13 Questions with... Ravinder Bhogal

Hello, I'm Ravinder Bhogal,

and I'm a journalist, a cook,

and the owner of Jikoni in Marylebone.

[gentle upbeat music]

It's incredibly inspiring to be able to travel

and eat food from different cultures

and discover new ingredients.

When they want to show you,

you know, that you're welcome somewhere,

that you're safe somewhere,

it's always food that's offered.

[gentle upbeat music]

I arrived here as an immigrant

when I was seven years old.

I was born in Kenya in Nairobi,

and my ancestry or my parents are Indian.

But then when you look at the heritage of India,

there is so much Persian ancestry as well.

So I already had all of that

and then I arrived in Great Britain

and I lived in a very densely immigrant community.

And you know, you begin to shop

at the Chinese supermarket

or the Turkish supermarket,

and that kind of feeds into your heritage.

And I think that is what immigrant food is,

that kind of constant evolution,

the adaptation of what's your own

layered with what is around you.

[gentle upbeat music]

So at Jikoni,

we call ourselves a no borders kitchen

because we feel that food is such a powerful language.

It's a language that everyone speaks,

everyone understands,

and it brings communities

and people from all over the world together.

[gentle upbeat music]

I had this incredible experience some years ago

when I was filming in Morocco, in Agadir.

It was 48 degrees

and I was making a film about tomatoes

and I was about to do a piece to camera

and suddenly felt very, very sick.

And the next thing I knew I'd fainted.

And when I woke up,

I just remember following the sound of voices

into this courtyard

where these women had laid out

the most incredible meal for me

and I didn't speak any Arabic or French,

and they didn't speak any English,

but we just sort of sat there and that,

you know, the language of food was our language.

[gentle upbeat music]

One of the things that we do here,

it's kind of a signature,

I've always had it on the menu

and it's so popular,

is our prawn toast scotch egg

with banana ketchup and pickled cucumber,

and when you look at that, it's, you know,

you've got two perennial favorites,

the British scotch egg, the Chinese prawn toast.

And what we've done is we've brought them together

and we've created something new.

What we're trying to say,

I suppose, is quite political

because when you bring cultures together,

you're actually creating something

that's better than the sum of their parts.

And I think that's really powerful.

[gentle upbeat music]

What makes me feel at home is hospitality

and people making you feel welcome,

and it's funny because when people come to Jikoni,

they always say like, Oh, I feel like I'm at home.

We've had Lebanese people,

Egyptian people, French people,

and because our food is so mixed and diverse,

people will sort of eat it and go,

Oh, this tastes like something

my grandmother used to cook.

[gentle upbeat music]

I love being in Italy

because Italy strangely always feels like home

even though I have no Italian ancestry or links,

but I feel like the Italians as people

are very much like Indians in their kind of nature.

They're very loud, they love food,

they love family, they love community,

they're passionate about produce.

[gentle upbeat music]

One place that springs to mind

is Trattoria Dardano in Cortona in Italy,

and it happened to be the place of a chef

called Paolo Castelli,

who I've now become very good friends with.

My favorite thing is their tiramisu.

It is the best tiramisu

I have ever eaten in my life.

He saw I was enjoying it so much

so he went into the kitchen,

bought this huge bowl of it

and just put it on my table and went,

knock yourself out.

And I did.

[gentle sultry music]

I feel that I come from a line

of just terrific female cooks.

My mother really believed

that all her children should be able to learn to cook

and be part of it

because we lived in an extended family.

And so I remember sitting out in the courtyard

with a giant sack of peas

and a red plastic bucket on a little stool

podding peas.

You know, that was my job.

All these aunties would arrive like early in the morning

and you'd hear their sandals clip-clopping

across the terrazzo floor

and the, sort of, buzz of gossip.

I really wanted to preserve that tradition

because that is so underrepresented in restaurants.

Women are so underrepresented in restaurants.

[gentle sultry music]

My favorite food memory of growing up in Kenya

is related to my grandfather.

So on Sundays,

he would take me to this ice cream parlor,

which was like a temple of kitsch

called Sno Cream in the city.

And I think for someone like my grandfather

who had seen such hard times,

the luxury of something like ice cream

meant he was okay, he'd done okay.

[gentle sultry music]

It's not just about the food on the plate,

but it's about the story behind the dish.

And as a writer as well,

that is what I'm always interested in.

So in my book, for example,

I've written a story for a recipe,

coffee rasgullas with mascarpone ice cream

and espresso caramel.

So a rasgulla is like a sweet Indian dumpling.

The story that accompanies that recipe

is a story about a woman

who, I had witnessed this,

about a woman who was a victim of domestic violence.

Her husband has died

and she comes home from the hospital

and there are all these mourners in her house.

She sort of steadies herself,

wipes her eyes and goes to the refrigerator,

where she finds this bowl of rasgullas.

All these women in her community,

this Indian community,

this very close-minded community are kind of shocked

that a woman with grief could have such an appetite.

And it's the judgment that's passed,

and it's the story of this very triumphant, strong woman

who has just discovered the sweetness of a new life

and how this rasgulla becomes a medium for that.

[gentle sultry music]

I remember standing under a tree in Bethlehem.

The trunk was so wide like,

I can't even tell you how wide it was.

Someone said to me, You know, they say

that this tree is 7,500 years before Christ,

and in his lifetime,

Christ would have walked past this tree.

And I just remember standing there

and just goosebumps

like it was just an incredible moment

that I'll never forget.

[gentle sultry music]

I think food can transport you to another place,

another time.

It's very, very nostalgic.

There's a dish we have on the menu here,

which is a Keralan dish.

It's called moilee and we make it with lobster

and it's just such a wonderfully restorative broth,

and it has turmeric in it,

which kind of turns it this sunny yellow color

so you could be in the darkest day

in Britain in November,

and then you have a bowl of this sunny broth

in front of you

and it transports you straight back

to the backwaters of Kerala.

[gentle sultry music]