AJ Sharp (00:01.668)
Today on Food Rebels, I'm joined by someone whose food tells stories. Ravinder Bogle is a chef, restaurateur, writer, and all-round creative force. She was born in Kenya to Indian parents and raised in the UK and has built a career that celebrates the beauty of mixed heritage and the in-between spaces that so often get overlooked in food. Ravinder, welcome to Food Rebels.
Ravinder Bhogal (00:24.344)
Thank you so much for having me, E.G.
AJ Sharp (00:26.866)
it's a joy to have you here. Absolutely. So excited. I don't even know where to begin because there's so much to your story and so many different really interesting aspects that I want to ask you about. But can we start with really understanding your background? What was it like for you growing up? It must have been unusual to be born in Kenya to Indian parents or is it not?
Ravinder Bhogal (00:48.174)
Well, I mean, I knew nothing else really. My grandfather left Punjab in North India in the 1940s in search of better opportunities like a lot of migrants and he got on a migrant boat that sailed from Bombay. Well, it was supposed to be sailing to Kenya, but apparently they sailed for 26 days and then they ended up right back in Bombay.
And his brother was traveling with him, said, I will never do that journey again. But my grandfather was this rebel pioneer and very brave. And he got back on that boat a month later and landed up in Mombasa, the port, and just fell completely and hopelessly in love with the landscape and the soil, which seemed to him for someone who had come from so little to be the soil that just
AJ Sharp (01:14.692)
Wow.
Ravinder Bhogal (01:44.056)
gave and gave and gave. It's so benevolent, volcanic, rich alluvial soil. And that's where he decided to lay down our roots. So that's how I came to be brought up in Kenya. And I have wonderful memories of growing up in Kenya. It's such a beautiful country. Like I said, the landscape is so benevolent. you know, growing up,
in this household with an extended family. So, know, aunts, uncles, grandparents, all living together, eating our meals together. You know, that really kind of shaped, I guess, my sort of love of food and love of farming and nature. And then when I was seven years old, we took a voyage into the dark.
AJ Sharp (02:33.762)
You were seven.
Ravinder Bhogal (02:35.348)
and ended up in England and it was a very dark, dank November. And I was hopelessly sad, you know, because I had come from this very tropical, huge landscape, you know, with colossal skies and colossal trees. And then suddenly I was in urban England in a very grey, dark November, trying to find a space for myself. So it was...
incredibly alienating and difficult.
AJ Sharp (03:08.024)
gosh, I can't imagine. mean, November in England is, is, it couldn't be further away from Kenya, could it? And presumably, did you have a community when you were in Kenya of other immigrants who had come from Punjab as well?
Ravinder Bhogal (03:15.53)
Absolutely.
Ravinder Bhogal (03:23.242)
Yes, there's a huge Indian community, not just from Punjab, from Gujarat, from Pakistan. There's a huge community. mean, Kenya for me and my father was an aeronautical engineer, so his sort of social circle was incredibly international. So we were used to mixing with all sorts of people.
AJ Sharp (03:43.47)
I can imagine. I can imagine. It sounds really exciting. So you were only seven. So it's really formative years for you growing up of your real sense of self of who you are. Did you feel that you had kind of adopted a lot of the Kenyan, I suppose, traditions or culture? What did you feel? How did you feel you were culturally?
Ravinder Bhogal (03:51.19)
Yes.
Ravinder Bhogal (04:07.83)
I mean, culturally, I felt like I'd been torn away from something, you know, my grandmother and a lot of my family was still back in Kenya. And those were the people I loved and needed. And and suddenly I found myself torn away from them. And that was really, really difficult. And everything seemed very barren, very alien. I guess.
you know, for a lot of immigrants, it's the steady meal, tick of meal times that gets you through. You get through one meal at a time as you're finding your way through and the kitchen becomes a portal to home. And it's where I felt most comfortable and most at peace when I could smell the cooking, you know, that my mother was doing and those, you know, faint smells of home.
It's what made me feel most connected to where I came from.
AJ Sharp (05:04.366)
bet. So you arrived age seven into where did you sail into?
Ravinder Bhogal (05:10.83)
So we grew up, I grew up in Ereth in Kent, so southeast London, Kent borders. And my father opened a business. He opened a motor spare shop. And, you know, like all migrants worked incredibly hard. He was open seven days a week and sometimes on a Sunday he made no money. Nobody came. But he thought it was really important to
stay open just in case someone needed, you know, WD-40 or whatever it was, know, tire changing or whatever it was. He just felt it was important to be visible and a go-to place and then, you know, ended up becoming his shop sort of ended up becoming the hub of a community, you know, and people would gather even if they didn't need a spare part for their car, they would just come in for a cup of tea and a chat.
And I think that was the lovely thing about it. But, you know, so I think having been through that experience of settling and navigating a new landscape with my parents, knowing how worried they were, knowing how distracted their lives or how disjointed everything was, you know, them trying to find us a new home, get used to come to terms with a new culture, settle their children into school and opening a new business.
I saw the difficulties firsthand that my father faced. And so when Marshmallow, the car insurance company, got in touch with me about this campaign called Taste of Home, it really spoke to me because I was like anyone who is making the landscape of navigating financial support for car insurance easier, which is essential when you're running your own business.
