Styling: Hope Lawrie. Zuu wears shirt, Stone Island at mrporter.com, T-shirt, Uniqlo. Photograph: Amelia Troubridge/The Observer
Big Zuu arrived at last year’s Bafta TV awards as the underdog. He’d been serving food to comedians on his cooking and chat show, Big Zuu’s Big Eats, since 2020. He talks to famous people about what they love to eat and then he knocks them up a three-course meal in his van, with the help of his best friends, Tubsey and Hyder. But the show was on its third season on Dave, and though it was one of the channel’s top performers, it still had a relatively small audience. It was up for best entertainment performance and best feature, against mainstream titans such as Graham Norton, Michael McIntyre, Alison Hammond and The Great British Sewing Bee. To Zuu’s obvious amazement, he won both categories. “Growing up, there wasn’t many chefs or people that look like me on telly,” he said, accepting his first award. “What? Doublé?“ he said, accepting the second.
Now, Big Zuu is everywhere. Big Eats is back with a revamped new location and non-comedy celebrities including Jonathan Ross, Alex Scott and Mo Farah. On the day we meet, he’s just launched a canned water brand, Drip. Every time I open Instagram, I get served another ad for a different brand with his face attached. “I do a lot of ads,” he says, sheepishly. He hosted his own ITV Sunday breakfast show. He’s done the rounds on Saturday Kitchen and Sunday Brunch, and ignited a good-natured Twitter beef with Michel Roux over a peach souffle, which Zuu called “very dead” on live TV. “He tweeted me afterwards! He said: ‘Cheeky.’ I was like, come on boy, you know it’s all love. I love Michel.” Recently, he appeared as a guest judge on Celebrity MasterChef.
But before he was on television, the man born Zuhair Hassan was cooking on YouTube, and before that, he was doing it on Snapchat. He was a rapper and a grime artist – his cousin is AJ Tracey – with a sideline in putting together big, flavoursome dishes to feed his friends. He grew up in west London, and now he lives in Golders Green, in a house with Tubsey, Hyder and his stylist, Dean. But he has an office in Soho, and spends most of his time here. “It’s kind of like my hub,” he explains. He’s taking me to the Israeli chain Miznon for lunch. As soon as we walk in, a customer asks him for a photo. He obliges, happily. Later, we’ll wander down the street to another spot for dessert, and he gets nods and hellos and fist-bumps all the way; a stranger puts him on the phone to his friend, who makes teeth grills, and would like to make him some. (Zuu chats but says he’s not really a grills man.)
Spending the day with Big Zuu is a joyful experience. He loves people, and people love him. He’s often told by strangers that their mums love him. “Mums, aunties, grandmas,” he says, but that makes sense to him. “Who’s the person cooking, that’s taking care of your family? People who love food love me, through the fact that I celebrate it on camera. The working-class people of this country, who definitely don’t see people like me represented on telly, they look at me as this bubbly food man,” he chuckles. He says it was weird to be seen that way at first, but now, dads will come up to him and tell him that their sons cook because they like Big Zuu. “That’s a lot of people cooking for their family because of me.” That sounds like a genuine gift to give to people. “That’s a blessing,” he nods. “If someone’s in their home, cooking one of my recipes for their family, I’ve influenced you to do something nice for your people. I don’t ever underestimate how powerful food is. It’s definitely done a lot for me.”
He can wax lyrical about the kosher shops in his neighbourhood, or the quality of the halal meat he will eat, or what dishes were imported to the UK after the second world war. “In the Big Eats theme tune, I say, ‘I was a young fat boy’, and it’s not a lie.” He eats at Miznon often and he knows the menu well. “It’s all about fresh veg, olive oil, not a lot of seasoning, just simple. They roast a whole cauliflower and put it on the table. That is literally – bam!” he says, though admits it would have been a bit much for the two of us. He “bams” when he’s happy, and he seems very happy. “The tomatoes are just chopped tomatoes, bam. The beans, they’re cold. Bam!”
He’s about to start shooting a new ITV series called Big Zuu’s 12 Dishes In 12 Hours, in which he’ll take a celebrity to a city somewhere in the world, and they’ll learn about the local cuisine. For the pilot, he went to Marseille with Oti Mabuse. He likes to know the history of an area and how its food came to be. I mention a recent online controversy, in which an American was scathing about the food in London. “You can never discredit how incredible the food is in London,” he says. “We have everything. Every single cuisine. Because we’re such a multicultural society, and we’re so open to different faiths, and so open to different people coming to the country. In Soho, you can taste the world.” He laughs. “I’m eating fish and chips, in a pitta. That’s what London is. This is London!”
Zuu has just turned 28. He first got into cooking when his mum was pregnant with his brother, and he was around 10 or 11. “I was trying to help her around the house, when she was tired.” Over time, he realised that there was more to it than just the feeling that he was helping out. “I realised that, with the satisfaction I got from doing it, I was able to be my own person. When you’re a young kid, all you want to do is be an adult, so cooking’s quite a grown-up thing. I found a lot of power, especially in an African household, where my mum is very strict, and the mentality is like, ‘I’m the parent, you’re the child.’”
