeing. so that they don't have to worry about you. So you're just kind of going, okay, okay. And then I went away to university, and it was like, oh, my God, this is like incredible.

I am a person without having to be a daughter or having to be a good daughter. And what does it mean to be a good daughter? And there are all these things I can do and all these great books that are informing me that I can. Another reason why books are so important. You grew up in Kenya and came to the UK when you were seven. So what were the women that you grew up around like there? They were incredible women. And look, I've learned so much, and I credit those women,

particularly in my culinary education, I learned this sort of very intuitive art of cooking from them. You know, this kind of interplay between you and the ingredient and this kind of just magnificence of, knowing how to feed 50 people without breaking a sweat and the generosity and that wisdom. And I was so inspired by the women that were around me, my grandmother, my mother, the various aunts. But then there was this, the other women.

So there was, you know, these vegetable sellers, the mama bogas, they'd come from home to home. They would leave their, their kind of, you know, small holdings very early in the morning. and get a matatu, which were these like crazy buses into the, you know, suburban areas where we lived. And they would petal their vegetables from door to door. And I just adored them. So often they'd come to the house and they'd be like, Mama Boga, Mama Boga. And a lot of the time they just got ignored.

But on the day that you needed vegetables, they had these incredible fresh vegetables that they would bring and they would sort of lay down their wares, you know, set them out like bait, passion fruits and finger chilies. all these wonderful mangoes when they were in season. And, you know, they would always let you as a child sort of spoil you and give you something for free or you'd pils for something naughtily from them. And these women really inspired me because they were the first female entrepreneurs I ever saw. They were women who worked who were changing the next generation's life. You know, these were women who were saving to educate their children. and even now I remember them with such fondness

and I think were these the women who actually inspired me to actually go actually I want to do business I want to be an entrepreneur I want to do something for myself I think they did I just love them there the fondest part of my you know childhood memories is the mama bogas and their magic bags that just held all this incredible produce

and you know we had an allotment that my grandfather tended and then these mama burgers. And I don't think I'd ever eaten a supermarket vegetable until I came to this country. Everything was fresh from a smallholding, from an allotment, from a farm. So, yeah, they had a huge impact on me. And then the other women, women, I just remember stories

because I remember, for example, on the days when there was communal cooking, so there'd be things like samosas that need many hands to be made, you know, and we'd make 200, 300 at a time. And I would sit or lie down on the sort of very cold pistachio-terazzo floor that we had in our house underneath the table. And I would listen to the grown-up chatter of these women. And for them, it wasn't really about cooking.

It was like a communal therapy session. You know, they would talk about husbands. They would talk about affairs. They'd talk about children or lack of children or, you know, whatever. the price of vegetables going up or whatever it was, but I found that kind of grown-up chatter incredibly reassuring. But it was the stories that these women told. Their own stories, but the stories of other people.

Some people might say they were gossiping, but actually they were stories. And those stories, I think, were the stories that really, you know, I didn't have bedtime stories. I didn't grow up in that kind of household. But those were the stories, I think, that really formed my imagination. and yeah, they were wonderful stories.

We continue to explore the stories that informed your imagination and continue to do so with your second book, Shelfy book, which is Wide Sargasso Sea by Gene Reese. Yes. An audible gasp in it deserves it. This is a book about Antoinette, The Mad Woman in the Attic from Jane Eyre, and serves as a post-colonial and feminist prequel to the infamous text.

It tells the story of how Antoinette became the first wife of Mrs. to Rochester, her journey from the West Indies to England, her mental decline and how she really ended up locked in the attic of Rochester's home. Can you tell us about why you picked this book? I don't think a book has ever spoken to me as much as this book. I might cry. I get very emotional about this book. I remember discovering Jean Rees. This was the first of her books that I read, but then I read everything she'd ever written. And then I cried because I really. realize she was dead and she wasn't going to write anymore. But I have read and re-read her books over and over again. And I think it's this sort of slightly vulnerable lost women making their way through

the world that really speaks to me. But this one particularly because Antoinette left her home, this sort of very lush tropical background with like greenery and lushness and sensuality and then came to this England's dark cold dream, as she calls it, and that really speaks to me because that's how I felt when I came to this country. My parents never told us that we were coming to England for good, and we had lived in Kenya, and it was just like when you live in something that's so lush and alive, it really kind of feeds your imagination. Everything is so colossal.

