 Good evening. Good evening and welcome everyone. My name is Harry West and I am a professor of anthropology and chair of the Food Studies Center here at SOAS. Our event this evening is cosponsored by the SOAS South Asia Institute and the SOAS Food Studies Center with assistance from our colleagues in the Office of Development and Alumni Relations and in the Centers and Programs Office. The SOAS Food Studies Center was founded in 2007 and its main activities bring together not only SOAS researchers and students, but also colleagues and students from other academic institutions in the UK and beyond as well as policymakers, activists, journalists and makers and vendors of food. The Center fosters the teaching of food-related courses at SOAS, principal among them an MA in the Anthropology of Food, and I see some of our students out there this evening. It also convenes a weekly SOAS food forum as well as a series of distinguished lectures all open to members and associate members of the Center. Now information on the Center and the MA program is available on the table just outside this room. So should any of you be interested in joining the Center, which is free of charge and be placed on our email list. You'll find the email address there, but it's SOAS Food Studies at soas.ac.uk. So send us an email and we'll sign you up. Now before I introduce this evening's speaker and he'll introduce the panel a few words about the SOAS South Asia Institute from its Deputy Director Dr. Navtej Porovol who is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Indian Studies and Sociology. All right, thank you, Harry. Good evening to everyone. It's a pleasure to see so many of you here tonight for the lecture which is jointly hosted by the SOAS Food Studies Center and the South Asia Institute. The South Asia Institute was established last year in 2014, but was officially launched earlier this year in 2015 May. The Institute was set up as a window through which the world could access SOAS and its vast regional expertise on the region, but also as a means for SOAS to showcase, highlight and share its knowledge of the region of South Asia beyond the university. With our academic members engaged in research and teaching on Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bhutan. Within our broader aims to promote research and teaching on South Asia, we are striving to keep the teaching of Bengali alive, which we are proud has a long and rich tradition at SOAS. So we're keen to establish connections with businesses and other links who may be interested in extending their support to a range of our other activities as well. The South Asia Institute strives to make contributions to our understandings of economic, cultural and social processes affecting the region as well as the region's engagement with the rest of the world. Tonight's lecture is a perfect example, and of course, it's not just a lecture, it's a panel presentation and discussion. And in terms of Iqbal Wahab's experience, someone originating from South Asia has made a tremendous mark on London, which in the process of making it his home as part of the South Asian Bangladesh Ida Aspera has also made it his base for entrepreneurship, innovation and social responsibility. So the South Asia Institute is pleased to be a part of the hosting of this event tonight. Now it's my pleasure to introduce our main speaker and chair of this evening's panel. Iqbal Wahab was born in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, in 1963. In 1964 his family moved to London where he grew up and attended school. He went on to study business administration at the London School of Economics where he received his BSc. After university, he worked as a journalist in the National Press before setting up a PR agency specializing in hospitality in 1991. Three years later, he launched Tandoori magazine, a publication focused on the South Asian food industry. He subsequently sold the magazine and in 2001 opened The Cinnamon Club, an award-winning restaurant and bar that changed perceptions of Indian cuisine in the United Kingdom. In 2003 he co-authored The Cinnamon Club cookbook with Chef Vivek Singh. Then in 2005 he opened Roast, a restaurant and bar in the old Floral Hall in London's Burrow Market that specializes in British cuisine made from the finest seasonal ingredients. In addition to his successes in the catering industry, Mr. Wahab has made valuable contributions through public service. From 2006 to 2013 he chaired the Department for Work and Pensions ethnic minority advisory group which worked to reduce ethnic minority unemployment levels. He serves on various boards and committees including as chairman of the Asian Restaurants Skills Board and have bounced back a charity and social enterprise that focuses on the training and employment of ex-offenders. He is patron of Mum's The Chef, a social enterprise that tackles long-term unemployment among ethnic minority women by cultivating cookery skills and of leap, a charity helping young people especially those from disadvantaged communities to find employment. For his public service and his contributions to the hospitality industry, Mr. Wahab received an OBE in 2009 and in 2010 he was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is the recipient of numerous other awards and accolades from menu magazines, restaurant personality of the year, to being named one of GQ's 100 Most Connected. He has received honorary doctorates in business administration from the University of East London and in science from the University of West London. He is also a visiting professor of the London Metropolitan University Business School. I could go on but I'm sure you'd rather hear Iqbal and the guests on his panel which is entitled Making Social Responsibility The Main Course, Social Change and Good Business in the Restaurant World. So thank you, Iqbal. Thank you, Harry. Thank you all for coming this evening. Many people's eyes, restaurants have a pretty poor image. We rush people in and out to maximise our profits. We swipe service charge away from employees. We have aggressive bullying chefs and nightmare owners with massive egos. And over the decades we've pretty much deserved that reputation. The restaurant world now is a very different place from the one I entered in the 1990s on which Alan entered around the same time. We're no longer judged by critics on how good we are because thanks to Twitter and TripAdvisor we're all restaurant critics. And so there's, in that process, been a democratisation of comment where the people that matter are the people who pay our bills. That's a rapidly changing mode of perspectives. And so what defines what a good restaurant is is someone who actually listens to rather than tells a customer about what they want. In its more free-form pre-democracy days, London restaurants would outdo each other to try and find something new because that's what public relations companies would tell their clients they needed to do. If it wasn't new they wouldn't be able to gain coverage for it. And as restaurant folk we love the coverage as much as we love the profits. So much so that we think that the former drives a ladder. About 15 years ago a central London restaurant created a new concert which fused Italian and Japanese cooking. The critics largely held it as a triumph but the public decided enough was enough and didn't go and it shut down. In New York, still probably the world's leading city for the breadth of its restaurants, people still have a seemingly insatiable appetite to find out something new. Earlier this year in Brooklyn a restaurant opened where the chef owner dictated that there could be no talking in the restaurant. Unless there was pure silence people wouldn't be able to appreciate the wonder that was his cooking. The place is packed, night and day. But I think that if it opened in London, the silence would be on the reservations line. Because New York may have breadth but London's got depth. And it's that increasing depth of perspective that is driving much of the change in which businesses are increasingly able to tackle social inequalities. And that's the focus what I want to present to you today. Food and drink and restaurants are given tools and along with a distinguished panel of contributors whom you'll meet during the course of this talk, I hope we'll reinforce that message that restaurants are able to deliver much more than food and drink. That we are agents for social renewal. And by social renewal I mean strengthening communities and neighborhoods through enterprise, empowerment and employment. Food and eating can forge intimate connections between people and places. Embracing food from local areas delivers both ecological and social justice. And provides an opportunity for building communities. And does so with consumers and producers of what's being now called a food shed. This which is a creation of local economic clusters. Let me tell you a bit about how my own voyage of discovery into what I'm building up to this evening happened. It was about a decade ago that I first moved into Borough Market to Open Rose. And that part of southeast London. You'd only go on a Friday or Saturday to go to the market the rest of the time. It was pretty much a no-go area. But on the Fridays and Saturdays I noticed that the kind of people who were coming to the market were coming from Kensington and Chelsea, Richmond and Barnes. Because in those days it cost you about £15 to buy a chicken. Today it cost more like £20. And I used to ask the trustees who owned the market, what about the people on the other side of the road? They probably spent about £1.50 on a chicken. And the trustees, rather plausibly, depending how you see it, said that was beyond their remit. Their remit was to create an environment to celebrate the best of British produce. And if the people on the other side of the road couldn't afford it, there's not much they can do about it. And I found that rather odd. But I thought rather to accept it and go with the flow, I thought this seemed what Rose could do to bring more people in to make the market more inclusive of the communities around it. So from the first day we opened I dedicated one of the tables in the restaurant and all the profits on that table have gone to support communities and people from backgrounds who haven't had it so easy as our customers and as the owners of the restaurant have had. So we started working with the local Prince's Trust and I used to bring in groups of people from South East London and have breakfast with them, take them around the market, give them an experience of where it's like to work in our kitchens or to work in our bar or to how to handle reception. So that in due course when they were coming out of school they might think of Rose as something that wasn't other to them, that might be something that they could possibly go and work in. In some of the cases they'd already got involved in a parallel economy of gangs and