I want to work with those people because we need more people who believe and celebrate the fact that migrants are adding a huge amount to our economy. They're driving our economy and that if they can do things that mean that migrants can sort of...
Ravinder Bhogal (07:28.814)
prosper and succeed and concentrate on the things that they're good at from creativity and entrepreneurship so that their entrepreneurship is not stifled by all these like difficult things then that's a really really brilliant thing.
AJ Sharp (07:45.423)
like administrative frustrations like car insurance or, you know, getting financial products and things like that must be really challenging if you haven't got three years of a house that you've lived in and all of these sorts of challenges, I can imagine.
Ravinder Bhogal (07:48.854)
It's so difficult.
Ravinder Bhogal (07:56.618)
Exactly. Exactly. And it can be really expensive as well. so Marshmallow giving people affordable access and a fair chance to succeed. And I think as an employer myself, I always think when someone new joins my restaurant, I want to give them everything to make sure that they have the tools to succeed in my business. And, you know, this is doing the same.
AJ Sharp (08:25.53)
So let's talk about your businesses. You've got a lovely restaurant in London.
Ravinder Bhogal (08:32.266)
I do. I have a restaurant called Giacconi. We've been open for nine years. So I opened in late 2016. And yeah, it's it's we say that we cook the food of immigrants that we cook without borders. And I suppose we we cook for those people who have the ache for what they've left behind, but also the wonder of their new landscape.
And what happens when those two things come together, when you reconcile those things, you end up creating something that is completely new. know, for me as an immigrant, think our experiences that you come from somewhere, you're desperately trying to hold on to your heritage, to your language, to your custom, customs, culture and food being one of those really important things. But then as you
AJ Sharp (09:25.562)
Mm.
Ravinder Bhogal (09:29.058)
find home and settle in a new nation, it reveals itself to you and you begin to weave in those new influences into what you have. And in doing so, you're creating something that is completely new. And I think that's what immigrant food is. And growing up in a very densely immigrant area meant that I had access to Chinese ingredients and Turkish ingredients and Iranian ingredients. And of course, that's going to feed into what we're cooking at home.
I think food evolves, it adapts, particularly the food of immigrants. And it's only natural. And so that's what we do at Chikoni. We cook without borders.
AJ Sharp (10:09.88)
I love that. So you just take inspiration and flavors from so many different cultural spice palettes and just make them work together.
Ravinder Bhogal (10:18.882)
Yeah, absolutely. For what makes sense. I think when you're a cook, you have a certain amount of intuition as to what things are going to work together and what makes sense, because we also will have shared histories. know, when you look at the Silk Route and you look at, know, Italy has pasta and then the Chinese have noodles. And there is, of course, some something that went from an idea that went from one place to another.
We all have versions of things that, you know, are similar. And I think we explore that a lot. I also explore the idea of maternal cooking because I think women and mothers and those maternal cooks have really been underrepresented on the London food scene. And because I gleaned so much of my wisdom and knowledge from these incredibly generous female cooks who I grew up with.
AJ Sharp (11:13.434)
Mm-hmm.
Ravinder Bhogal (11:15.402)
I was really keen to keep their stories alive and keep their narratives alive through my cooking.
AJ Sharp (11:23.148)
It's something I think that has changed a little bit in the UK. I was certainly taught to cook by my mother and loved it. And it's, I'm trying to do it now with my daughter, who's 10 and my son, who's 12. They both like cooking. They're not scared of it. They're very happy to get their hands, you know, dirty. They like making cakes more than other things, but this is fine. We start somewhere, don't we? But you're right. This, this cultural element of passing down recipes and techniques.
Ravinder Bhogal (11:44.556)
Yes, absolutely.
AJ Sharp (11:50.115)
And so often, you my kids will say, well, what's the recipe? I'm like, you don't need a recipe. You just need to look at the ingredients and just need to see how they look as we're starting to combine them. And we're not making terribly difficult things, but it's an instinct that you can only really learn by being taught it and shown it, isn't it?
Ravinder Bhogal (11:54.858)
Yeah.
Ravinder Bhogal (12:08.238)
100%. I think for me, was like people often say, well, how do you know about all these spices? And it's not even that someone stood there telling me and teaching me. I was just in a kitchen surrounded by these experts, these women who knew exactly what they were doing. And it was almost by osmosis, you know, because you're you're smelling things, you my nose was like attuned to the smell of spices like a bloodhound.
AJ Sharp (12:27.684)
Mmm. Mmm.
AJ Sharp (12:34.637)
Yeah.
Ravinder Bhogal (12:34.848)
You know, I knew when something was ready instinctively. Are you ready to add the next spice? How do you know? These are things that we pick up. It's an inheritance, I guess.
AJ Sharp (12:45.954)
It is an inheritance and it's exactly as you say, it's an instinct. It's one of the things I think that you can't get from a book or maybe even a cookery school, maybe you can from a cookery school, but you can't get it from a book is the, when something's going a little bit wrong, how to fix it. You know, that moment where it's like, add some ice cubes and cool it down or heat it up a bit more or whisk it a bit harder, whatever it may be. Or don't worry if you haven't got soured cream, you could use one of three other items to...
Ravinder Bhogal (13:01.835)
Yeah.