The sky is so big. The nights are so dark. There are stars. silence, there's animals. We had a lot of animals everywhere. All of that kind of space and freedom was just such a joy. And then when we came to England, and I'd visited England before, but it was very much sort of holidays and visiting English cousins and Fortinemann Masons and Hamleys. And it was this like wonderful carousel of wonderful things. Yeah, that's not life here when you live here. And then, you know, my parents were very much starting from the beginning. So I grew up having a

quite a privileged life in Kenya. And then suddenly we were living in this really ramshackle, flat above a shop that had no central heating, that had no washing machine. It was really, really hard. And I just felt so lost. And I missed my grandmother, all those things that we'd left behind,

you know, the language, the food, the customs, the sort of like neat hugs that my grandmother used to give me, the animals, it was just such a shock to my system that we weren't going back. I never got to say goodbye. And that, I think, was really difficult. So when I read this book, I was just like, my God, you know, there was somebody else who went through this experience and felt this sort of alienation and not fitting in and looking for a place to be. So it really spoke to me.

I mean, the language as well is so beautiful. It's so realistically written. and there's so much in it and I think that that whole thing about the mad woman in the attic I think we all have one somewhere inside us I think there's always a woman there are so many themes you know there's this sort of intergenerational trauma

the way her mother is with her and I'd experience some of that with my mother as well who was you know lost her own mother at two and I think really struggled with knowing how to be a mother and being married at 16 and all of that and then this woman who ends up in, you know, sorry, I'm just going to have to stop. It's a lot. It's okay.

I think it's something that you're so right. You feel very alone in, but actually when you read a book like this, or even when someone listening to this podcast hears you talking about it, they will relate to. It will resonate. It's so important. It's so important. I think it's so important to tell our stories before somebody else does and tells them wrong. So this mad woman in the attic is something I grew up with

because like I said, I grew up in a very patriarchal household and women weren't given space or weren't hurt and my uncle got married to this incredible woman I think she was 19 when she married him and I don't think he wanted to marry her or he had his own stuff going, you're still discovering who you are when you're that young and he drank a lot and there was a lot of violence in the house and eventually she sort of must have had

what must have been a massive nervous breakdown and ended up sort of living in this room at the top of the house and you know she lived in the house but no one understood her mental illness and it was very much as a lot of cultures it's like oh she must be possessed or she's a bad person or she's a witch

And that's what I grew up with, hearing that about her as a child. And I just remember walking past her room often. And she'd just be rocking back and forth, really distressed. And, you know, there were incidents where she had sort of fits of anger or, you know, moments. And witnessing that as a child, I just feel so bad that I wasn't able to help her in any way. and I couldn't have a seven, six or five or six years old, but being very frightened of her as well and not knowing what she was going to do

or how she was going to be that day, that this whole madwoman in the attic concept, there's so much about women's anger, and I think it's now being talked about a lot, and it's been explored as a theme, and how important it is for women to be able to express their anger, and you always brought up sort of being told that it's not good or ladylike for women to be angry.

And so you have all this internal anger and actually you turn it in on yourself. And it's like a bomb or a gun that you're holding to yourself because you're unable to express it. And that's such a dangerous thing. I think women hurt themselves because they don't feel hurt or they don't feel able to express their anger. And to be able to express it is such a wonderful thing because in the very, sort of basic sense, it's a mechanism to protect yourself. It's that fight or flight, or I must flee. This is a bad situation for me. I have to be angry and speak about it and flee. Or anger can be activism as well when it's channeled in the right way as well. It can be a force

