ABOUT A YEAR AGO, I GOT A WHATSAPP FROM A VIP at Woolworths with the cover of The Observer Food Monthly attached to it.
The OFM is a supplement to the UK Sunday newspaper The Observer. It showed a formidable-looking black chef with a rolling pin held over one shoulder and a bronze, dome-shaped pie in her hand. The coverline read: “Chefs to watch in 2022” and also “stars of the future as chosen by Jay Rayner” (the famous critic whose scathing review of Le Cinq in Paris went viral in 2017).
I was living in London when the OFM was first published in 2001. Marco Pierre White was on the first cover. Twenty-two years later, the chef on the cover is Nokuthula “Nokx” Majozi from Durban, senior sous chef at the Rosewood London and head piemaker of The Pie Room at the Holborn Dining Room.
“There were six of us in the story, so I didn't know!” Nokx says when I ask her how she felt when she saw that cover. “No one knew! So, when I saw it… it was mind-blowing!”
We're sitting in a red-leather booth in the mostly empty restaurant on a Wednesday morning.