Ravinder Bhogal (13:13.238)
Yeah, there is, you're absolutely right. There's so much nuance and so much technique that can't be written down in words. You just have to be there and you have to see it and you have to absorb it. And and then your instinct or your intuition has to get get used to that. It becomes your kind of intuitive literacy, if you like.
AJ Sharp (13:37.41)
love that so much. it's, I mean, cooking at home, do you also cook at home without borders in the same way that you do at Giacconi? Is it the same kind of idea?
Ravinder Bhogal (13:51.06)
Absolutely. You know, I just think that, for example, sometimes I'll make dal, which is, of course, really, really Indian. But I love those beautiful preserved lemons that you get. And I just sometimes use those in the base of my dal because they give such a lovely freshness and acidity. know, so it is about sort of thinking not what does this what makes this the most authentic version, but actually what makes it taste the best.
And we all have those tricks, you know, where you might have someone adding Worcester sauce to their lasagna sauce or like to their ragu or whatever it is. We all have those things. And again, it's about sheer instinct. It's about knowing what instinctively what this is, what is going to make this taste better.
AJ Sharp (14:40.526)
Yeah, do I need more salt or more sugar or like you say Worcestershire sauce that brings a bit of an umami quality to something? That's really, really incredible. how, how has your, I mean, have you gone on, you've written some books, haven't you?
Ravinder Bhogal (14:47.967)
Exactly.
Ravinder Bhogal (14:57.226)
I have, yeah, I'm three cookbooks in. yeah, yes. So the first book was called Cooking Boots and that was when I had been a fashion journalist, fashion and beauty journalist. And then I made the switch over into food and it was very much about London girl about town sort of cooking for her various emotions and situations, whether you're impressing the in-laws or whether you're trying to...
AJ Sharp (15:00.718)
Three cookbooks in? Wow. Okay. What are your books called?
Ravinder Bhogal (15:26.584)
save money because you've seen a pair of boots that you really want to buy so you have to eat a bit cheaper or economically. So that was that time in my life. And then I wrote the restaurant cookbook, which is called Giacconi, proudly inauthentic recipes from an immigrant kitchen. And then my latest book is a vegetarian cookbook. It's called Comfort and Joy, Irresistible Pleasures from a Vegetarian Kitchen.
AJ Sharp (15:34.308)
Tough that.
AJ Sharp (15:51.131)
lovely. You know, the kind of the vegetarian side of cooking, I think is absolutely fascinating. I was recently in Copenhagen and there's a chef there called Beau Friedrichsen, who's part of Klaus Meyer's madhouse, you know, his, his cookery school. And he talks a lot about green umami and how hard green umami is. It's what he said to us is it's really easy to make meat taste good.
Ravinder Bhogal (16:07.265)
Yeah.
AJ Sharp (16:18.98)
You know, just season it and cook it and it's already oozing with umami. It's much, much harder to make vegetables and green, green produce have that real depth of umami. It takes real skill, doesn't it?
Ravinder Bhogal (16:19.074)
Yeah.
Ravinder Bhogal (16:31.392)
I mean, yeah, and I think I've been very lucky because vegetables culturally have always been at the center of our table. We didn't need the safety blanket of meat or dairy produce to make things taste good. And we've always believed that vegetables are the soul of the kitchen and that when they're treated with respect and cooked, you know, with spices and condiments that they can absolutely jangle with flavor.
AJ Sharp (16:58.446)
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Do you do a lot with kind of fermented foods and things?
Ravinder Bhogal (17:03.2)
I do. I love, we call them achars, so pickles. So I've grown up in a house, you know, where a meal was barely ever eaten without a pickle to accompany it. So everything from, you know, preserved lemons, pickled lemons with spices to mangoes. And then it's interesting because when I came to this country, we used to, in Kenya, we used to make a raw mango achar and they are
extremely expensive to get here and hard to come by. so we just use Bramley apples, which have the same sharpness and a similar texture. So we make this delicious Bramley apple achar, which we serve alongside, you know, a dahl or we put it into a cheese toastie or it's, you know, it's super delicious. Carrots, ferment carrots. We do a really, really lovely
croquette, which we take a dal makhani and we turn that into a croquette with Montgomery cheddar and then we serve it with this karatachar, which is wonderful.
AJ Sharp (18:14.438)
that sounds absolutely incredible. You're making my mouth water. What was it like for you though, when you opened the restaurant and you were kind of breaking away from the traditional rules, I suppose, of always having to stick with one cultural identity for a food inspiration? Did you get a lot of pushback from it?
Ravinder Bhogal (18:17.272)
Mm-hmm.
Ravinder Bhogal (18:33.14)
I did actually, it was incredibly difficult because I think when people look at who you are, what you look like, you're immediately put into a box. And I've never fitted into that box because again, I'm East African Indian. You know, when you look at India, we have a lot of Persian ancestry as well. And then I'm a Londoner and I'm British and I'm all of those things. I'm also the
the product of all those wonderful communities who gave me hospitality as I was growing up, whether it was our Polish neighbours who babysat me or the Nigerian people who lived down the road, who we went to their house for dinner. All those people have made me who I am. And I think in a way, Gikoni, when I opened Gikoni, it was a subconscious answer or a clap back to all those people who tried to put me in a box.
because I was saying, well, no, I am many things and don't try and cauterize my experience by saying stay in your lane and cook a curry or cook a biryani or make naan. That's not what I who I am. And I think that it took a few years for people to realize that we weren't just cooking Indian food, that we were cooking this, as we call it, cooking without borders or immigrant food.