for change. So I think that this brings up all of these things to me, this book. You know, it really, really speaks to me. It's a very personal book to me because of my own. and anger and all these issues that I think really need to be spoken about. You said it's important for you to be able to tell your own story before someone else tells it wrong. This book does that because it reclaims a voice that had been subjugated before. Absolutely. Do you feel that you've been able in your life to claim your own voice,

to tell your own story, to own it? I'm beginning to, and I think partly opening Chiconi for me was that, because I felt for a lot of my childhood, my experience, or a lot of my life, my experiences in immigrant had been courturized. I had to be the Indian girl, but no one thought, oh, she's a East African Indian. She is also a product of all these amazing, diverse immigrant community that she's grown up in. She's a Londoner. She's all these things. And I felt that for a lot of my life, yeah, my experience was quarterized and I was put into a box.

And I think subconsciously I created Gicone because I wanted to belong to a place where I could finally be who I was, all my many identities, my many tongues, my multitude of identities. I could be all of those things. And there are so many people like me everywhere. And I feel they find a home in Gicconi. I just delight when people from so many different backgrounds come to our restaurant and, you know, we cook across borders. So people will be like, oh, this reminds me of something my aunt used to cook. This tastes like something my grandmother used to cook. Oh, this is quite British, but then there's this spice going through it.

Or you've used this ingredient. Or, you know, it just gives me so much joy because people are finding home or a sense of home at Gricone. And that's really fulfilling for me. But, you know, in terms of telling stories, I think it was a quote by Chinua Cheebe, I think I read, that just really startled me. And it was, I think it said something like, until the lions have their own historians, the glory of the hunt will always belong to the hunter. And that really is about owning your own stories and telling them before some secondary person comes along and tells them all wrong. We have to be able to speak about our experiences. and I think in speaking about them, we empower others to do the same.

Did your parents ever tell you why they didn't tell you that you were going to be staying here? They never told us why. But the house that I grew up in, it was like crazy. It was like two alcoholic uncles. My father, who was just like basically a party animal and hadn't really grown up. And then had all this, I think family was very triggering for him because he had all this responsibility or put on his shoulders. So he loved, he was their life and soul of a party.

So they built this bar in our house. And all I remember is just a stream of people, strangers coming into our house, like these kind of phantoms, just drinking and having parties and people coming out of like behind closed doors, you know, doing up their clothes or like people falling downstairs, drunk. And then there was this group of children like me and my cousins, and we just had full autonomy to do what if the fuck we wanted to do.

Like drink icy sodas at midnight or watch vampire films or like go to the kiosks and never eat dinner and just eat donuts for dinner. So there was a greatness to that, but it was also like children in a house like that are completely unseen, but they see everything. and no one notices that you're actually seeing everything that's going on and taking it in because the adults are so kind of preoccupied with their own, you know, dramas. And I think that was both a wonderful, it was like a curse and a blessing at the same time. So I think my parents were so wrapped up in their move here and everything that they didn't.

My father had already come a year before. So then my mother and myself and my brother joined. them and then my sisters came a little while later and my oldest sister was already married and living in england she got married at 19 or 20 when she got married it sounds so wild i mean everyone's everyone very young as well looking back now it does feel a bit crazy to have so much responsibility and to make those decisions i guess of course they didn't really think to to explain to you what was going on but then i guess you've been talking about it now is that reclamation of your story?

Yeah, I think it's important to talk about women in our communities. These women have all been marginalized. They're experienced like what I do, I find to be a complete and utter privilege. The fact that I have a platform, that I have a restaurant, that I get paid to do, you know, the cooking. You know, I was given this parameter by my mother and she said, you will cook for your husband and your children. and I've gone beyond that. And it is such a privilege. I really do feel sometimes when I'm at the past,

the sort of spirit of all those women who came before me who didn't get that opportunity standing with me, kind of cheering me on, going, yeah, do it. Well, speaking of cooking as something glorious and powerful, your third book is How to Eat by Nigella Lawson. This is Nigella's first ever. a cookbook. It was first published 25 years ago. Widesly considered a culinary classic. It's more than just a collection of recipes. It's also a work of delicious prose which inspired a generation to feel

