Skip to main content

AUGUST: Food, home & business

This year I've been  writing a play that looks at how food feeds into our understanding of home and belonging. It's about a Malaysian woman who moves to the UK, misses home, sets up a street food stall selling Malaysian food...

 The play is called 'Don't sing in the kitchen, or you'll marry an old man', check out the project here: www.DontSing.co.uk

 As part of research for this project I have been speaking with people in London about food and home. In the series ‘Home, Food & Business’ I have been focusing on those who have developed a career around food that reminds them of home and who predominantly have ‘home’ in multiple places.I thought I would gather those interviews here.


 So far, I have spoken with Mandy and Guan, there will be more coming!

 Mandy from Sambal Shiok

 Safiah and I are bad Malaysians. We hadn’t been to Roti King in Euston till Monday 6 July. Luckily Mandy, of Sambal Shiok, saved the day and showed us the road home. Roti canai and kopi. Real kopi, kopi with sweetened condensed milk.

Sambal Shiok is a Malaysian Street Food stall, run by Mandy. Sambal is a Malaysian chilli sauce, often made with shrimp paste served as a condiment. Shiok is Malaysian slang for delicious. 

Mandy started her business in December 2013 at Harringay Market on Sundays as a guest spot for Christmas/New Year. Speaking to Mandy it’s clear to see the drive and the passion. Originally trained as a lawyer, Mandy worked as a partner in a corporate law firm in London, before realising that that pace of life was no longer making her happy - and food, and cooking was something that did.

READ MORE
And Mandy Part two, about support, advice and the importance of networks.

Guan and Nyonya

I meet up with Guan on a Tuesday lunchtime, I had just got back from a week in France and although I had a lot of work to do that day I was still in holiday mood, so it wasn't hard for Guan to twist my arm into having a glass of wine with lunch. Or rather - "are you the sort of person who has one glass and then thinks another is a good idea? Maybe we should just have a carafe?"

With that one sentence, I knew me Guan were going to get on.

Guan gave up his Investment Banking career to train in traditional French cooking at Cordon Bleu in London for a year. But for his cooking post-studying Guan went back to his roots and developed a very specific style of cooking, Nyonya food. A combination of falling in love with cooking and a lucky break on TV with 'The Taste' meant Guan ended up changing careers and giving a life in the food industry a shot.

READ MORE

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Body Eats

When I first saw Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring (1975) I remember feeling a deep hunger. My belly rumbled, my torso tightened and the muscles sucked into my belly button as my body concaved in on itself. I could feel my arms wanting to desperately reach out and seek things to fill me up, to bring close to me, to suck up and consume. I wanted to devour the world. I watched it the first year of my Performing Arts undergraduate, where I thought I would major in dance and movement. In the end I didn’t, switching in the final semester to acting, after struggling to feel fully comfortable with my body moving through space for people to watch. I decided I preferred to hide behind words. Dance has always been a space of thirst, for cravings, for desire – a way to seek out and pursue, a way to rampage through ideas. Moving to be sated. Finishing dance exams growing up I would always be hungry, never being able to eat when nervous. Navigating how to feel in leotards, in front of mirrors, o
Post a Comment
Read more

A restaurant review: of Instagram Stories

With the importance of ‘brand’, of storytelling and the prolific use of social media to attract customers, it seems appropriate to me that restaurants can be judged through the prism of Instagram and the fleeting tool of Stories. It is after all, a curated space for the business to tell their story. This is a piece of writing that was difficult to write because it hit emotional points that are sometimes hard to articulate, so this is a string of thoughts.  Food is the focal point of a restaurant, to be examined and appraised. It is often thought. In communities which have a robust food culture the dissection of dishes is an act of bonding, of creating memory and building connection to space and time and place. “We eat to remember place” anthropologist David Sutton writes, in his work reflecting the Greek island of Kalymnos.  Restaurants have a history and an anchor in the idea of being spaces of restorative-ness, of gathering and of being with people, of nourishment.  In the capitalist
Post a Comment
Read more

The undoing and redoing of me

I am often thinking about the line between public and private, the way it wavers, blurs, disappears. In a world of social media it is a question for everyone, and not just for the stars, royalty, politicians. For me the question broadens into the realm of work. Where do I begin, and where do ‘I’ end. The ‘I’ must interrogate my place within power structures, within cultural narratives, within relatability.  My academic research was about a community I am part of, through my father. It was an ‘objective’ approach to examine storytelling, but because it was not a culture I participated in on a daily basis I was constantly negotiating my position in the work, my lens in the re-telling, my biases, my outside-ness and my inside-ness. The story of me became integral to the condition of the research. And, as my professional career has progressed, my approximation to this culture, one that is less known in the wider world, means I have become a tool to crack into these spheres - I have the con
Post a Comment
Read more