often I'd meet kids age 15 who were carrying guns, although these days are called them burners, you didn't know that, they're called burners. I wasn't so surprised that they'd gone into gangs at the age because I too, in a previous age, being brought up in South London I too had been part of a gang and in my own time, but we didn't carry guns, we were wussies, we had flit knives and we got so engrossed in this gang and our extracurricular activities as we now call them that we saw no point in studying and so we all failed our roles together and my parents were so dismayed they said why don't you retake them, you didn't retry so hard first time and so I did and I went to university and I went on to do the things I did. The others in the gang didn't receive any such nudge, two ended up in prison, one committed suicide, one was killed and the rest just led to uniform the meaningless lies. So I'd grown up knowing that quite often a small touch can trigger a big impact. I've taken much personal satisfaction over the years of mentoring kids from council of states, people who had no father figure and see them go to university sort of been business, go work in a big firm, but those are largely personal gains for me. What about the business? How did this commercially impact on us? Convention was that businesses would reach a certain level of maturity by which we meant profitability before undertaking any kind of philanthropic act. We threw that model out at Roast and so whilst we were still in loss making mode some of the team around me would think that we were prolonging that long loss making mode by starting off from day one by committing part of our resource away from profit and into what my finance director used to call fluffy stuff. My challenge back was to not view this as a cost but as a social investment which will one day witness a return back to us. And I suppose by social investment I mean a strategic financial input that positively impacts both on the communities that are concerned to Roast but also to the financial health of the company itself. I couldn't bring myself to say that to my colleagues at the time unless they thought it was too fanciful an idea. Businesses have traditionally siphoned off their consciences to what we call corporate social responsibility. The problem I view with social CSR activity is that it's seen as a cost and not as an investment and in a company they siphon off the conscience of the company to one person so that they have the responsibility to look after the concerns of the company while Evernos gets on with driving profit. And for many years I suppose I was Roast CSR officer. It would be me going off to Africa to visit slum dwellings and to see how we can bring entrepreneurial skills like mine into slum dwellings. More locally it would be me going to Brixton prison and talking to inmates about the prospects of work rather than return to crime. And then one day the light went on in my mind. I was invited to go and take part in a program that Gordon Ramsay was doing where he was teaching inmates in Brixton prison about how to cook and he invited a few of us in to have lunch one day cooked by the inmates and they were right in front of us and I was particularly impressed with one person whose skills seemed pretty impressive and I said to Gordon that guy's like really good. He said well six weeks ago he couldn't even boil an egg and so I went to this guy afterwards and I said if you're interested in work experience when you finish here just ask a governor whether you can they can put you in touch with Roast. So fast forward a few months and I'm walking into my office and in our little reception area I see somebody filling out a form and I look him and I think I know you. You're the guy from Brixton what are you doing here? And he said I'm filling out a form you've given me a job and I said to him I had no idea you'd even applied for a job and to be honest I'd forgotten I'd even offered the work experience from in the first place. So I said it's really important for you to know that you got this on your own merit that I had nothing to do because I didn't even know you're applying for it so don't think that you got this job as an active charity it's very important for you to know that and he was so chuffed with this that he went and told Gordon's team who then put an article in the evening standard and then a funny thing happened I've got a whole load of phone calls and letters from people saying pretty much the same thing. Dear roast I've never been to your restaurant but I know that I know you do things like that I shall start coming. So this was a ground maker for me because now this was a there was a commercial case for social intervention and with that I could then actively encourage other members of the company to participate alongside me and that the team could warrant time off and it wasn't really time off again it was investment and the team became more than our employees it became our neighbours our suppliers our our investors our landlords and with their involvement we greatly amplified the effects of all our social activities. Blimey it worked. When we decided to do a pop-up roast in a prison early this year at a young offenders institute called ISIS next to Belmarsh our managers and chefs owned the project entirely training inmates on how to prepare a roast menu and you'll see some of them up there there now. The guests for on the evening were mainly our customers our landlords came our suppliers came potential investor came along five members of our team volunteered their time including the next employee who took those pictures. Two of the participating prisoners in that program came to work for us on release I don't know if you know this but some two thirds of released prisoners end up back inside within a year they're given 43 pounds on the day though they're released and it costs 40 000 pounds a year to keep somebody locked up. Over the years 20 ex-offenders have ended up working at roast reoffending rates for those in jobs drops to single digit percentile rates as they say in America do the maths and it's increasingly important to do the mass and prove the case beyond a philanthropic doing good perspective. So I hired an economist to do a social impact assessment report on our various activities. We kick-started a social enterprise called Mum's a Chef which empowers women suffering from the terrible benefits gap and gave them the one skill they already had inside them but they'd never knew as a skill they just knew it as a chore which is cooking. The base in Croydon so we put them through Croydon catering college got the men VQ levels and we gave them a contract at roast to feed our team and we did it for six months to get them going like a kick-start. The 12 women got a job on the back of that contract and not only did it have many unmeasurable outcomes like positive that more positive mental health and increased self-confidence but it also saved the state £312,000 in benefits for a £30,000 contract. We're not just local actors though with local responsibilities we're global citizens too. About 18 months ago I went with Terry Waite the former Hezbollah hostage to visit a very very poor country in West Africa called Togo and we visited a slum dwelling called Katanga and the YMCA there which is run by Waikare International which is an umbrella body of all the YMCA's around the world has made enterprise a key priority for young people of Togo and so in this horrible slum dwelling that we visit we respect the best part of I don't have to spend half a day there. We saw them these women are like trying desperate hard to set up business in smoking fish but they're all being scuppered by middlemen and markets delaying their payments and so despite all the efforts to get on business they're actually remaining static in the social and economic position and I thought at the time that if they had some business training and understood financial management and planning they'd fare a lot better. So I invested in a group of five women to go to business study school and learn these skills and here's how they did. We'll see them up there. Aichitu age 24 is an orphan before going on her course she was earning 15,000 of their francs now she's earning 25,000 which is an increase of 67 percent she can buy her own supplies for her business and she's hired an assistant. Adama is a widowed mother since doing that course her income has increased by 50 percent she buys tools for a firewood business and has hired someone else to work with her. Gertrude age 23 is an orphaned mother with two children her income since going on that course has increased by 133 percent she's hired two people to work for her and she can feed her children with and give them pocket money so they can have breakfast at school. Agbovi was 15 as an orphan couldn't write didn't have a job before going on his course and now he's earning 5,000 francs a month as is Ahufa also age 15 and she's employed two more people. I call this an investment into those courses but actually we made it alone, a loan that wasn't repayable to the Rose Foundation but back to the local YMCA. Those women have all repaid their costs of their tuition and so which has happened within six months and so what we've done is that we've now matched their contribution so that more and more people can go through this course because now that we've proven it works we want to escalate it. If I'd gone there as a more conventional philanthropist I'd have written out a check and just hoped something good would have happened. Having come from a restaurant background I knew how to navigate through markets and break through barriers that agents and suppliers put in our way and I was able to use that skill and that experience to help those five women who hopefully will do the same for future women in that area. One of the Harvard business reviews most celebrated articles of recent years was called Creating Shared Value in which Michael Porter and Mark Kramer in describing a new version of inclusive capitalism made the point that businesses shouldn't have random moments where they act as charities. Only when businesses adopt social values as a core commercial practice do they see the most sustainable and far-reaching impacts. Let's take the example of the Cinnamon Club. Indian restaurants have a reputation for operating closed door policies only employing friends and family not really seeing the wider obligations to communities not using their spaces for other purposes and serving their customers. My first guest contributor this evening is sitting me my close collaborator in creating the Cinnamon Club Vivek Singh. Vivek please share with us how you helped debunk those stereotypes. Thank you Iqbal and a very good evening everyone. Well I think the the year might have been 2005 and I still remember like yesterday I'm saying to to Iqbal how a certain young chef that had worked in our kitchens for a little over six months close to