at home in the kitchen and adapt recipes to suit their needs rather than following these strict instructions. How did Nigella help to liberate you? Oh God. It does, I think, sound overblown to say it, but she really did change my life and she really did liberate me. because, you know, I grew up with women cooking, but it always felt this like this sort of cult of domesticity, you know, it was what was expected. You cooked, you cleaned, you picked up the dishes off the table after the men had eaten. It was very much like that. And then I was a shop girl at Selfridges. I was 18 years old and this book had come out and I bought it. And I used to live in Kent. My family home was in Kent. So I had these long train journeys home and I had.

I barely looked up from this book. I was just so taken in not only by the delicious food. I loved to eat. We were a very foody family. There was always food. And I think as a culture as well, Indians are just generally very food-oriented. We're always thinking about the next meal. But there was this beautiful writing, this sensuality of food expressed so well and a joy,

a lack of denial, a complete celebration of food and eating it. and, you know, you cooked to eat the joyful part, you know, and it wasn't this drudgery that, you know, I'd seen so often in my own experience. And it was like when I was reading, and I've said this publicly, to Nigella as well, is it was like someone had let Light and Erin reading that book because I think so early on it was where inspiration formed.

It was like I didn't think. think I was going to be a food writer because no one told me you can train and go off and be a chef. You know, my parameters were very closed off as to what I could and couldn't do, what was permissible and what wasn't. But there was something about reading that that just lodged this desire, this subconscious desire in my heart. And I really believe in manifesting things and situations. And I think when I read that book, I had this deep desire to write about food. to cook food, to have people at my table, to maybe cook professionally, but I didn't dare voice it. And it just remained this like sort of, yeah, very subconscious desire.

And I just think I meditated on that desire so often, and I went back to that book so often and read it so often that suddenly that subconscious desire turned up somehow in real life and knocked a might be. door and said, come, we've been waiting for you. And when I won this Gordon Ramsey competition, I didn't know what I was going to do with it. It was like, okay, and I remember going to my editor at Look magazine and saying, oh, you know that thing I took a day off for, well, I kind of won. And I remember her saying, we're going to lose you, aren't we? And I just remember thinking nonsense, like, no. And it was only the day that the show aired that I started getting calls from Agent saying, oh, you may have a career in this, come and see us. And being a journalist, I was so skeptical, I went and saw seven or eight agents, and I was like, no way. And then I met my current

agent Felicity Blunt, and she was a literary agent. And I had been writing this little manuscript, you know, a few recipes and stories. And she just looked at it and fell in love with it. And within three months of that, I had a book deal. And my life sort of really changed. But it wasn't a huge surprise to me and I don't want to sound arrogant saying that but I think it's because I thought about it so often. Yeah it would be inside you for a long time. Yeah it would be like a daily meditation that it felt like this is as it should be. So this was growing inside of you. Can you pinpoint the moment when you did manifest it? I mean even entering the competition that didn't just happen by accident the fact that you were clearly writing these little recipes or these little stories. When did you start to

put the wheels in motion outwardly? I didn't really. I think I really genuinely was writing and recording these stories and recipes for myself. And, you know, I think, of course, you know, reading Nigella's book was that kind of real moment and then, you know, seeing her on TV and even people like Maltho Jafri, I remember having her Eastern vegetarian cooking. And she was someone who looked like me as well, you know,

to be able to see someone who looks like you. on television and writing books again. It made me reinforce that I could. But I think I'd been told so often that I couldn't and that this is what you'll do and you'll get married like your sisters did at age 20 and then you'll have children and then you'll cook for your husband and children.

I didn't dare voice any of those desires. I just kept them inside me. And I think it was when a really good friend of mine, Heather Wiley, who was a stylist, a fashion stylist, I had seen this advert for Gordon Ramsey's The F word and they were looking for a new Fanny Craddock. And she just said to me, I just have this overwhelming feeling that if you enter this thing, you're going to win. And she'd always had this kind of quite psychic thing. Yeah, she was quite cosmic in a way.