And now people get it and it's joyful knowing that we are one of the few places actually in London or the world who do that.
AJ Sharp (20:07.874)
amazing. do you keep true, like per dish, do you keep true to the original recipe of the dish you're creating or are you literally creating totally new dishes fusing together all these different cultural elements?
Ravinder Bhogal (20:22.44)
you know, everything is our version, I guess, you and that's where this idea of authenticity. Well, what is authentic? Because how I make something is going to be completely different. You know, someone might frown at the fact that I'm adding this ingredient or using this spice when they might not. So I think we have a blend of dishes, you know, there are some dishes that veer very far off the path and are completely new, like
the idea of taking like a Ponto Scotch egg, is basically the love child of a British Ponto Scotch egg and a Chinese Pontoast. Or sometimes we'll do Kukupaka, which is an East African Indian hybrid chicken curry, which again is the product of immigrants, but it's cooked widely across Kenya, mainly by women in their homes.
But every woman has a different recipe for it. I've never tasted two that taste the same. So this is my version of it. So it's authentic to me. Yeah.
AJ Sharp (21:27.418)
I love that. And I never, didn't realize you'd come from a fashion journalist background, because I was going to ask you at what point did you start food writing? But actually you didn't stop writing, did you? Or did you?
Ravinder Bhogal (21:39.786)
No, I didn't really stop writing. mean, my career sort of took off really because of a TV opportunity. So a friend of mine who was a fashion stylist had called me up and said, look, I've just seen an advert for a TV competition. Gordon Ramsay is looking for like the next fanny crad, cradock or whatever it was. And I think that you should apply. And I really think that if you enter, you're going to win.
And she had this weird sort of psychic edge, like she'd always been known in our group for sort of predicting things. And I entered and 9,000 women entered and I ended up winning and it completely changed my life. And the day it aired, I started getting calls from agents saying, you might have a career doing this. And I sort of went and saw, you know, a few agents and then the last agent I saw had a literary agency and I...
had the very scrappy manuscript of Cooking Boots that I'd been writing really for myself to record recipes and she fell in love with it and within three months I had a book deal. So yeah.
AJ Sharp (22:47.17)
incredible absolutely incredible what year was that
Ravinder Bhogal (22:53.102)
Gosh, I'm terrible with numbers and remembering, but it was a I'd say a good 15, 20 years ago now.
AJ Sharp (23:01.464)
Okay, so predates, Giacconi and a lot of the things that we know you for today.
Ravinder Bhogal (23:03.946)
exactly. And Giacconi really came about again because I was presenting a TV show for Channel 4 and my co-host happened to be Jay Rayner, you know, food critic. And he's like a mouth on legs. So I'd cook on the show and he would eat the food and he'd say to me, you really need to think about getting into kitchens and...
AJ Sharp (23:18.912)
the lovely J Rainer.
Ravinder Bhogal (23:32.064)
and learning the trade of restaurants because your food is delicious and more people should be able to taste it. And I never really had a mentor. So I really took his advice seriously and I went and started working in kitchens and it was the advent of pop ups and supper clubs. So I started doing pop ups and I did some private catering and stuff. And after about six years of doing that, it became really clear to me.
after another food critic had come to a few of my things and she took me aside and just said, when are you going to commit to a space of your own? Stop being such a coward. And then it became clear to me that that was the only way that it could go, because doing it as a one man band was incredibly challenging and I wasn't really making very much money. It wasn't sustainable. So then I sort of plucked up the courage and started looking for a site and
I was convinced that Marylebone was the only neighborhood I wanted to open in. And when our site became available, I went to see the landlords and went through some really real challenges trying to secure the site because they were already over 40 people interested, 40 people who had more experience, more money, more operational experience and more reputation than me. But they somehow took a chance on me.
AJ Sharp (24:52.218)
Mm.
Ravinder Bhogal (24:58.75)
And here we are, you know, nine years later.
AJ Sharp (25:02.222)
What was it about Marilobone?
Ravinder Bhogal (25:04.768)
I think my dream had been that I wanted a restaurant in a neighborhood where the door would swing open and I would know people's names. I would know the names of their dogs. I knew I would know where they like to sit, their kind of quirks about how they like their drinks fixed, all of that kind of stuff. So, yeah, it was that. It was the fact that it was a neighborhood.
AJ Sharp (25:31.14)
I love that. I'm getting this real impression from you that you've got a really lovely sense of intuition that you like to follow when you're making big decisions about your life and like listening to your friend who maybe had a premonition. It's really, it's lovely hearing people talk about like the intuitive process of actually just following your heart, following your passions.
Ravinder Bhogal (25:53.166)
That's right. think, sorry, just to interrupt, I think we are needing to wrap up because I've got another interview, like literally in 60 seconds. I'm so sorry.
AJ Sharp (26:03.106)
Okay, no worries. That's fine. Okay. Lovely. Well, thank you.
Ravinder Bhogal (26:06.848)
Amazing. Fantastic. That's really good. Thank you so much. It was lovely chatting to you AJ. Sorry I had to it short. Take care. Bye bye. Bye.
AJ Sharp (26:14.466)
No worries, thank you, bye!
