Hair and makeup Juliana Sergot using Bobbi Brown and Tigi. Photograph: Alex Lake/The Observer
I was born in this country, but spent every holiday in India. There, you don’t have plastic toys: you scale fish, you pluck chickens, you grind spices, you form kebabs with mincemeat. Those are my earliest memories, which basically means you have absolutely no fear and no food that was taboo.
If any friends ever came home, I’d beg my mother not to spice the lamb chops. I’d beg her not to put turmeric on the chips. Never worked. Now my daughters are 18 and 20 and when their friends come over they still are embarrassed if I cook curry, because maybe it makes them look as though they’re not fitting in. Isn’t it strange? And the world’s a different place now, it’s really crazy.
At Mowgli, my chain of restaurants, we stand on the shoulders of the curry-house culture, but that culture was made for the western audience. It was made on the basis of a mother sauce of onion, ginger, garlic, potent spices, because you can reheat that and it lasts for days. That’s not how Indians eat at home. We looked at the English and we thought: “Right, what you want is a nice thick gravy.” Well, Indians don’t know what a thick gravy is, we’ve never had a thick gravy in our life!
I worked as a barrister on domestic violence for 20 years and the mantra of abusers was: “I shout because I care. I shout because I’m a perfectionist.” And that’s the mantra in many professional kitchens. There is nothing attractive about that. I rail against that “Yes, Chef!” military discipline. It’s pernicious and it needs to change.
If I’ve got happy chefs, you taste it in the food. If you’ve got happy servers, you see it in the service. At Mowgli, if you get a dog, you get “pupternity leave”, a full week of completely flexible working. You have a day off for your child’s first day of school, you have your birthday off. We send 40 to 50 members of our team to India every year: we pay them to live in villages and help with female entrepreneurship and sustainability projects. As a result, we’ve got 700 jobs and only four vacancies.
I don’t take Indian chefs. I take curry virgins and I teach them how to cook the way that my great-grandmother cooked. That way, you get complete consistency. And let me be very frank here: a male Indian chef, first generation, taking orders from a 5ft 2in, anglicised Indian female, it wasn’t happening.
Without a doubt, our success is built on chat bombs (dahi puri). In India, they’re made to order on the street, you pay a rupee and you’re given a chat bomb and you’ve got to pop them in your mouth in one. They’re like a grenade of flavour. To predicate a restaurant on the basis of something that will perish in five minutes is totally foolhardy, but thank heavens it worked.
When I was growing up in the 1970s, to be brown, it was dreadful. Some of my earliest memories were of firebombs coming through our windows at home, or bricks thrown at us. My parents were GPs and they would be stoned on the way to work by the very patients that they treated. But what that made you feel – and I think this is very true of many Indians – is that, honestly, you want to be liked. And one of the best ways to be liked is through your food, being able to cook for people, bring them around a table.
Our growth is bigger now than it was pre-pandemic. Can you imagine? And we’re busy because we’re reasonably priced. The day 16-year-olds can’t buy food with their pocket money in my restaurants is the day there’s really no point in us existing any more.
My favourite things
Food
The mad thing is my favourite food is sushi. It’s the subversiveness in me: you’d never have raw fish in India, there’s no way. I like the really good, filthy, proper sushi, like sea urchin – the weirder the better, frankly.
Drink
Coffee: sometimes I want to cry when I smell a good bag of ground coffee. It reaches into my heart; coffee is my absolute drug.
Place to eat
L’Enclume up in the Lake District, that’s a real treat. There are very few Michelin-star places where I necessarily remember the things that I’ve eaten, but Simon Rogan’s L’Enclume is the dream.
Dish to make
Butter chicken. I think it’s the only reason I’ve got friends, due to a dish that takes me 25 minutes to make. Kid you not.
Meat Free Mowgli by Nisha Katona (Watkins Media, £25). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