And I really took her quite seriously and I entered and then I won. But even then I didn't think I'm going to go off and do something with this. it felt, but it was just like, I think it felt a bit like being on a conveyor belt. And then, you know, when I published my book, the book did well, but then it was like doing television. And I remember getting this gig for Channel 4 and I was co-presenting a show. My co-host happened to be Jay Rayno, who's like a mouth on legs. And he would eat my food. And I'd never had a mentor. I'd never had anyone tell me this could be an option for you. And he'd say to me, you know, your flavors are so idiosyncratic. I've never tasted food like this put together.

These flavors are really extraordinary. You should really think about going and learning the trade of restaurants. And so I did because no one had ever told me I could. And here was this guy, one of the best, telling me I could. And I went and started working in other people's restaurants and learning and educating myself. And then it was like when pop-ups were like a cool thing, I got involved in pop-ups and it was another female chef who gave me my first platform. And it was like the adrenaline coming off a service was addictive. You know, it was like this high of like, I've just fed 90 people and they all love my food and it was such an incredible thing. And then, you know, I fell into sort of private catering.

And a lot of my clients happen to be well-known chefs who'd say, come and cook for my birthday. Or like I remember, you know, cooking Brett Graham's like the 35th birthday party, you know, from the Ledbury. I was like, I couldn't believe it. I thought it was a joke when he asked me to do it. But having people like that trust you and give you that kind of credence was an incredible thing for me.

And then I'd been sort of cooking for six years, pop-ups and bits and pieces, carrying my things around on the tube because I couldn't afford a taxi. And Faye Mashla had been coming to a few of my things. And she just took me aside one evening and said, I was doing this like pop up for six weeks. And she just said, when are you going to stop being such a coward and just find a space of your own? And the way she spoke to me felt to the feminist in me like a very kind of Virginia wolfesque challenge.

Yeah. And I was just like, okay. And by that time, I had birthed the idea of Giaconi, what the menus were going to be like, what the space would look like, where I wanted to open, all these things. And I suddenly had this like gush of confidence of saying, okay, it's time. And then I spent two years looking for a site because I only wanted to open in Marlaboone. And then the site came up and I was told you will never get this site. You have no operational experience. You have no, you know, reputation.

You don't have the money. But I was so bloody-minded. It was like I never wanted anything more, and I would not take no-for-an-answer. And in the end, they gave it to me, and they were like, you know, you haven't got the deepest pockets, but you've got the biggest mouth. And, you know, we really believe in your vision for this space,

and it's unusual. And, you know, you're right. We don't have another woman on our estate cooking and having a restaurant. And it felt like such a win. I was completely unprepared. for what would unfold. The opening of a restaurant is such a hugely profoundly traumatic thing.

I think it's so all-consuming. I had no idea what I was letting myself in for, but I'm so proud that I did. And I have such an incredible team of people who work with me. It's like a family. It really is. And it's such a privilege for us to be able to sit people for two, two and a half of ours, strangers, who we don't know, and to be able to give service, give something of ourselves

to them, something that doesn't appear on the bill, that is the joy of hospitality, and that's what I love and live to do. Bayleys is proudly supporting the Women's Prize for Fiction by helping showcase incredible writing by remarkable women, celebrating their accomplishments and getting more of their books into the hands of more people. Bayleys is the perfect adult treat, where shaken in a cocktail over ice cream or paired with your favourite book. Check out bailey's.com for our favourite bailey's recipes. Your fourth book is Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head by Worsonshire. This is the Somali British Poets' first full-length poetry collection.