Today on Food Rebels, I'm joined by someone whose food tells stories. Ravinder Bogle is a chef, restaurateur, writer, and all-round creative force. She was born in Kenya to Indian parents and raised in the UK and has built a career that celebrates the beauty of mixed heritage and the in-between spaces that so often get overlooked in food. Ravinder, welcome to Food Rebels.
Ravinder Bhogal (00:24.344)
Thank you so much for having me, E.G.
AJ Sharp (00:26.866)
it's a joy to have you here. Absolutely. So excited. I don't even know where to begin because there's so much to your story and so many different really interesting aspects that I want to ask you about. But can we start with really understanding your background? What was it like for you growing up? It must have been unusual to be born in Kenya to Indian parents or is it not?
Ravinder Bhogal (00:48.174)
Well, I mean, I knew nothing else really. My grandfather left Punjab in North India in the 1940s in search of better opportunities like a lot of migrants and he got on a migrant boat that sailed from Bombay. Well, it was supposed to be sailing to Kenya, but apparently they sailed for 26 days and then they ended up right back in Bombay.
And his brother was traveling with him, said, I will never do that journey again. But my grandfather was this rebel pioneer and very brave. And he got back on that boat a month later and landed up in Mombasa, the port, and just fell completely and hopelessly in love with the landscape and the soil, which seemed to him for someone who had come from so little to be the soil that just
AJ Sharp (01:14.692)
Wow.
Ravinder Bhogal (01:44.056)
gave and gave and gave. It's so benevolent, volcanic, rich alluvial soil. And that's where he decided to lay down our roots. So that's how I came to be brought up in Kenya. And I have wonderful memories of growing up in Kenya. It's such a beautiful country. Like I said, the landscape is so benevolent. you know, growing up,
in this household with an extended family. So, know, aunts, uncles, grandparents, all living together, eating our meals together. You know, that really kind of shaped, I guess, my sort of love of food and love of farming and nature. And then when I was seven years old, we took a voyage into the dark.
AJ Sharp (02:33.762)
You were seven.
Ravinder Bhogal (02:35.348)
and ended up in England and it was a very dark, dank November. And I was hopelessly sad, you know, because I had come from this very tropical, huge landscape, you know, with colossal skies and colossal trees. And then suddenly I was in urban England in a very grey, dark November, trying to find a space for myself. So it was...
incredibly alienating and difficult.
AJ Sharp (03:08.024)
gosh, I can't imagine. mean, November in England is, is, it couldn't be further away from Kenya, could it? And presumably, did you have a community when you were in Kenya of other immigrants who had come from Punjab as well?
Ravinder Bhogal (03:15.53)
Absolutely.
Ravinder Bhogal (03:23.242)
Yes, there's a huge Indian community, not just from Punjab, from Gujarat, from Pakistan. There's a huge community. mean, Kenya for me and my father was an aeronautical engineer, so his sort of social circle was incredibly international. So we were used to mixing with all sorts of people.
AJ Sharp (03:43.47)
I can imagine. I can imagine. It sounds really exciting. So you were only seven. So it's really formative years for you growing up of your real sense of self of who you are. Did you feel that you had kind of adopted a lot of the Kenyan, I suppose, traditions or culture? What did you feel? How did you feel you were culturally?
Ravinder Bhogal (03:51.19)
Yes.
Ravinder Bhogal (04:07.83)
I mean, culturally, I felt like I'd been torn away from something, you know, my grandmother and a lot of my family was still back in Kenya. And those were the people I loved and needed. And and suddenly I found myself torn away from them. And that was really, really difficult. And everything seemed very barren, very alien. I guess.
you know, for a lot of immigrants, it's the steady meal, tick of meal times that gets you through. You get through one meal at a time as you're finding your way through and the kitchen becomes a portal to home. And it's where I felt most comfortable and most at peace when I could smell the cooking, you know, that my mother was doing and those, you know, faint smells of home.
It's what made me feel most connected to where I came from.
AJ Sharp (05:04.366)
bet. So you arrived age seven into where did you sail into?
Ravinder Bhogal (05:10.83)
So we grew up, I grew up in Ereth in Kent, so southeast London, Kent borders. And my father opened a business. He opened a motor spare shop. And, you know, like all migrants worked incredibly hard. He was open seven days a week and sometimes on a Sunday he made no money. Nobody came. But he thought it was really important to
stay open just in case someone needed, you know, WD-40 or whatever it was, know, tire changing or whatever it was. He just felt it was important to be visible and a go-to place and then, you know, ended up becoming his shop sort of ended up becoming the hub of a community, you know, and people would gather even if they didn't need a spare part for their car, they would just come in for a cup of tea and a chat.
And I think that was the lovely thing about it. But, you know, so I think having been through that experience of settling and navigating a new landscape with my parents, knowing how worried they were, knowing how distracted their lives or how disjointed everything was, you know, them trying to find us a new home, get used to come to terms with a new culture, settle their children into school and opening a new business.
I saw the difficulties firsthand that my father faced. And so when Marshmallow, the car insurance company, got in touch with me about this campaign called Taste of Home, it really spoke to me because I was like anyone who is making the landscape of navigating financial support for car insurance easier, which is essential when you're running your own business.
