Culinary Journeys:

Our new feature, Culinary Journeys focuses on chefs who have migrated to the United Kingdom, in order to display how migration continues to shape the country’s culinary landscape, and thus highlight the importance of diversity within the hospitality sector.

For our inaugural issue we spoke with chef and award-winning cookbook author, Olia Hercules; originally from southern Ukraine, she migrated to Cyprus at the age of 12 and remained there until she was 18, when she moved to the UK to attend university. She went on to train at Leith’s School of Food & Wine, and later, worked as a chef under the guidance of Yotam Ottolenghi. In 2015, she released the first of her cook books: Mamushka, a selection of recipes from her homeland, and followed it two years later with Kausasis, a culinary sojourn through Georgia, Azerbaijan and beyond. Her forthcoming third book Summer Kitchens, explores the seasonal dishes produced in Ukraine’s traditional outdoor kitchens.

How would you describe your cooking style?

My cooking style is ingredient and season led. This stems from the way I grew up cooking. I cook quite a lot of Eastern European food, obviously Ukrainian, and lots of others, but try to use local British produce. I sometimes make substitutions, but I never force recipes if I can’t find ingredients. I am interested in using traditional methods, that are in part, inspired by recipes but making them my own and something that fits with where I live.

What was it like integrating in both Cyprus and the UK?

Arriving in Cyprus as a child straight off the boat, was really tough. With very poor language skills, being thrown into a new English-speaking school was difficult. I had a relatively smooth transition when I moved to the UK. Obviously there were moments when I thought, oh god I am defiantly being too ignorant here… things can be very different depending where you are. But on the whole, perhaps because my university campus was so diverse, international students were heavily normalised. When I finished uni and moved to London… well, London’s London, so it was fine.

How has your migration affected your cooking?

I was never really interested in cooking until I went to university, but during my year abroad I lived in Italy and was surrounded by so many amazing cooks that managed to make great food with very minimal ingredients.

During the summer, I worked in a restaurant in Sicily to practice my language skills. One day the chef made me some spaghetti for lunch - what looked like to be plain pasta, but it was in fact, ‘spaghetti ai ricci’, pasta with sea urchin, cooked by residual heat with olive oil.

I was like wow, I want to cook delicious food. It was a real ‘poww’ moment, where all of these wires in my brain were going very crazy. From then I became obsessed by food, and used my experiences of eating in Ukraine, Cyprus, and Italy to shape my cooking. You see… my food is a journey.

How has UK hospitality benefitted from international chefs like yourself?

Take, Ottolenghi for example. He not only made middle eastern cuisine popular in the UK, but had such an interesting approach to the way he hired his staff. He always hired people from all over the world and would host meetings with chefs that had worked for him for a while and let them brainstorm and bring ideas, in order to bring diversity and integration into what they were cooking. He also supported staff from every level in the kitchen - when I was working at one of his restaurants, I think my head chef was originally a kitchen porter, and Ottolenghi really supported his career development. There are so many ways ‘migrants’ contribute to the hospitality industry.

How do you think migration effects the hospitality industry?

I honestly don’t know how the industry can survive without the international labour force. At a practical level, there is a notorious shortage of chefs in the industry…they move a lot and its super tough. But also at a more romantic level, there’s so many ways that migrants contribute to the hospitality industry… people bring so many exciting new ways of approaching food, and without them.

Your new book, Summer Kitchen explores the food cooked in traditional outdoor Ukrainian kitchens, and examines the cooking methods involved - can you tell us a bit more about this?

I wanted to share with people a different way of approaching cooking. Ukraine is famous for its produce, and in the summer we often have an abundance of fruit and vegetables, so we pickle everything to preserve it. Summer Kitchen is about making the most of seasonal produce, which is something I think people in the UK can do, and it doesn’t have to be massively pretentious. My fermented chillis recipe is something we eat whole in Ukraine all the time, but in my book you can blitz them up and make the most delicious sauce, which can add flavour to anything.