You might know Wawson from her Beyonce connections as they collaborated on the poetry for her lemonade album and also the Disney film Black as King. This collection of powerful poems touches on migration, womanhood, trauma and resilience detailing the lives of refugees, immigrants, mothers, daughters, black women and teenage girls. I read this book because I was at a really low point and my cousin got it for me and put it in the pose

and she said, you need this right now. Why did you pick this book? I discovered Warsen Shire before the Beyonce thing. I think she was like a Tumblr poet and I just come across her words. And I was like, you know when words bite, when you can actually feel them on your skin, and they were so full of pain and trauma,

and it's like picking a scab. You can't stop doing it, but it's completely compelling. And everything that she spoke about, I just, firstly, I was just blown away that someone so young could write like this. She was 24 when she was, you know, named young poet. I think. And I was just completely blown away by the way she put words together. By the way she was so

vulnerable on paper. By the way she was owning her story. By the way she, you know, she told stories of refugees. I think this is something that we close our eyes to and we just can't anymore. Like the refugee issue and, you know, people seeking asylum, it's a very, very real thing. Like we, we We have to open our eyes to it and we have to be able to welcome people and give people aid because it could be any of us. And I think that poem, Home, I think, became kind of an anthem, didn't it, for the whole refugee crisis. All those people coming over in boats and, you know, I can't remember the words now. No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark. You only run for the border when you see the whole city running as well.

Yeah. The boy you went to school with who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory is holding a gun bigger than his body. Yeah. I mean to be able to write and to be able to, you know, she must have been surrounded by people who saw all of this. And I think she writes that so much. You know, she talks about intergenerational trauma, these relationships between mothers and daughters. And it's such an important one. And I think for anyone who's had to leave home for whatever reason,

and we left home, we left Kenya, not for the same reasons. We weren't refugees, we were immigrants, but it was still traumatic. And I relate to so much of this, and I particularly relate to this idea of mothers who are traumatized by an experience and how that speaks to their children

and what happens to those children. And I think that it's so important to particularly, look after mothers when they come over from new countries to make sure that they feel settled, that they can speak the language, that they feel that they have people to go to. When I opened Giaconi, one of my passions was to, how do we get refugee women working in my kitchen? How do we get them confident in speaking English and helping them with their paperwork and helping them ask questions?

And we set up this pilot scheme where we were getting refugee women coming and cooking in the kitchen. are really skilled women. You know, they've grown up cooking and looking after families and children, but I think that for women to have a life of their own is so important because happy mothers equal happy children. And I think another thing, and people don't like to talk about it, but is violence in homes that often, you know, we talk a lot about domestic violence and we think that that is often a man beating a woman or now women, women beating. men, you know, the other way around. But so much is actually about mothers beating daughters. And, you know, I think for a lot of women who have been traumatized, when they look at their daughters,

they see their pain. You know, they see, you know, burning cities or, you know, the trauma that they've had is kind of born into their children, particularly daughters. And I've experienced that. And I think it's something that we really have to talk about seriously. openly. Well, we've talked about the complex relationship that you had with your father, but what was your relationship like? What has your relationship been like? What is it like with your mother? It's a very, very difficult one. I have a lot of empathy for my mother. She lost her own mother when she was 16 and I think, you know, she didn't learn to be a mother. And then she had a stepmother who she had a very strained relationship with and then the lack of education, a very distant father and

getting married at the age of 16 and being shipped off to a new country to live with a new family where she had a very cold, steely matriarch of a mother-in-law who, you know, basically bullied her. She was 16, you know, and I remember my mother telling me I was so sad because I was away from everything I knew and my mother-in-law said to me, don't you dare cry? And whatever happens in this house now stays in this house and you can't go back in and see your family. And that must have been so petrifying for a girl of 16 years old. And then she had her first child at 17.

And it was just like she was still a child. And, you know, to navigate that must have been a really, really difficult thing. But I think as a result of that, and as a result of the lack of education, she just didn't know how to be a mother. And I feel like my sisters and I have had to be her mother a lot of the time and have had to be a carer. And I think when you're a child and you can see that your mother is, is depressed or sad, you carry that weight on your shoulders and you just think, okay, how can I be invisible? How can I not cause any trouble? How can I not add to this burden? So I think it's

really important to talk about and I think we really have to support these women because everyone is going through something, but particularly these women who've had to flee her with children, I can't imagine the weight of that and how much support that they need. And then as a result, there is this intergenerational trauma because you as a child carrying that feeling that is heavy. It is too much for a child. And we've talked about your familial expectations, cultural expectations and experiences. But what about your experience, grown up as an immigrant teenager in Thatcher's Britain. I know.