He is an enthusiastic presence, and talks about the “good energy” he likes to bring to any given situation, but admits he wasn’t always this way. “I feel like my life forced me to think like that. I went through a lot of stuff growing up and I definitely always looked at life on the bright side,” he explains. He is very close to his mum, who came to the UK as a refugee, fleeing the war in Sierra Leone in 1995. He talks about her often. “My mum came over here four months pregnant with me, didn’t really know anyone here, couldn’t speak English. When your mum is a refugee of a war that is going on, right at that time, it’s very different. A lot of her life was spent balancing taking care of her child and supporting her family. So a lot of times, we went without, so we could support people back home.”
As a child, he found that hard to understand. “I was quite sad. I’d look at other people and be like, you’ve got a massive room, and you have bare toys and shit. The little materialistic things that you have when you grow up in western society.” He went to Sierra Leone for the first time when he was eight or nine, and the trip made him realise what he had and changed him. “I started to look at things differently.” Whenever he’s on TV now, his mum texts to let him know that the show is on. “If I’m on The One Show, and I’m there, live on telly, she’ll text me: ‘The show is on.’ Every single time. It’s so funny.”
He also learned a lot from food technology at school. “Some places don’t have a kitchen, so we were very blessed to have that,” he says. He was taught how to make a roux, and pizza, and he started feeding his friends at lunchtime. You must have been quite good, if you were the one cooking for your mates? “I think I always understood that it’s quite methodical, but it’s also about passionate love. So I mix the both. I don’t really measure stuff, I just put my heart into it.” On Sundays, he still tries to cook a lasagne or macaroni cheese for his friends. “My mac and cheese is unbelievable,” he says. The trick is onion powder, garlic powder, hot sauce, three different cheeses, and leaving it to rest. “It’s moreish! When you eat it, you have to sleep after.”
Six years ago, when he was hosting a show on the now defunct Radar Radio, he put up a YouTube video of himself cooking a Christmas dinner for his friends. A TV producer spotted it, saw Zuu’s potential, and pitched the show that would become Big Eats to Dave. “That video got us a pilot. I never planned that cooking video. We just did it. I never planned to have a show called Big Eats. We just did it. Everything just kept growing. It was like a snowball. Now, I’m just, like, a food man,” he says, laughing.
Is there a difference between how you do social media and TV? “I feel like I try to be myself all the time, but I definitely know that, if you put a random person on the telly, they’re going to enunciate themselves way better.” He does an impression of a plummy presenter. “But with me, I feel like it’s very important that I don’t fall into that. I just try to be myself and appreciate that people may not understand every single thing I say. But you get the gist. I’m on Dave with my friends, having a laugh, and random old white people stop me in the street and say, I love the show.”
Zuu wears polo shirt, Gucci at matchesfashion.com Photograph: Amelia Troubridge/The Observer
Now, he’s on primetime, too. He was invited on to Celebrity MasterChef after he met John Torode at an industry event. “The pressure’s definitely real,” he laughs. “I’m not gonna lie and say I wasn’t thinking about the 100 years I’ve spent watching John and Gregg.” They cooked seven of his dishes, including his mum’s jollof rice. “It just looks like a normal episode of MasterChef. But that was not a normal episode of MasterChef. They respected me as a chef. They respected my recipes as important recipes. This is food from west Africa, and they put it on primetime BBC. You’ve got the Go Compare guy cooking fufu and okra stew. If that’s not changing our perception of reality, of race and diversity in food, what is?”
Zuu recently filmed a documentary for the BBC, due next year, about performing his Umrah, one of the Islamic pilgrimages. He took Tubsey and Hyder with him. “I’ve always been on and off religion. I’m with it, but I still live my life, I go out, I do some sinning, which I think everyone does. But I definitely feel like the older I get, the more I hold on to it, and understand it.” He wonders if people might see him in the public eye, as a young Muslim man, bringing joy to people through food, and think, “oh, I like Muslim people, because I like him,” he says, before adding: “As much as that sounds super weird!”
By this point, we’re both stuffed, but we gamely make our way down the road to Buns From Home for dessert. We sit on a bench outside the bakery, in the sunshine, attempting to eat two enormous cream buns. People nod, say hi, fist-bump him. “Look how much custard this is!” he says, delighted. “Unbelievable.” Eventually, I tell him that my stomach hurts. “If your stomach is hurting, if you haven’t eaten to the point where you’re gonna explode, then you haven’t done a day with Zuu,” he declares, beaming. “You’ve experienced what it’s like to be my friend.”
Big Zuu’s Big Eats is on Dave on Mondays at 10pm, and is available to stream on UKTV Play. 12 Dishes will be on ITV1 and ITVX in 2024