I want to work with those people because we need more people who believe and celebrate the fact that migrants are adding a huge amount to our economy. They're driving our economy and that if they can do things that mean that migrants can sort of...
Ravinder Bhogal (07:28.814)
prosper and succeed and concentrate on the things that they're good at from creativity and entrepreneurship so that their entrepreneurship is not stifled by all these like difficult things then that's a really really brilliant thing.
AJ Sharp (07:45.423)
like administrative frustrations like car insurance or, you know, getting financial products and things like that must be really challenging if you haven't got three years of a house that you've lived in and all of these sorts of challenges, I can imagine.
Ravinder Bhogal (07:48.854)
It's so difficult.
Ravinder Bhogal (07:56.618)
Exactly. Exactly. And it can be really expensive as well. so Marshmallow giving people affordable access and a fair chance to succeed. And I think as an employer myself, I always think when someone new joins my restaurant, I want to give them everything to make sure that they have the tools to succeed in my business. And, you know, this is doing the same.
AJ Sharp (08:25.53)
So let's talk about your businesses. You've got a lovely restaurant in London.
Ravinder Bhogal (08:32.266)
I do. I have a restaurant called Giacconi. We've been open for nine years. So I opened in late 2016. And yeah, it's it's we say that we cook the food of immigrants that we cook without borders. And I suppose we we cook for those people who have the ache for what they've left behind, but also the wonder of their new landscape.
And what happens when those two things come together, when you reconcile those things, you end up creating something that is completely new. know, for me as an immigrant, think our experiences that you come from somewhere, you're desperately trying to hold on to your heritage, to your language, to your custom, customs, culture and food being one of those really important things. But then as you
AJ Sharp (09:25.562)
Mm.
Ravinder Bhogal (09:29.058)
find home and settle in a new nation, it reveals itself to you and you begin to weave in those new influences into what you have. And in doing so, you're creating something that is completely new. And I think that's what immigrant food is. And growing up in a very densely immigrant area meant that I had access to Chinese ingredients and Turkish ingredients and Iranian ingredients. And of course, that's going to feed into what we're cooking at home.
I think food evolves, it adapts, particularly the food of immigrants. And it's only natural. And so that's what we do at Chikoni. We cook without borders.
AJ Sharp (10:09.88)
I love that. So you just take inspiration and flavors from so many different cultural spice palettes and just make them work together.
Ravinder Bhogal (10:18.882)
Yeah, absolutely. For what makes sense. I think when you're a cook, you have a certain amount of intuition as to what things are going to work together and what makes sense, because we also will have shared histories. know, when you look at the Silk Route and you look at, know, Italy has pasta and then the Chinese have noodles. And there is, of course, some something that went from an idea that went from one place to another.
We all have versions of things that, you know, are similar. And I think we explore that a lot. I also explore the idea of maternal cooking because I think women and mothers and those maternal cooks have really been underrepresented on the London food scene. And because I gleaned so much of my wisdom and knowledge from these incredibly generous female cooks who I grew up with.
AJ Sharp (11:13.434)
Mm-hmm.
Ravinder Bhogal (11:15.402)
I was really keen to keep their stories alive and keep their narratives alive through my cooking.
AJ Sharp (11:23.148)
It's something I think that has changed a little bit in the UK. I was certainly taught to cook by my mother and loved it. And it's, I'm trying to do it now with my daughter, who's 10 and my son, who's 12. They both like cooking. They're not scared of it. They're very happy to get their hands, you know, dirty. They like making cakes more than other things, but this is fine. We start somewhere, don't we? But you're right. This, this cultural element of passing down recipes and techniques.
Ravinder Bhogal (11:44.556)
Yes, absolutely.
AJ Sharp (11:50.115)
And so often, you my kids will say, well, what's the recipe? I'm like, you don't need a recipe. You just need to look at the ingredients and just need to see how they look as we're starting to combine them. And we're not making terribly difficult things, but it's an instinct that you can only really learn by being taught it and shown it, isn't it?
Ravinder Bhogal (11:54.858)
Yeah.
Ravinder Bhogal (12:08.238)
100%. I think for me, was like people often say, well, how do you know about all these spices? And it's not even that someone stood there telling me and teaching me. I was just in a kitchen surrounded by these experts, these women who knew exactly what they were doing. And it was almost by osmosis, you know, because you're you're smelling things, you my nose was like attuned to the smell of spices like a bloodhound.
AJ Sharp (12:27.684)
Mmm. Mmm.
AJ Sharp (12:34.637)
Yeah.
Ravinder Bhogal (12:34.848)
You know, I knew when something was ready instinctively. Are you ready to add the next spice? How do you know? These are things that we pick up. It's an inheritance, I guess.
AJ Sharp (12:45.954)
It is an inheritance and it's exactly as you say, it's an instinct. It's one of the things I think that you can't get from a book or maybe even a cookery school, maybe you can from a cookery school, but you can't get it from a book is the, when something's going a little bit wrong, how to fix it. You know, that moment where it's like, add some ice cubes and cool it down or heat it up a bit more or whisk it a bit harder, whatever it may be. Or don't worry if you haven't got soured cream, you could use one of three other items to...
Ravinder Bhogal (13:01.835)
Yeah.