At this time, and you're carrying all of these things that you've mentioned, as well as making your way as an immigrant in this society. What was that like? It was quite difficult. I mean, I was bullied a lot at school because I looked and sounded different. And I think, again, like, I remember, you know, reading A.A. Mill, for example. Wow, yeah.

And being asked by the teacher to stand up and read. and, you know, I had a very mixed-up accent because I had American teachers, but, you know, grew up in Kenya with Indian parents, and I sounded different, I spoke differently. And I remember her saying, oh, you have such a lazy way of speaking, you need to improve how you speak,

or your accent or something like that. And it was almost like, like now I look back at it, it was like she was trying to civilize me somehow. And that just feels so hard. horrid and I sort of lost all my confidence and I just kind of went into myself. And this is partly why even now I think I'm really proud of reclaiming my language and my culture. I speak read and write Punjabi. I speak Hindi. I can understand and speak Urdu. I feel really fortunate to

have that. It's something I'm immensely proud of. I speak a little bit of Swahili very badly. But on my restaurant menu for example we have a dish called kuku-paka and it is an east african Indian hybrid chicken curry that kind of everyone cooks in their homes it's a very maternal dish and someone once said to me well why don't you just call it a chicken curry and i was like well why should i this is my language this is how we say it you know why should i make it convenient for you i don't like my name being shortened it's revinda i don't this the name i was given given. Like, I don't want an anglicised version of my name. These are things that I feel really passionate about, reclaiming language, reclaiming culture, because I felt that when I was growing up,

I had to hide so much of who I was. I had to try and fit in all the time. And now I'm like, well, actually, I don't have to fit in. I just have to be myself. And that is, you know, it's taken a lot of work to get there. It's time to talk about your fifth and final bookshelfy book, which is the interpreter of maladies by Jumper Lahiri. Published in 1999, this was Jumper's debut collection of nine stories, which detail the Indian immigrant experience in the US alongside the lives of Calcuttans. It touches on subjects including arranged marriage, alienation, dislocation and loss of culture, all things we've just spoken about, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000, as well as the Penn Heller. Hemingway Award for debut fiction. Now, I know you've returned to this book many times throughout your life.

Why is that? Well, I think Jim Bala here is just such an exceptional writer. Her prose is just so dreamy and it's so transportive as well. But it's so fragile and magical and emotional and vulnerable. And it really taps into all these things that we've talked about, that thing of, you know, longing or aching for what. you've left behind, the wonder of your new landscape, trying to fit in, fearing that you're losing your customs and your culture, trying to hold on to them, adapting, integrating, you know, all those

things. It's just such a glorious book and each story is so different, but for me, completely relatable. But the last story, the third and final continent, was a story that really spoke to me because it's about this man who's come over from India and he's trying to settle. First he ends up in London in Finsbury Park and then he finds himself in the US in Boston, I think. And he's sort of living in this boarding house which he discovers is owned by this woman

who lives in the house, who plays the piano, who's 103 years old. And he is completely befuddled by this that there's an ancient woman living by herself And I really, really relate to this because, you know, I'd grown up in this crazy extended household, living with my grandparents, living with my aunts and uncles. And it was never about nuclear clans. It was about community and large extended families.

And people dropping in without an invitation, there was always food made. There was always, you know, a cup of tea on the go. And that generosity of just letting people come in and out of your life. and I could not understand when I came to this country and I saw so many elderly people living alone. I just didn't get it because I understood, you know, they say it takes a village to raise a child, but I also understood that it takes people

to shepherd people through their, you know, latter years. And having grown up with grandparents, I just felt so sorry for these elderly people. And, you know, here I was in England trying to get used to this blustery climate, the bland, weird, stodgy food and all these things. And then I went to this very weird school that taught us things like maple dancing and Morris dancing.