a year seemed to have such a positive impact on our teams. This young chef happened to be Alan Sparing the first non-Indian non-nation British chef that had just walked through our doors and waited about two hours when I was sort of in the middle of lunch service waited to meet and said well I just want to come spend some time in your kitchen want to learn how to cook. I never had that experience before in fact to the contrary I thought it was going to be hard to recruit people and I didn't know how it would go so I gave him a chance I said you know well come in come work for a few months and I was saying to Iqbal after he left I think it was just short of a year how amazing that experience had been his his interest his energy the enthusiasm for our spice our world of flavor of taste was an absolute eye-opener for myself and as I was saying of this I could see Iqbal's eyes kind of change and it is it is small matter that this chef clearly understood what we were about the flavors the excitement the journey the the the voyage of through spice he clearly understood he learned the essence of it he went on to work in Dubai for a little bit came back to the UK and now runs one of the country's best Indian restaurants called the chili pickle in Brighton and check him out check him out when you get coming back to what Iqbal's reaction was it was something that only Iqbal can have first things first he said he wasn't surprised that Alan was so excited by an opportunity to work in an Indian kitchen and you know and and that was something what Iqbal said then really changed the way I look at teaching or learning training or sharing Iqbal said he wasn't surprised that Alan was in some ways more excited about Indian food than some of our existing Indian chefs would ever have been he said after all look at Gordon he was cooking the best French food in the country then and he wasn't French look at Jamie he was the best Italian chef of the land and he'd never been to Italy never sort of you know he wasn't Italian and and for that matter David Thomson at the time who had a one-mission-starred Nam in London was possibly the best known Thai chef anywhere in the world he wasn't even Thai so that got me thinking about teaching it got me thinking about opening up our kitchens to people of all backgrounds the people anybody who was wish to cook and learn Indian food wanted to learn a little bit about spice anybody who is who we could teach train or share knowledge with would be that little bit extra that would keep our jobs interesting certainly very shell selfish as a motivation for me at the point in time it was more about making my own life in my own job a little bit more interesting than it was just cooking for 300 people every lunch and every dinner mind you this was before this was much much before the clamp on immigration and the restriction of visas for chefs or for that matter the economic crash of 2008 that has been so well documented in the in the world of restaurants our kitchens in 2005 2006 2007 were already open to people from all backgrounds being prepared as a training and teaching ground we were future ready so to say or so we certainly thought and then of course 2008 happened and everybody and everything kind of melt into went into a meltdown economies crashed businesses folded benefits cart jobs vanished young people were starved of opportunity that first job that first rung of the ladder that first real sort of opportunity to go and have a job no matter what which just wasn't there and there wasn't that much thought you know opportunity was needed was required by this time our experience of training and teaching people from all different backgrounds has given us the confidence to further our reach to people who may or may not be trained chefs we thought you know after all you don't need to be a rocket scientist you don't need to know a lot all you need is want want to cook and to be a good chef and I've I've maintained it for a long time you really don't need a lot if I could done it anybody can do it all you need is reasonably good intellect a very good palate and even bigger heart and if you got those three things anybody can cook so with this and with the view to attract talent from anywhere it didn't matter where they came from where they wanted to go anybody who was interested in cooking we thought we had an opportunity and a responsibility almost to to develop the future generation of chefs for Indian restaurants in the UK and again I think Igbal is greatly involved in the Asian restaurant skills board and we launched Mastara chef and initiative of the Indian Asian restaurant skills board we actually launched a youtube campaign to recruit we want to cook we want to cook we want to create we're determined we're passionate and we're dedicated but we are not all the same we're from different backgrounds with different ideas and different dreams and different dreams for all of us want to learn we want to learn the traditional and the modern the history and the theory the ingredients flavors the colors and the taste the tastes we want to understand we want to know how because we want to cook because we want to cook that guy with the pan he's got a terrible temper he's still there it was nowhere as easy recruiting as we thought and I often beat myself up thinking you know we could have done more we could have had more we could have had more success with it in spite of its modest success I look around the number of familiar faces this was done about four years ago the number of familiar faces the people who are still in the business the apprentice program has resulted in at least 18 examples of people from various different backgrounds successfully working as chefs in some capacity or the other in the world of food and more importantly out of benefits opportunities seem to work oh this was great until one day I realized that opportunity didn't just have to be for chefs for people who wanted to do something in the world of food or necessarily wanted to start off somewhere it could happen in any shape way of form under one day in 2012 I met somebody who was from a who was very different from the people we had come across so far this was the powerhouse behind Darjeeling Express Asma Syed Khan herself Asma was doing her doctorate in law a hugely successful supper club and best of all a love for feeding her food and sharing with her guests her story Asma had probably run about 12 editions of her supper club very successfully and most of them being booked out months in advance more often than not oversubscribed one day she said to me she was closing Darjeeling Express down because she couldn't carry on doing this at home it was just far too disruptive it was clear that Asma really loved cooking and feeding people and I really mean that you must go and try Asma's supper club once and you'll know what I mean about feeding people and in Darjeeling Express she had found the perfect vehicle to do so she had people who wanted to book months in advance she had worked so hard to get this far and yet did she really want to close it down I asked her what her best days for these supper clubs are and she said Saturdays and Sunday afternoons work well it occurred to me that these were the two days when our private dining rooms at the Cinnamon Club had the least demand and in fact we weren't even normally open on a Sunday afternoon so I offered Asma to use the private dining room at the Cinnamon Club for a couple of editions if she wanted I was absolutely amazed at the combined energy of her guests her team and how it combined seamlessly with the energy of our teams and our rooms and in fact before he said more I should I should actually invite Asma Khan to come up and share the rest of her story please Asma thank you right so that that was a wonderful introduction by Vivek it was actually a game changer having this opportunity because I I just saw myself as a home cook because I cooked in my house and the women who helped me were all housewives because they they were the easiest ones they're actually big and multitask they were highly skilled so I had a small team of women who were doing these supper clubs with me but we never saw ourselves as professional or actually even called ourselves cooks because we just felt that we're just doing this at home you know it's like feeding family it's like just and despite all the kind of enthusiasm the positive reviews and positive comments by our guests who had paid for these supper club meals we still felt we were just doing this as if we were just inviting people to our house so when Vivek suggested this you know I was first like completely in awe and quite excited because it was a beautiful room and so for a long time we went through this kind of excitement of what are we going to cook and then I realized that no we're just going to treat this like a supper club like a normal thing in a very different environment and it really it changed everything because I think that walking into a professional kitchen women who had never been inside a kitchen suddenly there was that whole feeling that you know everybody admitted later on they just felt very tall they felt big they felt like there was something and you know walking and working alongside chefs who were doing exactly the same thing as us because they had their own clients that day so you know in the rest of the restaurant and I think that that was quite an amazing experience watching you know these chefs you know in their chef coats and all my women were in their chalvar commies and kurtis and they just felt really excited and then at the end of the evening we all went out and you know the women said you know they let us all cheer because we're all we are cooks because that was such a big realization because being inside a restaurant and in a kitchen and actually serving alongside chefs who were wonderful to us I mean they were really kind of surprised at what we were doing the way we were dressed and you know but they tasted the food and they understood that they are committed you know this is not something that we were just doing to pass our time and actually it changed my attitude because I had realized now that actually to take this business somewhere else and I was offered the opportunity to go to Soho and do a pop-up at a pub and I felt confident and I thought I mean they obviously I mean I've done supper clubs but I've never really run a restaurant which is what I had to do at Soho so I walked in there and I told them that I did a pop-up at Cinnamon Club and that was it that's all I said and I got it and I think that that really made a difference because I could say that and I and I had done it a couple of times and it gave me the confidence that we could do it even though it was tough work because you know doing a supper club which is a one-off running a restaurant is a very different thing and to be very honest I wasn't sure because I the women who work with me are mainly middle aged housewives