When Nisha Katona was growing up in 1970s Lancashire, part of the only Asian family in the village, food was never just food. To her Indian immigrant parents, cooking large pots of curry and inviting the neighbours in was an “olive branch”; a way of connecting with a community in an environment where they were frequently “firebombed and spat at”.
For Katona and her brother, however, it was more complicated. “We were really ashamed of Indian food,” she says. “Embarrassed by how it smelled. It represented everything that made us different. We would beg our parents not to cook it when our friends came over.”
Half a century later, the very cuisine she once shunned has become Katona’s life’s work. Today, she is the founder of Mowgli Street Food, the Indian restaurant group serving 40,000 diners a week across 26 UK restaurants, many of them with queues around the block. She is also the author of seven cookbooks, the latest of which, The Curry Bible, brings together more than 100 “greatest hits” recipes and is the kind of book which might become the sort of well-thumbed kitchen staple that sits on the shelf for years, splattered with turmeric and oil, and passed between generations.
“It feels almost narcissistic, doesn’t it – writing a book called The Curry Bible?” she says, laughing. “How utterly ambitious. But there is something about curries that this country loves – for all the street food recipes I share, it is the classics people always want to know about.”
‘The Curry Bible’ by Nisha Katona (Photo: Penguin Michael Jospeh/PA)And they are much easier to cook than you might assume. “There’s a misconception that curries are long and involved, and require long lists of ingredients – people go out and eat in Indian restaurants because they think they cannot cook it themselves,” she says. “But most curries are predicated on only three spices, two of which – turmeric and chilli – never change. It’s also usually one pan and 35 minutes. It really is the simplest way of cooking.”
Katona only discovered this herself as an adult, while working as a barrister and raising two young children with her husband Zoltan, a classical guitarist.
“It was when I got into my thirties, when I had my own house and wanted to invite people over, that I realised, in terms of hospitality, curries are the easiest thing to do,” she says.
She began writing down recipes and noticed a pattern behind them. “It dawned on me that there is a very simple formula behind all Indian dishes, and I found myself turning into a bit of a curry evangelist, wanting to share that with other people. So I started teaching cooking classes on the weekends.”
Yet the idea of swapping the courtroom for a whole career in food could not have been further from her mind. “There was not a bone in my body that thought I wouldn’t die a barrister,” she says. “I think I’m the most reluctant restaurateur there could ever be. All you saw on TV were shouty alpha chefs. I never thought for a second I would be in that environment.”
Then the idea for Mowgli, an Indian eatery which would not serve Westernised curries but authentic street food, began to take hold. “And the idea did not let me rest.”
Nisha Katona owns Mowgli restaurants (Photo: Nassima Rothacker/PA)The eventual leap – quitting her job and using all of her savings to open it – didn’t come free of doubt.
“There were no role models; no women my age with children doing this. There were no people without generational wealth doing this. I had two kids and a mortgage and was looking for pennies down the back of the sofa.
“I physically built the restaurant myself while still a barrister, and the only time I’d see the girls was when they were coming into a building site.”
Did she feel guilt around that? “The biggest pressure came from women around me saying, ‘You’re having a midlife crisis. You’re sacrificing your family at the altar of your silly dreams.’” Katona rejects that completely.
“We have a duty to show our daughters and our nieces that to do something you love is so important.”
When Mowgli opened its first restaurant in Liverpool in 2014, it was an instant success. “I love that I did it all in my 40s, because I can say to other women like me: so can you,” she says. “At that age, you tend to think the next horizon is basically the menopause and then bereavement. But I’m 54 and I think I’ve got another two businesses in me.”
Within five years of opening, Mowgli had seven restaurants and a turnover of £10m. Much of the success lay in its promise of fresh, generous food at a price ordinary people can afford.In the early days, she says, that was easier to deliver. Hospitality was in a golden era: consumer confidence was strong, people were eating out and costs were manageable enough for restaurants to remain affordable.
Nisha Katona’s Goan fish curry (Photo: Nassima Rothacker/PA)Now, the picture is very different. As if the cost-of-living crisis and global insecurity weren’t enough, then came the “monstrous” last Budget. “It killed hospitality,” she says. “The increase in the national minimum wage and the NI contributions can put millions of pounds of cost into restaurants, which means they cannot grow and create jobs.”
She sighs. “The Government needs to cut hospitality some slack, otherwise we will end up with American candy stores and vape shops up and down the high street. And my plaintive plea to the public is: please keep going out, even if you just get one portion of chips.”
Meanwhile, her own battle is to keep Mowgli feeling reasonable. “We have had to get clever with our menus, so that we can still make the margins we need to survive,” she says. “What a challenge that is, when the cost of goods has gone up. But I know unless we are reasonably priced, we will not survive this period.”
The pressure has had personal consequences. Katona has Crohn’s disease and the past 18 months havebeen frighteningly difficult.
“I’ve been so very unwell,” she says. “I lost three stone in weight. It is triggered by stress, so it has really changed my relationship with work and money. Illness and frailty shows you what is important in life. Nothing, no amount of money, is worth you losing your health. None. I would walk away from everything now to avoid ever having a problem with my health again.”
Whatever her future may look like, there is something deeply heartening about Katona’s success story so far. “To think that we have gone from nobody wanting to know us and nobody wanting our food, to people actually coming into our restaurant and eating our dishes – that is really edifying.”
‘The Curry Bible’ by Nisha Katona is published by Michael Joseph, £28
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