And then there was a custom that I could finally get my head around. And it was harvest. And we were basically told, decorate, you know, cardboard box with crepe paper, put, you know, goods in it, can things, biscuits, all that. And then we're going to match you up to an elderly person in your, in your neighborhood. and you basically take this box over to them. And for me, that was such a life-changing day. And I remember just like pilfering things from my mother's cupboard,

putting them in this box, and then knocking on this door and finding this like very pink-cheeked old lady called Grace Locke. And she was just so extraordinary and so excited to see me. And she said, oh, you've bought some goodies for it. me and in I went into her house and I didn't really understand boundaries at that age and because I was so sort of unseen at home and lonely as well I was either always disappearing off to the library or every other day I was knocking at Mrs. Locke's house and she always let me in she never sort of you know dismissed me

she always said oh come in and I would often do things around the house for her like wash up or but often we'd sit there and she introduced me to things like the archers and she'd send me to the library and she would give me a list of books and they were always large print you know barbara bradford taylor daniel steel you know some mills and boons things like that you know again i would read some of the books that she was renting from the library and then you know she had this pension for fries turkish delight and i'd never eaten a donut before and she basically ate donuts every day She always had raspberry jam donuts. And I remember her saying things like, you know, you can't have a donut in your hand and not smile.

And it was this like energy that she had and this like amazing friend that I made. I think she was my first friend really in this country, first true friend that I could just go around and be myself with and ask her questions about her life. And she never got impatient with me. She was a wonderful woman. So I really related to this story, this man sort of, you know, trying to figure out how he can help this 103-year-old woman and this lack of understanding of how come she's on her own, how come she hasn't got anyone looking after her. And I felt that with Mrs. Locke, I didn't have my grandmother around. You know, she was in Kenya, but I had this grandmotherly figure that I got to hang out with. In many ways, Mrs. Locke's voice is a voice that will have been.

silent because she didn't have anyone to speak to. So in asking her those questions, you're uplifting it. You're celebrating championing voices that still deserve to be heard, which has been a theme throughout all of the books that we've talked about today. I'd love to know what role you feel food can play in championing marginalised voices. Well, I think what I do every day is that, you know, that I get to come to a pass and I am, you know, the philosophy of it, food at Giaconi is cooking without borders because we feel that we cook the food of those people who have the deep ache for what they've left behind, but the wonder of their new landscape. And what happens when you reconcile those two feelings? You're creating something new. You're cooking

immigrant food because you are, it's the old and the new and it's the adept, you know, the constantly adapting and having to adapt. And that's what we're creating. And the country we're live in is so wildly diverse and I grew up in such an immigrant dense area that you know I was looked after by Turkish people or Polish people or you know Chinese people Indian people and I ate their food and that has of course affected how I cook yes I have the base of my heritage culinary heritage but I've layered it with all these other things that I've learned so there's that but also our food is deeply maternal because I the magic of what happens when you're surrounded by these women who just know how to cook instinctively, their intuitive cooks. So much of that gets lost in restaurants because it's chefs doing very

chefy things. And when you ask people what the favorite thing that they've ever eaten is, it's often something cooked by their mother or a female relative. And I wanted to bring that to the fore. and so I feel like I'm telling the stories of these women through my cooking. You've told us so many stories today and I want to thank you personally for being so open and so honest. And I do have one more question to ask you. And it is if you had to choose just one of the books that you've brought today as a favourite. Which would it be in why? I think it would be Widesugassee C by Jean Rees.

It just had such an impact on my life reading it. felt there was someone else who had made this journey, this voyage into the dark, and it just comforted me deeply, even though it's a very sad book in many ways, I found it deeply comforting that somebody else had been there. You're not alone. Thank you for joining us. Thank you. No, honestly, the pleasure is all mine. Thank you so much. I'm Vic Hope, and you've been listening to the Women's Prize for Fiction podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Bayleys and produced by Birdline Media. Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you next time.