who have never worked before they've lived in this country for many years they live in what I would call the Indian ghettos they live in Wembley and South Hall and have lived in their own community many of them actually are not very confident even using the tube you know coming into Soho was quite an exciting I had to go and meet everybody at Alburton which is just Piccadilly line taking them straight but I just realized that this was something this was almost like a line they had to cross coming into Soho was something really big for them they always said we've passed it on the bus but we never got off and now they were working there I think really it made a huge difference and you know I you know we had our hiccups you know with you know women not turning up for work or whatever then we had everything changed we had some nice reviews from Esquire timeout and then the very big change which was we got a great review from Faye Mashler at the evening standard she gave us a four star review and the one thing that she mentioned as this is food cooked with love it is you know anyway I don't know how to put it but it is food that you know your mom would cook and that is exactly what it was we were not professional we cook with love there's a lot of passion for cooking in this kitchen none of us are trained you know we have very poor knife skills you realize that when we had a professional chef coming in we just thought we'd get him in in 15 minutes they had done everything that takes us the whole day to cut and the first thing the women said oh we can't have him in the kitchen I said okay fair enough let's get him out because you know it was because it's not that kind of place but you know we've got there you know we turned out the numbers we fed the people we succeeded there wasn't a single night when you know everyone's exhausted you know and it was a struggle physically it was a struggle because that's one issue when you have women who are in their late 40s 50s there's some even in their 60s who work for us but they they do a full shift they work extremely hard and you know age is no longer a factor there's a huge enthusiasm and having the good reviews and all the pure positive feedback I think the big thing is the women took ownership of Darjeeling express and that was really I mean the night you know we had a very good review at the financial times and that was the weekend before Diwali and Lakshmi Pooja for those who don't know Lakshmi Pooja is a you know when the Hindu goddess of of wealth is worshiped and and Diwali is something that you know you you light up your entire house you know you bring good you know good wishes and and and good fortune to your own home these are all women where the core of this celebration is the woman of the house and I was absolutely sure no one would turn up for work because they'd already told me the festival is coming up the review came out I gave everybody a copy of the in terms because I wasn't going to waste 3.50 per person I said take it home go and show your husband go and show your children you're in the financial times and the day before Lakshmi Pooja everybody turned up they turned up on Lakshmi Pooja we lit at the eye and tried to do some tradition in in the kitchen because I felt I realized that they had lit the lamps in their own kitchen but they came to work and there was this one grandmother who you know leaving grandchildren and her daughters and everyone at home so I thanked her because I realized that she's the most traditional of all our women and I said you know Uma thank you very much for coming on Lakshmi Pooja and Diwali and her comment you know I really made me realize that how long how far these women have come and this journey has been amazing because she turned on and told me that you know you are my Lakshmi which is the goddess of wealth she said this this kitchen is my temple even God would not forgive me if I had not come to work today and you know and these are very traditional you know Indian women who are you know who are first generation immigrants who really not really assimilated in the society who have held on to their own traditions and it's amazing they've come such a long way on Diwali night none of us went home till 11 o'clock and not one person of course we ate huge amounts of sweets that was our excuse that you know we I managed to get lots of laddus we ate lots of sweets and felt yeah yeah this is Diwali for us but no one said I'm missing my family and no one called home you know I kept telling you know you want to take a break you know you want to call your kids they said no no no let's get on because we were packed we were packed you know there was a queue we could see from the kitchen people lining up waiting outside the pub for two and they were like you know let's turn tables let's get people out let's and it was amazing because you know I I know because I'm Indian I understand what festivals mean and especially festivals that are very symbolic for a particular tradition and anyway so this is where we are and so now I'm actually thinking of the next step opening a restaurant I have three women now who work part-time for me they're completely committed we all talk about our restaurant and they are going to be my head chef and probably sous chef and it's been fantastic because you know one we never thought when you started off by doing supper clubs at home that we could do this but I think the opportunity at cinnamon changed our view about ourselves it gave us the confidence because that platform of being in a restaurant like cinnamon the us cooking the food working alongside chefs and seeing that yeah it's the same thing you know they're cooking we're cooking we serve the food outplated and they're happy guests but that realization was so critical because we and if we had not had that opportunity to go into a restaurant and cook alongside chefs and have all that praise and the women realizing that they had the skills because how much ever I told them that food is great or you know people praise them here they saw other people who they saw as professionals because they never saw themselves as a professional but that changed it's so much love anyway so thank you very much for the opportunity and I will go back thanks for that thanks as well congratulations I can I can see a film coming out of like a culinary version of bend it like bacon businesses acting as businesses even those like roasts or the cinnamon club which have an embedded core social perspective can create permanent social value but social enterprises can go a lot further a number of them have adopted the conventional commercial restaurant platform and done it not to have a sideline activity with a social impact but to tackle social inequalities as a core motivation of why they set up in the first place so we'll now hear from two social enterprises who've done this very cleverly firstly I'd like to invite Jackie Roberts head of the Shoreditch Trust which owns and operates the wonderful waterhouse restaurant good evening hi hello I'm going to talk to you about one of our programs called Blue Marble Training Shoreditch Trust is based in London borough Hackney I don't know if you know it well it's quite large borough and Blue Marble was set up some time ago specifically works with young people 16 to 25 although sometimes we go slightly over that age and it's part of our strategic aim as a charity a wider aim to reduce economic and social inequality in Hackney and I'm not going to go into what those issues are in Hackney because you can go and look those up but I'm sure people are familiar with some of the levels of deprivation that we're looking at in Hackney we apply a person-centered approach and that's really important I'm going to come back to that but it kind of sort of takes in what people have been talking about this evening so far we apply this approach to enable vulnerable young people to meet crisis needs to mitigate risk enhance skills knowledge experience and power we advocate for greater investment in vulnerable young people and that's what the program is really really about we're arguing that young people who are supported in the right way to participate can also inspire positive change in industry and that's really really important and I'm going to show you a little film at the end of three chefs who have left our program and are now employing our trainees um we often talk about working with young people to support them building up resilience but actually in the years that I've been working at shortage trust and with young people on blue marble training I've met some extraordinary resilience resilience that I wouldn't have and actually resilience is a difficult thing because we have different levels at which we deal with things but actually I've met young people dealing with things that frankly are quite extraordinary um and through innovative and dynamic approaches to training um and by that I actually mean way outside the box I've got a colleague here tonight you know exactly what I'm talking about you can imagine that somebody coming into a kitchen a live kitchen for the very first time uh introduced a team of trainee chefs our head chef Amrit and Lorena Sue chef somebody who might be three days out of a situation that was quite chaotic potentially violent straight into an environment where they're part of a team but actually they're also still dealing with some of those emotions and some of those those issues that they haven't quite left at the door so when we talk about outside the box we don't really tick any boxes we we don't we don't have any chances they're with us for the long haul until we feel and they feel that they're ready to move on but their contribution is enormous once they do so that's how we use our dynamic and innovative approaches young people arrive on our program with many additional needs and this is key to the program um they're facing external challenges with multiple indicators of disadvantage in their lives that continue to hold them back they're either leaving care or custody uh they're struggling to manage lives with gang related pressure poor health you often think as young people being at the sort of pinnacle of their health but actually we see enormous issues around very high levels of sugar intake which causes catastrophic mood swings we see social isolation we see loneliness loneliness is seen as an older person's issue particularly in the capital but actually it's hugely significant with young people um and that not having those networks means that actually it's really difficult to get a foot in anywhere let alone the restaurant industry um they're they're dealing with those issues plus insecure housing again if you look up issues in Hackney you'll see that we are dealing with exorbitant private rental issues which are basically pricing people out of the borough and just maintaining a routine and getting to work on time presents enormous difficulties we have a head chef that Iqbal