We all need to eat to live, but what a joy it is when you’re able to work with food for a living, all the way from waitering in a family restaurant to mulling over menus a world away from home.
Back when I was a laatijie of 13, I worked weekends as a busboy at my family’s Mike’s Kitchen. I earned R15 per shift, which was all a small fortune in those days. I carried food, cleared tables and generally did all the menial things a busy family steakhouse needs doing to ensure tables turn, so that more customers can be seated, fed, cleared, and shuffled out the door to make room for the next seating.
My childhood Christmas lunches and New Year’s Eve parties were spent in the family steakhouse, serving other people.
It was here, surrounded by the smoky scent of grilled steaks and sizzling hot fries, that my passion for food was born. I say passion, but that’s just a euphemism for my outright gluttony. I love food. The more, the better!
I spent my youth and early adulthood in the various steakhouses my family owned. First as a busboy, then as a waiter, and finally as a floor manager – the most thankless job in the universe.
Deciding I wanted something different out of life, I left to go find myself. Or to find anything that wasn’t the restaurant trade, filled as it was with long hours and rude guests.
I spent years in search of who I should be and what I should do. I flitted from job to job, alternating between hospitality, customer service and marketing, with a side order of HR and communications. I learned new ways of serving clients and rolling with the punches of rude customers.
I worked retail, selling educational toys in Gaborone and fixing watches in London. I did corporate, running internal communications in Sandton, media and PR in Stellenbosch, and wrangling digital media, customer resolution and crisis management in Cape Town.
Through it all, my job history has a golden thread of marketing and communications holding it together, making sense of it all. But one thing was missing – the divine food of my youth.
And I realised this week while contemplating Heritage Month and life back in SA that I’ve come full circle. Here I am in Dubai, back in the restaurant game, back working with family. Back to being surrounded by food.
Glorious food that brings together friends and lovers in a moment of bliss, connecting over a favourite dish, celebrating a birthday, an anniversary or a date night, or just as friends connecting over a simple meal.
Life and its funny little ways. Everything I’ve learned since leaving the restaurant trade almost two decades ago has brought me here, heading up the marketing for three restaurant chains in one of the world’s most competitive food markets.
And so, while the braai and kookkos family dinners serve only as memories of things I missed as a child, the heritage of connecting over food – as South African as braai pie and mielie pap – is my heritage, and my business. Family business.
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