It was passion and a leap of faith that saw celebrity chef Nisha Katona quit her 20 year career as a family barrister to become a best-selling cookery author and restaurant owner.
In between long hours in chambers, Nisha, 54, would take pleasure in teaching people how to cook traditional Indian food that her mother had taught her, and realised she needed to write a recipe book to pass on the tradition to her daughters.
“I wrote it and then thought ‘I don't know how to publish a book’. So I looked in a Jamie Oliver cookbook, googled some of the names in it, and one was his agent. I put my pride to one side and I sent her a little video of my proposal,” Nisha tells Ateh Jewel in this week’s HELLO! Second Act podcast.
“And within ten minutes she rang me, which is extraordinary, wanting to meet on Monday. I remember getting that phone call, going out into the garden and sitting on the children's swings thinking, ‘oh my God, a door has just flung open’. That was the beginning of that second phase. Suddenly my life was charging into food, which was my passion.”
Following the idea for her book, she felt galvanised to open her first restaurant Mowgli in Liverpool in 2014 to great success, eventually giving up her secure career to throw herself into expanding her chain to what is now 26 venues. Her family - and even bank managers - had concerns initially.
“A woman in the bank said ‘you’ve got a steady job, what are you doing that for?’ said the star of MasterChef.
“But it's an involuntary thing if you're an entrepreneur, you have to do it. Otherwise you will feel, what am I living for? There is a door with a light flashing over it. I've got to go through that door.”
Nisha, who has been married for over 25-years to her classically trained guitarist husband, Zoltan, lost three stone after being diagnosed with chronic Crohns disease in her bowel last year. “It was scary, I felt like I was going to die,” she says. But she isn’t letting her condition hold her back.
“Life does not end at 40 or 50 or 60. It is a new beginning and we are at our best in the second act. There’s hope for anyone. The most important thing is being joyful and having purpose, it keeps you very hungry and happy.
“And if you work doing the things you love, it keeps you young and glowing from the inside.”
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