knows really well he he's known to go around to people's houses and get them out of bed and bring them in to training so we go that far and beyond the risk of entrenched social exclusion offending or reoffending is high as a result of these barriers and blue marble training gives young people a chance to turn things around by teaching skills in a real kitchen with a real team attached to a real restaurant leading to real opportunities and making real changes to lives the program also focuses on the development of those skills that are often overlooked so it's not just about knife skills which are really important as we've discovered um and also speed which is hugely important as we've also discovered but also those things that are some of us really do take for granted so thinking creatively emotional development being able to collaborate uh thinking about innovation in a very different way bearing in mind a lot of these young people have come through systems where they've been excluded consistently throughout their lives so we try and support them to develop these um these skills not even skills I suppose but just these opportunities to be able to really find out who they are while they're with us um and leadership once they put on their blue marble t-shirts and aprons they are trainee chefs they are no longer a gang member they're no longer that kid that was excluded and has been warned three times by the local copper they are trainee chefs and that's really important um we commissioned a social return on investment report independently and it concluded that blue marble training demonstrates a successful model of work-based training and that's really important I'm going to come to some of the issues around having lots and lots of young people in a live restaurant setting um and sure it's trust and blue marble training on meeting the aims and objectives and outcomes expected of it by stakeholders and funders we're working closely with ex-offender and care leavers and creating many outcomes including those that are not being invested in and this is my frustration with running the program um and something I've talked to Iqbal at length about um we probably need to be better at demonstrating those facts and figures around reoffending rates of which we have none on our program um but actually it's really hard to tell that story when you're dealing with real lives and you're talking about people who are in the room so the report confirms that we have reduced truancy increased engagement and education and training very often for the first time for some young people reduction in youth offending sustained continued transitions from care to independent living um Iqbal talked about somebody leaving prison with 43 pounds very often a young person will move into their own flat and not know how to pay the gas bill not realize you have to pay for water not know where to buy a bed so we do all of that with them as well it's an alternative to gang culture in hackney um and it's an alternative to violence and crime in the borough uh increased peer-to-peer mentoring communities with an endemic underemployment and that's also about our trainees who've grown up in the area and move on to some of london's top restaurants and come back to us to recruit the next generation of chefs in their own kitchens and for me that's a really significant part of the story um there are consequences of handing trust and responsibility to people who may not have yet been granted this in their lives and are still coming to terms with what that means we are on probably the fourth blender this year um we've reduced our food waste but really when someone is in the kitchen for the first time and they're asked to make mashed potato and they mash the potatoes while they're still raw you have to buy a new ingredient so we do see a lot of waste and that does cost us but actually we accept that running a training program in a live restaurant setting can come at a cost but we believe that it's the only way to ensure that trainees can really progress and take ownership of their future there is something quite significant about being in a kitchen an open kitchen where customers can see you where they can see their food being prepared where you can see customers enjoying their food it is really a significant part of the program we meet these challenges in many many different ways and this is where it is very costly to run a program like ours and frustrating because it's trying to demonstrate that that spending the money here is really really significant further down the road as we know it's a complete common sense but you'd be amazed how many times I have to demonstrate this to people who hold the post strings it provides self-leadership coaching which is really key and we've we've only just been doing that for the last year but we've seen a significant improvement in just very basic things that self-esteem being able to really focus on goals and focus on training in the kitchen physical fitness we do a huge amount of that now because we realize that the sugar intake was significant and we're not about to take on the sugar industry and the soft drinks industry so we're going to try and tackle it from our own kitchen which is actually cutting out the leucosate and trying to promote water but at the same time running around the park which has a huge impact on everything including energy but also mental health one-to-one counselling as part of our own mental health program we have a mental health program in our charity as well and we deliver healthy eating sessions which my colleague here does through the food for life program at Shortage Trust as well so lots and lots of different aspects to the training to really sort of provide that that basis so that young people can go in and really take part and participate in the training so these support activities provide a space for trainees to reflect really important we take that for granted I do it every day a lot of young people through the education system don't understand that reflection is a big part of developing who you are and forming those networks and friendships it helps them to understand and navigate the training in the work environment to contribute to their own outcomes instead of the outcomes that have been enforced on them while they've been growing up to understand good practice and how to challenge themselves in a constructive way instead of fighting and throwing things on the floor and walking out of the kitchen we have a very different technique to that and to make the connection between well-being and work satisfaction hugely important that actually if I feel good I'm more likely to want to get up for work in the morning and go and really achieve something that day key to the program is peer mentoring the presence of role models who themselves are graduates of the training program is very important and help trainees to develop a sense of responsibility and can obviously see the longer road ahead and the bigger picture our advanced trainees support the new participants on the program who are terrified on their first day in that kitchen and they're encouraged to inspire train and mentor themselves as they move on and we continue to mentor our alumni once they've left us and you're about to meet Jack Leanne and Luca Jack left us pretty much three years ago but we're still mentoring Jack so I suppose the other point about this industry is that it provides an opportunity for young people to really learn some hard skills that are actually very transferable as well but also there's a network in the kitchen there's a family in the kitchen there's a sense of belonging in the kitchen as as part of a team and this is really really important in supporting some of the young people we work with to recover from what they've been through where they've been growing up so here's a little film thank you my attitude was just rubbish it was completely rubbish I was so anti-social it was unbelievable I'm just getting in so much trouble with the police and involved in gangs and that I didn't really have any options at the time I didn't do well in school went to college didn't do well in college I kept finding the same repetitive thing happening I didn't want to feel like I was just doing nothing firing was my solution to everything I wasn't good with words I couldn't express myself about being angry I meant into my care home my place and at three years old and I stayed until 14 so then you just sort of grew up thinking that you're owed for some reason you don't have to come with actually any sort of knowledge you don't have to know how to talk you don't have to know what goes well together you go there you learn and you teach everybody's there to help each other it's like a system personally for me it wasn't the work that I was going to find part it was the interaction with people that you wouldn't you wouldn't have known or you wouldn't have spent time with so it's like basically going to a new school you have to have a very loud stern voice in the kitchen like you can't just be in the background you've got to build that confidence completely changed my life it makes you feel like homework or it makes you feel like you're in a family just a bond that you have to have been sure it's trust and blue marble I've learned I think all the life skills are all the important aspects that I'm going to need in order to pursue my goals you feel like something's new to you and you're afraid don't worry you know you'll be welcomed and everybody I'm sure will show you the right direction within the kitchen knowing that you're needed somewhere it's the most crisis feeling that nothing could ever give you thanks Jackie when you look at our in the city high streets we see many manifestations of urban blight and through them we've witnessed many ironic successes like the pound shop the most worrying high street success though is the rise of the fast food joint the popularity of these joints is largely driven by price so the provenance of the chickens must be deeply worrying this has a clear trajectory of direction for our youngsters these fast food fast buck operators clog up our high streets youngsters clog up their cues these youngsters arteries in due course get clogged up and then the obesity and heart disease wards get clogged up by ever more patients the social cost of these seemingly innocuous food has yet to be properly calculated by health officials because the consequences are too scary of doing that um moaning about this trend is all well and good but what can restaurants do about it last month in Tottenham a great new project opened up challenging the way in which youngsters eat fried chicken and looking at ways in which they can live longer and healthier lives so what is this great new alternative to the chicken shop well it's a chicken shop um but it's a chicken shop with a difference um it's crazy by Hage and Jarrod or now tell us about how chicken's home came about thank you well um I