Kitchen conversion
Dennis Mwakulua gives us a taste of things to come - sweet potato ice-cream. It's an example of the African ingredients that he likes to incorporate into his recipes. He is currently inspired by a recent visit to Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck restaurant in Bray, Berkshire, and is taking advantage of the quiet summer period to try out new ideas.
He fills a strawberry sugar tuile cylinder with foie gras halfway up, then strawberry sorbet, and dusts it with a balsamic vinegar and onion powder. It seems that visitors to international law firm Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw won't be short of dishes to challenge and delight their taste-buds this autumn.
Avenance has held the contract for the past 10 years, providing hospitality and directors' dining. As the head chef of this prestigious City contract, Mwakulua has come a long way, both geographically and professionally, in the nine years since he arrived in London.
As a teenager, he had an ambition to make it as a basketball player in the USA. He then became passionate about music and rapped semi-professionally in the hotels of his home town, Mombasa, in Kenya. His group BMW (Blacks Most Wanted) were the first Kenyan rappers to show a video on national television. But when one of the group defected to the USA, Mwakulua didn't see rapping as a solid proposition. His parents wanted him to study so, in the words of one of his songs, he headed "straight out of motherland Africa".
At the age of 23, he arrived in London with just US$35 in his pocket and was surprised when his dollars were not accepted in a shop. As a native of a touristy seaside city, he had assumed that dollars were welcome everywhere.
The size of London surprised him, and the cost of living there shocked him. In Mombasa, he could live comfortably for about £50 a week, including food, rent and other bills. Once changed into sterling, his $35 didn't last long.
The idea of cooking for a living wasn't even a twinkle in his eye back then. Mwakulua came to London to study business and finance, and took kitchen portering jobs purely to pay his way. He shared a room with two friends in a house in Stratford, east London, and enrolled at Lambeth College.
At 3.30pm every day he left the college to get to Camden Town for 4pm to start washing dishes at French restaurant Caf‚ Delancey. Two girlfriends left him because of his hard-working mentality. "They wanted to go out and play, like a proper girlfriend and boyfriend," Mwakulua remembers, but he had virtually no free time between working and studying.
In the summer of 1996 he signed on with recruitment firm Mayday, which placed him with Avenance. It was while washing dishes at investment bank Merrill Lynch that the young Kenyan experienced a revelation that changed the course of his life. Suddenly, he was looking at food with new eyes.
He recalls: "I saw chefs Mark Webb and Michael Osborne doing the food and I thought, ‘Wow.' In Kenya, what's put on the table is what you have. I never appreciated food much. But at Avenance, I started to get interested. I thought I could take a year off from college and concentrate on this interest."
Watching Avenance's executive chef, Robert Kirby, do fish and pastry demonstrations hooked Mwakulua completely, and he asked the chef how he could learn. Kirby told him to come up and work with him at HSBC Investment Bank in London whenever he was free. "I'm not shy to ask for help," Mwakulua says. "I hassled Robert. I kept calling him, even on holiday. He'll either be mad or give you what you want." Then a commis chef vacancy came up. He took it, and that's when the hard work started.
Mwakulua realised he had a lot of catching up to do, and often worked from 6am to 6pm. He remembers one occasion when Kirby got angry with him for serving a cake warm instead of hot, and he nearly walked out because of the pressure and frustration. But it was Kirby's high standards that spurred him on.
Free Saturdays were filled gaining unpaid experience in the kitchens of London's Ivy, Dorchester and Le Caprice. "To catch up with the guys here," he says, "I had to concentrate on the food, bearing in mind that the food culture here is very different. I had to learn the basics very quickly." An embarrassing moment came when he made a sandwich of prawns with Branston pickle. This was perhaps an early clue to his inventiveness, but after that he went out and bought a Pret A Manger sandwich book.
Clearly, Mwakulua's bright personality, artistic talent and passion to learn have led to his achievements. He wants to be a role model and give something back to the industry. "I want to encourage ethnic minorities and young guys from college," he says. "I'm telling the kitchen porters you don't want to wash dishes for the rest of your life. You need to know what's going on in the kitchen. Make it your business."
Racial prejudice is something he never experienced in Kenya. He says that some people treat him as though he were still a kitchen porter, rather than a head chef responsible for managing a team. But his strategy is unequivocal: to blank out negativity or jealousy.
He explains: "If I suspect someone is racist, I won't allow that to control my feelings. I don't pay attention to any negativity. If I find racism in any place of work, I will just pack my bags and move away. I won't start any court case or legal action. I will leave as a gentleman. I will prove the point of what they're missing and prove their stupidity."
He believes that food in the UK is getting better because of the growing availability of ingredients and foreign influences. He wants to return to Africa to discover more ingredients and see how they can be adapted and used in recipes here. Roasted goat is one Kenyan speciality he'd like to bring to the UK.
One of his proudest moments recently was attending the Craft Guild of Chefs awards dinner. "Everywhere I looked, there was a big name who was acknowledging me," he says. He now intends to compete for the guild at an international level.
A visit home to Kenya last year confirmed Mwakulua as an enthusiastic convert to the speed of metropolitan life. "In London, you have to keep up the pace," he says. "I love action." So what did his family think of his unexpected career? He says: "They laughed when I first told them I'm a chef, because I never cooked at home."
Up close and personal
Position: Avenance head chef at international law firm Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw
Salary: £24,000
Home: Elephant & Castle, south London, with girlfriend Martina and 19-month-old daughter Aalysha
Favourite films:Jerry Maguire ("I've watched it many times; whenever I'm in a bad mood, it inspires me"), and Lean On Me, starring Morgan Freeman
Favourite musicians: LL Cool J, Public Enemy, NWA
Favourite restaurant: 1837 at Brown's, London (when it was being run by chef Andrew Turner)
People who have inspired me: Robert Kirby, Mark Webb, Mark Parfait of Accenture, and the people I work with
Memorable holiday: a working holiday in Dubai
Favourite hotel: Burj Al Arab, Dubai
Competitive achievements
2001 La Parade des Chefs Gold Medal at Hotelympia
2002 Avenance Chef of the Year
2003 British Meat Chef of the Year and British Meat Contract Catering Chef of the Year
2003 Finalist in the Norwegian Seafood Challenge
Roast belly of tamarind-glazed Norfolk pork with kachumbari salad
