Please join us on the 20th of June for a very special panel discussion on the theme of food, culture, and marginalisation.
The panel will be hosted by our very own much-loved-and-dearly-missed Fatima “Fatti” Tarkelman, who describes herself as a “[p]roudly queer development chef [and] sustainability and inclusion champion”. She is the founder of the Kin-spiration Collective, a group of women and other people of marginalised genders who are also chefs of colour, and is overseeing the collaborative effort of putting together a cookbook by the same name. Kin-spiration (the book) will feature recipes to waste less, and for Fatti “the story of the food and the people behind it are as important as the flavour”. Most importantly - to us, at least - Fatti was also the head chef at Glasshouse, the former site name of The Common Press and its sister spaces, and both the staff and customers desperately miss her warmth and flatbreads.
Fatti will be joined by three incredible chefs who'll be discussing their backgrounds, experiences as people of colour, and as migrants, and how these things have intertwined and informed their work.
About the host:
Fatima ‘Fatti’ Tarkelman
My food is proudly inauthentic.
~ Fatima ‘Fatti’ Tarkelman
Fatima “Fatti” Tarkleman is a zero-waste migrant chef of mixed African-Asian descent. They have special interests in fermentation and flavourful cross-cultural cooking. Fatti prioritises sustainability, inclusivity, and local produce, while representing the flavours of their heritage and their London upbringing. Fatti works as a freelance development chef, workshop facilitator, speaker, and content creator. They embrace innovative ways of using age-old techniques to make delicious food, putting care for people, their stories, and nature at the heart of their practice. Fatti is currently working on a collaborative cookbook, Kin~spiration, which will feature recipes to waste less by chefs and the special people who inspired them to cook. Kin~spiration will spotlight women chefs, and chefs outside the gender binary, showcasing the breadth of their work from across the UK diaspora. Look out for her in Delicious Magazine in June and Ocado magazine in July!
Socials: @foodventures_with_fatti. @the_kinspiration_group
About the panelists:
Melissa Thompson
Of Maltese and Jamaican descent, food from all over the world excites me, especially from the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, East and South East Asia, and increasingly West Africa.
~ Melissa Thompson
n 2014 Melissa Thompson started a supper club, which quickly grew into a popular restaurant pop-up - but when Melissa stopped to have a baby in 2018, instead of going back to the pop-up she started developing recipes for publications and brands and writing about the hospitality industry. Melissa is a BBC Good Food columnist, a regular contributor for The Guardian and her work has appeared in Vittles, BBC Good Food, Waitrose Magazine and more. She is the co-director of the British Library Food Season, is a panellist on Radio 4's The Kitchen Cabinet and has given in-house talks to corporations, and consulted about race, diversity and inclusion.
Her debut cookbook, Motherland, was published in 2022 and tells the story of Jamaican food and its origins.
Sal Dhalla
My relationship with food has always been incredibly important to me, and I’m from a hotch-potch multicultural family full of foodies and self-confessed master chefs. At its heart, my family food culture comes from East Africa, where my parents and grandparents are from. We have a mixed heritage combining Gujarat, Tanzania and Zanzibar … I’m not a Zanzibari chef, unless you count the taught by doing, intuitively adapted versions of my Nani’s recipes which I absolutely love to cook regularly. I may be classically trained in French cooking, and draw on those skills and teachings a lot, but that’s not the chef that I am either. I am all of these things combined into something that is bound by my strong intuitive connection to and love of food.
~ Sal Dhalla
Sal Dhalla, who goes by ‘The Food Witch’, is an intuitive chef specialising in delicious vegetarian and vegan cooking. They work primarily as a retreat chef, teacher and workshop leader, holidays and events around the UK and beyond, running mindful baking and intuitive cooking workshops, teaching intuitive cooking and working one-to-one with clients to help them reconnect to the joy of food and cooking. . She left a corporate job to pursue a dream of becoming a chef and baker over a decade ago, and is keen to help to support diversity and inclusion in UK hospitality especially for queer POC. She is also the author of two books, Veg Out - a collection of her favourite plant-led recipes - and 10 Steps To A More Joyful Relationship With Food.
Kenji Morimoto
I came from such a close-knit Japanese-American community, where we'd see each other all the time, every Sunday at temple, and all my friends were nearby … after moving to the UK, I really missed the connection to that culture. Obviously, I have friends here, but it's so different when you have people who look like you and have the same history as you. So diving headfirst into something very, very Japanese was deliberate. I wanted to stay connected.
~ Kenji Morimoto
Kenji Morimoto is a fourth-generation Japanese American based in SW London whose cultural identity is grounded in food. As a child, he was in charge of making tsukemono (Japanese pickles) for family gatherings, learning from and surrounded by elders recreating flavours of home. During the pandemic, he started his Instagram @kenjcooks to document his interest in fermentation and connecting the dots between diasporic traditions and his own. Since then, he’s cooked in fermentation-focused kitchens in Poland and ran fermentation-focused supper clubs, led workshops on koji and kimchi, partnered with companies such as MOB and Souschef, and published in Waitrose Food. He is currently working on his first book.
This event will take place in our bar space, which is fully wheelchair accessible and has a disabled toilet.