Ravinder Bhogal (13:13.238)
Yeah, there is, you're absolutely right. There's so much nuance and so much technique that can't be written down in words. You just have to be there and you have to see it and you have to absorb it. And and then your instinct or your intuition has to get get used to that. It becomes your kind of intuitive literacy, if you like.
AJ Sharp (13:37.41)
love that so much. it's, I mean, cooking at home, do you also cook at home without borders in the same way that you do at Giacconi? Is it the same kind of idea?
Ravinder Bhogal (13:51.06)
Absolutely. You know, I just think that, for example, sometimes I'll make dal, which is, of course, really, really Indian. But I love those beautiful preserved lemons that you get. And I just sometimes use those in the base of my dal because they give such a lovely freshness and acidity. know, so it is about sort of thinking not what does this what makes this the most authentic version, but actually what makes it taste the best.
And we all have those tricks, you know, where you might have someone adding Worcester sauce to their lasagna sauce or like to their ragu or whatever it is. We all have those things. And again, it's about sheer instinct. It's about knowing what instinctively what this is, what is going to make this taste better.
AJ Sharp (14:40.526)
Yeah, do I need more salt or more sugar or like you say Worcestershire sauce that brings a bit of an umami quality to something? That's really, really incredible. how, how has your, I mean, have you gone on, you've written some books, haven't you?
Ravinder Bhogal (14:47.967)
Exactly.
Ravinder Bhogal (14:57.226)
I have, yeah, I'm three cookbooks in. yeah, yes. So the first book was called Cooking Boots and that was when I had been a fashion journalist, fashion and beauty journalist. And then I made the switch over into food and it was very much about London girl about town sort of cooking for her various emotions and situations, whether you're impressing the in-laws or whether you're trying to...
AJ Sharp (15:00.718)
Three cookbooks in? Wow. Okay. What are your books called?
Ravinder Bhogal (15:26.584)
save money because you've seen a pair of boots that you really want to buy so you have to eat a bit cheaper or economically. So that was that time in my life. And then I wrote the restaurant cookbook, which is called Giacconi, proudly inauthentic recipes from an immigrant kitchen. And then my latest book is a vegetarian cookbook. It's called Comfort and Joy, Irresistible Pleasures from a Vegetarian Kitchen.
AJ Sharp (15:34.308)
Tough that.
AJ Sharp (15:51.131)
lovely. You know, the kind of the vegetarian side of cooking, I think is absolutely fascinating. I was recently in Copenhagen and there's a chef there called Beau Friedrichsen, who's part of Klaus Meyer's madhouse, you know, his, his cookery school. And he talks a lot about green umami and how hard green umami is. It's what he said to us is it's really easy to make meat taste good.
Ravinder Bhogal (16:07.265)
Yeah.
AJ Sharp (16:18.98)
You know, just season it and cook it and it's already oozing with umami. It's much, much harder to make vegetables and green, green produce have that real depth of umami. It takes real skill, doesn't it?
Ravinder Bhogal (16:19.074)
Yeah.
Ravinder Bhogal (16:31.392)
I mean, yeah, and I think I've been very lucky because vegetables culturally have always been at the center of our table. We didn't need the safety blanket of meat or dairy produce to make things taste good. And we've always believed that vegetables are the soul of the kitchen and that when they're treated with respect and cooked, you know, with spices and condiments that they can absolutely jangle with flavor.
AJ Sharp (16:58.446)
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Do you do a lot with kind of fermented foods and things?
Ravinder Bhogal (17:03.2)
I do. I love, we call them achars, so pickles. So I've grown up in a house, you know, where a meal was barely ever eaten without a pickle to accompany it. So everything from, you know, preserved lemons, pickled lemons with spices to mangoes. And then it's interesting because when I came to this country, we used to, in Kenya, we used to make a raw mango achar and they are
extremely expensive to get here and hard to come by. so we just use Bramley apples, which have the same sharpness and a similar texture. So we make this delicious Bramley apple achar, which we serve alongside, you know, a dahl or we put it into a cheese toastie or it's, you know, it's super delicious. Carrots, ferment carrots. We do a really, really lovely
croquette, which we take a dal makhani and we turn that into a croquette with Montgomery cheddar and then we serve it with this karatachar, which is wonderful.
AJ Sharp (18:14.438)
that sounds absolutely incredible. You're making my mouth water. What was it like for you though, when you opened the restaurant and you were kind of breaking away from the traditional rules, I suppose, of always having to stick with one cultural identity for a food inspiration? Did you get a lot of pushback from it?
Ravinder Bhogal (18:17.272)
Mm-hmm.
Ravinder Bhogal (18:33.14)
I did actually, it was incredibly difficult because I think when people look at who you are, what you look like, you're immediately put into a box. And I've never fitted into that box because again, I'm East African Indian. You know, when you look at India, we have a lot of Persian ancestry as well. And then I'm a Londoner and I'm British and I'm all of those things. I'm also the
the product of all those wonderful communities who gave me hospitality as I was growing up, whether it was our Polish neighbours who babysat me or the Nigerian people who lived down the road, who we went to their house for dinner. All those people have made me who I am. And I think in a way, Gikoni, when I opened Gikoni, it was a subconscious answer or a clap back to all those people who tried to put me in a box.
because I was saying, well, no, I am many things and don't try and cauterize my experience by saying stay in your lane and cook a curry or cook a biryani or make naan. That's not what I who I am. And I think that it took a few years for people to realize that we weren't just cooking Indian food, that we were cooking this, as we call it, cooking without borders or immigrant food.