think as I talk there'll be pictures of fried chicken sort of in an ambient way so I hope you're not too hungry um it's fried chicken that we've cooked so I it's it's nice to stand there with an open restaurant because I came to see it about about four and a half years ago and so all we want to do we it was me and a guy called Ben Reimer who's running the restaurant he's there tonight um in an apron um it was when burgers started being done in a good way it was when Byron started opening up an honest burger and people were looking at at fast food in a slightly different way and we we really like fried chicken so we're like well let's just open a posh fried chicken shop because we love fried chicken let's just do it better um so four and a half years later quite a lot of things happened one of which is there are some posh fried chicken places there's uh the wishbone which has changed hands and bricks done there's um mother cluck her the people have done fried chicken and it's it's but it costs about um 14 or 15 pounds for two pieces of chicken and chips and a side and if you're if you're a 14 year old living in in in London in Hackney are you going to spend 14 pounds or are you going to spend $199 on six wings chips and a drink well of course you're going to go and spend $199 so we we spent a lot of time meeting young people and talking about fried chicken shops and looking at them quite seriously um fried chicken is delicious it's really it's really nice um it's even nicer if you're a bit drunk on the way home um and then you feel a bit ill afterwards um it's really bad for you if you eat it two or three times a day which is what a lot of young people that we met and we we commissioned a study to look at this um in Birmingham and in London so an organization called shift to a behavioral change organization they met lots and lots of young people um there are things that fried chicken shops are good at um they offer really fast food you can get your lunch in like 15 minutes and you're in and out if you're a young person you don't get hassled after if you spend two pounds and then you can spend an hour in a fried chicken shop and no one's gonna give you grief and like if you're in McDonald's for more than half an hour and you're a young person you start to get edged out of the door um you're full up you spend two pounds 15 you're full up so if you're a mum your your mum you've got two small children you've got four pounds in your pocket you can take into a chicken shop and and your kids won't be hungry afterwards um and they offer a kind of environment which young people feel comfortable in they they can spend a bit of time in there they can meet their friends there so yes the food is really bad it's really bad it's the worst chicken in the world you couldn't invent worst food it's battery caged hens largely from South America a lot of the time flown flown here stored for a long time and then and then cooked in quite old oil that's been there for a few days for about 15 or 16 minutes um it's full of fat it's full of hormones and unknown stuff the salt levels are kind of astronomical this msg the chips are really bad they're over salted they're cooked in the same oil and you get a big fizzy drink thrown in as well so it's pretty much the worst food you could eat um and from a social justice perspective we were kind of in east london i run a charity that's based in east london like jackie and we're interested in ideas of fairness and what we're seeing in east london is people eat amazingly so you can eat so well in london and like never before um there are restaurants opening every other week um people really into food they're really into street food but if you're a teenager and you're not from a wealthy family and you're living in east london you've probably got one of the worst diets in western europe and in tottenham where our restaurants based 41 percent of 11 year olds are obese so that's clinically obese and the national average is something like 21 so it's pretty much double the national average so so the idea is quite simple we we cook really delicious fried chicken we've worked with um a number of really interesting chefs who have designed some recipes that are so our chicken is free range chicken from yorkshire um we brine it overnight and then we steam it um so it's pretty much cooked and then we flash fry it to order um in cold pressed rapeseed oil and a ragged fryer for about two mid two and a half minutes so it contains one seventh of the salt content of your typical piece of fried chicken it's good chicken to start with so it tastes delicious um it has a third of the fat content and we serve it with a mixture of sides um we really like chips so the idea of not giving young people chips is kind of problematic so again we looked at chips and there are ways of cooking chips that are much less bad for you so if you leave the skin on if you cut them quite thick if you steam them in the same process as the chicken then fry them for much shorter length of time then or at your salt fat content it's much better and there's actually some fiber in it as well um the kfc menu's got vegetables in it so you can get coleslaw you can get baked beans you can get corn so there's a familiar there's a kind of vernacular of fried chicken that contains vegetables right so we we're now serving vegetables to kids um and they're seasonal and um that's a that's a good thing as well so basically the the model the business model has taken as almost as much time as the recipe so basically it's a it's a way of subsidizing lunch and after school meals so basically in the evening it's full price and people like us can go and you can come and have delicious fried chicken different varieties and it's really nice really well cooked good service you can get beer you can get glass of wine and you'll spend per head about 14 or 15 pounds but you know that all of the money that you spend is being used to subsidize kids in the daytime to come in and get it for two pounds so the two pounds price point is what you'd spend at chicken cottage or Dixie chicken um and kids can come in between 12 o'clock and 5 30 we close at 5 30 and the staff have lunch kids leave we turn the lights down and we're a bit more fancy um so it's a really simple model it's a way of basically you can go and eat out in your community and have the food did you see the food was on there yeah all that stuff um and you know that your money is being being used to get kids in in the daytime and start a conversation about food so there's a really big obesity epidemic and this isn't the solution but it's part of a solution I think giving young people choice um making an environment welcoming um and actually giving them a quality of service that that gives them respect and giving gives them food that gives them respect is I think really really important for for young people in the city so we're now open and you can come and visit us whenever you like thanks Hadrian all around London we see empty retail spaces and these so easily with a little imagination and creative flair could be used for better purposes and aspirant restaurateurs who often lack access to finance um are increasingly able to use them and I really came across an organization called grub club which takes supper clubs and transports them into these empty retail units the creator of grub club is alivia sybony so alivia please tell us how how it worked for you in catford thanks like that so yeah I'm alivia sybony and the co-founder of grub club um sorry how did yes this line is amazing um so just to give you an overview what is grub club so thanks um now amazingly by coincidence I use this slide a lot that is an ex chef from a cinnamon club just to bring it all back in the total coincidence but great and so we are a platform for dining experiences supper clubs pop-up restaurants so how does it work you have talented chefs from great backgrounds who are looking to set up their own business and they are looking for spaces to host in um so we connect them with venues now there are tons of venues around the city which um go under use at specific times so there are cafes that close in the evenings um that struggle to compete against the like of starbucks for example and yet have that empty space in the evening um there are museums that are closed at the weekends um you know restaurants that have a quiet night um a bit like vivac was explaining earlier so we'll connect these chefs fledgling chefs with these underused spaces to enable them to host their restaurant for the night they then showcase those dinners on our platform um and diners who are a little bit bored of the sort of uh you know pizza express offering come to our platform discover these dinners book through our platform and attend um so this enables the chefs on the one hand to uh build a profile and build a following and it's really providing the stepping stones to help them towards their journey of opening up a restaurant um and lowering the barrier to entry to achieve that goal without having to have you know huge amount of um financing behind them and and all of the risk involved because they do it um step by step obviously for the venues it's an extra source of income so when they're closed anyway in the evenings uh this is a way for them to get a bit of extra money but it's also a nice exposure for them so you know people might go into starbucks because that's just that's what they know and that's part of their pattern but actually if you take them outside of that uh environment and you bring them into a different cafe um see in the evening they might then return during the daytime to actually buy their coffee there so it's um supporting those businesses along the way um and for diners um not only is it a sort of fun dinner but it's actually a really interesting way to um support chefs in their journey and actually meet other like-minded people so all of the dinners are social dinners um so as you were saying early in terms of sort of social exclusion this kind of enables them to connect with other people around a dinner and so that's how we work uh broadly and so how does that impact specific communities um so really the idea is to bring people together and so we were contacted by london borough of luisham and um they actually earmarked catford as an area which um is in need of regeneration and so what they did is um they contacted us and we worked together with them to help on the one hand support local businesses and local traders and on the other hand re-engage local communities so um from a diner perspective the objectives are really to improve social cohesion so catford is a very uh diverse area which lacks a lot of social cohesion so it's not necessarily hugely deprived from an economic uh sense but it's it doesn't really have anything for anyone to do at any time so as a result you know no one sort of felt engaged with the community there was quite a high crime rate uh people you know there were the local