And now people get it and it's joyful knowing that we are one of the few places actually in London or the world who do that.
AJ Sharp (20:07.874)
amazing. do you keep true, like per dish, do you keep true to the original recipe of the dish you're creating or are you literally creating totally new dishes fusing together all these different cultural elements?
Ravinder Bhogal (20:22.44)
you know, everything is our version, I guess, you and that's where this idea of authenticity. Well, what is authentic? Because how I make something is going to be completely different. You know, someone might frown at the fact that I'm adding this ingredient or using this spice when they might not. So I think we have a blend of dishes, you know, there are some dishes that veer very far off the path and are completely new, like
the idea of taking like a Ponto Scotch egg, is basically the love child of a British Ponto Scotch egg and a Chinese Pontoast. Or sometimes we'll do Kukupaka, which is an East African Indian hybrid chicken curry, which again is the product of immigrants, but it's cooked widely across Kenya, mainly by women in their homes.
But every woman has a different recipe for it. I've never tasted two that taste the same. So this is my version of it. So it's authentic to me. Yeah.
AJ Sharp (21:27.418)
I love that. And I never, didn't realize you'd come from a fashion journalist background, because I was going to ask you at what point did you start food writing? But actually you didn't stop writing, did you? Or did you?
Ravinder Bhogal (21:39.786)
No, I didn't really stop writing. mean, my career sort of took off really because of a TV opportunity. So a friend of mine who was a fashion stylist had called me up and said, look, I've just seen an advert for a TV competition. Gordon Ramsay is looking for like the next fanny crad, cradock or whatever it was. And I think that you should apply. And I really think that if you enter, you're going to win.
And she had this weird sort of psychic edge, like she'd always been known in our group for sort of predicting things. And I entered and 9,000 women entered and I ended up winning and it completely changed my life. And the day it aired, I started getting calls from agents saying, you might have a career doing this. And I sort of went and saw, you know, a few agents and then the last agent I saw had a literary agency and I...
had the very scrappy manuscript of Cooking Boots that I'd been writing really for myself to record recipes and she fell in love with it and within three months I had a book deal. So yeah.
AJ Sharp (22:47.17)
incredible absolutely incredible what year was that
Ravinder Bhogal (22:53.102)
Gosh, I'm terrible with numbers and remembering, but it was a I'd say a good 15, 20 years ago now.
AJ Sharp (23:01.464)
Okay, so predates, Giacconi and a lot of the things that we know you for today.
Ravinder Bhogal (23:03.946)
exactly. And Giacconi really came about again because I was presenting a TV show for Channel 4 and my co-host happened to be Jay Rayner, you know, food critic. And he's like a mouth on legs. So I'd cook on the show and he would eat the food and he'd say to me, you really need to think about getting into kitchens and...
AJ Sharp (23:18.912)
the lovely J Rainer.
Ravinder Bhogal (23:32.064)
and learning the trade of restaurants because your food is delicious and more people should be able to taste it. And I never really had a mentor. So I really took his advice seriously and I went and started working in kitchens and it was the advent of pop ups and supper clubs. So I started doing pop ups and I did some private catering and stuff. And after about six years of doing that, it became really clear to me.
after another food critic had come to a few of my things and she took me aside and just said, when are you going to commit to a space of your own? Stop being such a coward. And then it became clear to me that that was the only way that it could go, because doing it as a one man band was incredibly challenging and I wasn't really making very much money. It wasn't sustainable. So then I sort of plucked up the courage and started looking for a site and
I was convinced that Marylebone was the only neighborhood I wanted to open in. And when our site became available, I went to see the landlords and went through some really real challenges trying to secure the site because they were already over 40 people interested, 40 people who had more experience, more money, more operational experience and more reputation than me. But they somehow took a chance on me.
AJ Sharp (24:52.218)
Mm.
Ravinder Bhogal (24:58.75)
And here we are, you know, nine years later.
AJ Sharp (25:02.222)
What was it about Marilobone?
Ravinder Bhogal (25:04.768)
I think my dream had been that I wanted a restaurant in a neighborhood where the door would swing open and I would know people's names. I would know the names of their dogs. I knew I would know where they like to sit, their kind of quirks about how they like their drinks fixed, all of that kind of stuff. So, yeah, it was that. It was the fact that it was a neighborhood.
AJ Sharp (25:31.14)
I love that. I'm getting this real impression from you that you've got a really lovely sense of intuition that you like to follow when you're making big decisions about your life and like listening to your friend who maybe had a premonition. It's really, it's lovely hearing people talk about like the intuitive process of actually just following your heart, following your passions.
Ravinder Bhogal (25:53.166)
That's right. think, sorry, just to interrupt, I think we are needing to wrap up because I've got another interview, like literally in 60 seconds. I'm so sorry.
AJ Sharp (26:03.106)
Okay, no worries. That's fine. Okay. Lovely. Well, thank you.
Ravinder Bhogal (26:06.848)
Amazing. Fantastic. That's really good. Thank you so much. It was lovely chatting to you AJ. Sorry I had to it short. Take care. Bye bye. Bye.
AJ Sharp (26:14.466)
No worries, thank you, bye!