businesses were struggling because there was nothing uh to bring the uh residents out to do um so the the aim of the project uh in doing a um uh six month pop-up uh in catford was to bring about uh social cohesion uh capital on this capitalize on the strength and diversity of the local community uh raise the low raise the profile of the local area so they wanted to bring um people outside from outside of catford into catford and actually make them discover an area that they may not have been to before um they also wanted to promote promote the nighttime activity so in this particular case they um uh uh we took over a shop that was um a closed shop inside a sort of an alien alien ailing sorry i was trying to follow up an ailing shopping center um and and there was a huge amount of crime in that shopping center in the evenings because it had it was sort of a 1960s sort of old um concrete block which had all these different alleyways and corridors and it was quite easy for people to sort of hide and attack people so actually by bringing this shopping center to life in the evening it actually brought a lot of activity and reduced the crime rate um around there um and they wanted to attract a new kind of demographic to the um town center and promote uh intergenerational uh connections by bringing people together for the food entrepreneurs the aim was to really give opportunities to new businesses to be able to start up uh on their food journeys but also give a platform for uh new uh fledgling uh food businesses to actually grow their their base to a larger public um so they were really supporting the local businesses and they were really capitalizing on this growing trend of pop-ups to sort of bring about a new image in the area um so this was the beautiful space we were given um and uh so we sort of worked with uh you know a local experience chef actually into providers to turn it into this three days later um so this is the space that actually came to life um for this for this period um and um over the space of six months we had a whole rotation of different chefs in there if you go to the next one thanks and so as an example we had in a pickle and so they were they just started off uh doing uh actually Mark um who's there had recently lost his job um uh it was a sort of you know nine to five office job and uh he was trying to sort of make ends meet by working in market stalls so he discovered catford canteen he was local to catford um and so he started doing these um dinners through grub club at um catford and actually um what it enabled him to do is really um bring his concept so he does so he's from barbados so he cooks bayesian cuisine and he wanted to show london that um there's a different style of caribbean cuisine that um people should try out so so through this he started doing an increasing number of pop-ups and actually this is um just under two years ago and since then he's um this is now his permanent employment he's done a huge number of uh uh public supper clubs but what's happened as a result is a lot of people have contracted him to do private events as well so a lot of companies uh bring him you know he's been overwhelmed with doing christmas parties um we were doing a filming shoot last week he came to do uh the cooking for our filming shoot and actually it's just brought about a huge amount of opportunities they started as a team of two they're now a team of six so they've also uh created new employment and for each dinner through sort of practice by um they've managed to increase their revenue by 50 percent for every event that they did um and that is through a mix of increasing the number of guests as they went um having better cost efficiencies and also increasing the price of the dinners as they went because they um got increasingly good reviews um so they're you know one of the examples of the um people who got an opportunity through this project um so just to summarize some of the impact that the project had so as a result of this seven uh businesses started up seven food food startups and they had 55 press mentions which actually made a really big difference to catford as an area itself um over 800 guests 29 events uh they were featured on bbc news and actually what was interesting is what happens beyond the food so not only did you know these chefs get opportunities and diners have a good time but it really did create a really great social impact for the cohesion of the local community and they create the diners who met at the dinner and created catford society um which is sort of creates a lot of different events including the catford film club um they went on to create a new series which called deptford brunt club um and that had a little pause and actually they've just come back to launch a new series and excitingly this new series is done with absolutely no funding from the council so um the council really saw a great uh impact we know with their initial investment because it's now got this longevity and doesn't actually need any more financial support from them so yeah it's just one of the examples thanks Olivia rubcub's goals are very ambitious so she didn't mention but um their aim is to be the uber of supper clubs um business people often ask me uh when all this restaurant london restaurant scene that's continually exploding um uh stop when it slowed down every single part of central london real estate seems to become a restaurant these days and um men they typically is men pay uh eye watering sums to open places in london and um so if you ask a question how democratic and easy and accessible is a process of starting a restaurant until recently the answer would be not very much and entrepreneurs emerge out of all kinds of social conditions and enabling entrepreneurship has become an enterprise in itself kerb has set a path for dozens of individual street food heroes and heroines and in some cases restaurant terms too um depending on restaurant revolution there's been a separate and parallel street food revolution where people are bypassing our fancy restaurants and going into new areas um where there's cutting edge more authentic food offerings in completely new environments at completely different price points from ours the promoters of the street food project street feast have recently launched a montee million pound uh campaign to launch something called london union they launched about a week ago uh with the name of opening with three point five million pounds i believe as of last night they're at two and a half million um so this is becoming big business in itself now but the advent of street food has really been uh the brainchild of petra barron the founder of uh kerb she understandably hates the title that the press have given her which is the queen of street food but undoubtedly she is petra why don't you come and tell us how this has all happened thank you iqbal um first of all i want to say that kerb is one of a few factors that has triggered this this um generation of entrepreneurs um hitting the streets and selling their food um for i mean who would who would have thought that you'd be doing this um 10 years ago standing out in the cold hanging onto your gazebo hoping that it won't fly away trying to shove some burgers around a grill and hope that people are going to come it wouldn't have happened so things have really come a long way um but there are key ideals that have informed our approach which has resonated with wider cultural shifts and people making changes in their careers as they seek greater meaning in their work um so what is kerb kerb is a membership organization of over 60 of london's greatest street food traders uh we organize lunch markets across the city as well as traders for private events from weddings to conferences to office parties and all sorts of things as catering is changing as well as the food that's being served on the streets um here is a film to tell you a little bit more about kerb before i continue this is a really exciting time for london's food culture this is a really exciting time for london's food culture food cooked and served on the streets enables any and anyone to participate in it we called it kerb because that's where it all starts out there on that strip of concrete cooking feeding london something special enlivening the spaces of the city it's entrepreneurs taking their first steps into the food business it's the reason that cities began in the first place through the trading of food and public spaces it's the launch pad for fledgling food businesses to get their ideas out there and start testing the market it's a platform and a stage and where everyone no matter where you're from or for how long you're here it's part of something really good and it's where this brilliant community of doers and street cooks gets their kicks owns their stripes and brings fun and flavor to these grailed london streets day in day out whatever the weather it's not for the faint hearted though it's hard work and every day is a gamble but for those that love it you can't mess with it you're out there on the curb playing a role in the city in this big old city you've got something to do something to contribute feeding people in charge of your own product making london taste better our traders come from all over the place and bring with them the stories and recipes that make their businesses unique they're obsessed with what they cook and what they do and we are obsessed with clustering it all kerb brings it all together creating spaces for this culture to grow to multiply to collaborate and to improve the films in this series start to tell the story of people and food and cooking eating and working together in public hope you're feeling hungry tuck in okay that's it thanks very much no sir i'm joking i'm joking i'm joking um yeah so how did kerb start um so it's 2005 and um i decided that i wanted to start a chocolate van and drive it around the country and sell brownies and hot chocolate and sundays and truffles and chocolate martini shots under the counter and milkshakes and all sorts of things and back then it was considered to be um there was no such thing as a street food hero people didn't even talk about street food it was just you're you're a mobiler it was like really sort of old school you're you're a dodgy ice cream van driver um and it was like a quirky lifestyle choice where people would be wondering when you were going to get a proper job um so when i was on the road i you know i would go to festivals and markets and fates and weddings and anywhere that people were hungry and um while i was at all of these events i'd meet all of these other traders and inevitably i would not have a drill for something that need drilling or pens or change or whatever and everyone was always more than happy to help you it was incredible i couldn't believe how sort of open and natural this community was amongst all these transient um different like disparate traders and it really um it really inspired me it was a whole kind of side effect of me just wanted to sell chocolate and be on the road was actually all of these different people who already doing that kind of thing for their own reasons and i um felt like there was something in the air so um one day i had this kind of vision that we should all get together get organized um and create more of what we've got and um something that was less serendipitous less kind of like oh we've just bumped into each other at a festival and more organized um so from that moment each street was born um which was a street food collective the first in the country um our strap line was driving british street food forward um i scoured every event i went to i'd like drive park up at events and kind of ditch my van and kind of go and see who was doing what and what they were cooking and everything and i'd call them and see if i could sign them up to this kind of fledgling collective which wasn't really anything it was just me trying to gather together traders who were doing good stuff um and slowly each street became something that had momentum we got our first market from kings cross the redevelopment that was happening um it started in 2011 when kings cross was i was talking to jackie earlier about kings cross a few years ago and there just really wasn't much going on there and they wanted to create a new narrative for kings cross that was beyond the red lights and the drugs and everything like that and they wanted to do it with food and they realized that by putting a collective like each street there that it would attract a different kind of person and it would attract um they would create a new story for the space um so from each street came kerb um and it's really been about finding passionate street cooks um and helping to create a scene that was all all helping to create a scene that was just going to develop and grow across london and slowly more and more people started hearing about it and it was customers go at getting excited that they could have something different other than prep and it was um people going oh my god that's actually a thing you can become a trader you can make maybe make a living from it and it started to kind of snowball a lot from there um so now we are three years old and we have um had markets operating in kings cross obviously paddington made a hill peckham south bank kings um for hackney wicks spittle fields all over the place and everywhere we go it's always kind of slightly different customers but everyone's pretty much the same in the the love of food and and the kind of joy of being around all these people that love cooking what they're cooking so um it's a lot of fun um so from the position of food lover food trader and then market organizer to business owner with a lusty interest in urbanism there've been some key objectives i've identified and around which kerb has developed and continues to hold true so one of them is that clustering is key um it creates strength in numbers greater visibility sharing of information that's like a really vital part of what kerbs about it's like this incredible resource um where you've got all these different traders and that they together know everything about street trading and that's really powerful thing to tap into and they constantly help one another and help us and um it's uh it's self perpetuating um it creates more opportunities and clustering creates alternative communities um i think that this is probably the number one reason that uh traders want to sign up to curb is because of the community that it gives them being a trader um by its nature is a really individualist kind of process and it's really uh hard work and you're out there in the british elements um you know like it's tough it's lonesome um so you've got this kind of group of engaged other people doing what you're doing and it feels uh reassuring to have that and it's it's um it definitely helps um another thing is that food transforms space um love of food is one of the only universal human truths we live in cities that are full of change and cultures we don't always understand when you put food in public on shared space at street level boundaries are dissolved and co-production is created everyone is bonded for those few moments in a space of common experience that can make you feel part of a city like very few other things can um the other thing is british food needs to improve and i know it has improved loads in the last 10 years but part of the thing that's always driven me and drives a lot of the people that we work with is that britain's always had such a terrible reputation for food and it's embarrassing when you go to other countries and they're kind of telling you how awful it must be to be british and the food that you must have to eat and have bland and everything and it's just really annoying and um i really think that by putting the best together everyone runs a better race and um you know like when we bring in a new buck who's kind of like some kid that we just discovered that's just full of you know cahones and really kind of ready to ready to rumble on the streets and and a lot of the traders will be like oh my god quick kind of can't let the side down gotta raise our game as well and i really believe that the more the more you do that the more you create market forces um within the market the better the market is i think britain's been a victim to a lot of antiquated laws in terms of our markets where there is no competition there's no role for competition you've got your pitch and you've got it for life and your family inherit your pitch and it just doesn't create a very kind of exciting or dynamic um scene so that's one of the things that is really exciting about putting street food traders together um as we've grown in numbers and visibility awareness of selling food on the streets as a career choice has also grown it's been extraordinary to watch the perception of it change in the last 10 years um bankers and lawyers and ad executives deciding that their jobs aren't as fulfilling or as gratifying as they would have hoped um carving out a new career path which sees them ditching their suits and kind of putting on their pinnies and learning how to pitch a gazebo and roll out a flooring um whilst i'd like to take credit for triggering this movement i believe it's come along at a time when we are also entering a new age uh roman chris narik of the school of life says we've entered a new age of fulfillment in which the great dream is to trade up from money to meaning and we see this everywhere we go we see this uh in the traders that we work with who have ditched their jobs to the customers that come along that perhaps don't want to eat a laminated sandwich want to look in the eyes of the person that's selling them their food and know where that food comes from and shorten the connection between the person and the producer um and a food business that is set up and run by you and you alone presents the most amazing albeit incredibly challenging route to fulfillment i think for feeling like an individual in charge of your own thing and with a valuable role to play in the city as well as creator of change in the london food scene and a member of an exciting and engaged trader community it is addictive however it's still got a long way to go there's many many uh hurdles that we've got across um around space and uh weather i don't know if we're ever going to cross that hurdle um this generation of food entrepreneurs are growing up and the whole thing is changing curbs next move is to ensure that we adapt as it changes um whilst retaining our core values of trader community plus street life plus great food um next year's goals are to join our two pillars of markets and private events with our incubator arm which is something that we've been doing kind of uh a lot of but we need to really kind of grow it and that's really where i think curb can make guarantee its longevity in london so it's not just a trend it transcends the fact that it's trendy and it continues to inspire new generations of people wanting to start their food businesses and also makes it a more accessible um industry beyond the bankers and the addicts leaving their jobs so that's our next challenge um but we've established a foundation and a great community of traders who would all really like to get involved in that as well so uh wish us luck and come to our markets when you can thanks very much thanks Petra i began this talk by saying that restaurants can act as agents for social renewal we've seen how Vivec enabled as well to become a restaurateur we've seen how waterhouse and chicken town have used the dining environment in which to correct social failures and we've heard from Olivia and Petra about the new economy that has emerged to challenge the convention of restaurant startups let me tell you one final story before concluding this is Mohammed Munim i first met Mo when he'd just barely been out of his teens and had seen the insides of far too many prisons for good king to just happen to fall on the wrong side of the track in his time in prison he'd uh grown for an interest in food while working in a kitchen and he was fearful that on his return out his old east London gang will grab him and nab him and give you back inside again before too long um so i gave him a job as a food runner at roast and um he did very well and soon became a waiter and then um and one day he said he told me he was leaving he was going to work in a cafe and i said why did you leave roast to go and work in a cafe and he said well they've made me the manager of the cafe um it did so well with it he opened a second and then a third and then this morning he just contacted me to say he'd be given his fourth cafe to run and he's employing ex-offenders at each and every one of them and that's what restaurants can do and and achieve beyond our traditional purpose we drive social change as evidenced many times over this evening we educate, encourage and empower those who haven't had the lucky breaks that many of us have had in life we can measure and communicate those impacts to others and we can now put a resource behind these activities because as with the case of Andrew from bricks and prison we can see um the ultimate sustainable commercial crowd pleaser and that's doing good is good for business thank you well thank you very much to everyone on the panel into iqbal as well for putting the panel together i think we've seen tonight a lot of very powerful stories that make us reflect on the way in which food can change lives can change communities and indeed inspire us to do to do these things and to use food to these ends rather than taking questions from the audience what i'd like to do is invite everyone to join us for a reception in the area just outside of the lecture theater where all of the speakers will be available and you can come and ask them questions individually okay thank you very much everyone for attending and we wish you good good evening