the times | Saturday December 4 2021 21
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circumstances. Ts&Cs applymonkfish) are a reminder of how far
Nestor has come since his uncle left
him alone on the platform in Glasgow
all those years ago.
With cooking like this, and all
Nestor and Roberta’s ambition and
strength and passion behind it, their
restaurant, when it opens, will be
something else. And when it does, he
promises, The Times will be the first
to know.
The refugee councils of Britain,
including the English, Welsh and
Scottish councils, support more than
20,000 refugees like Nestor each year,
helping them with food, clothing and
housing, providing therapy, legal
advice and help finding jobs.
Donations will be doubled up to
£250,000 by anonymous
philanthropists.
The charity helping children reconnect
with nature, leading article, page 33Edinburgh with Tom Kitchin, whose
celebrity status was something that
seems to have seriously turned
Nestor’s head, and to whom he now
declares a huge debt of gratitude (“He
taught me everything”).
From there, it was down to London
and eventually a job with the great
Claude Bosi at Bibendum. Now, of
course, the dream is his own
restaurant. His girlfriend Roberta is
helping him in the kitchen today. She
is also a refugee from Congo but
came younger, has an English accent,
major nails and eyelashes, and works
as a beauty therapist. She’s adding a
“secret” Congolese spice mix to the
smoked fish for the farcie and is the
one, I gather, who encourages Nestor
to embrace his Congolese culinary
heritage and not just cook classical
French.
“Congolese cooking is delicious,”
she says, “but the problem is
presentation. We’ve got a diverse
array of food, a very rich culture, but
I’ve not yet seen it presented in a way
that would be... appetising to most
people. To make it work in a
restaurant, it needs to have all that
deliciousness but look prettier. Not
just brown.”
And the food Nestor serves me is
certainly pretty. The beignet is a
shimmering golden bauble dusted
with black winter truffle, light and
fluffy and wonderful. The monkfish
torchon is perfectly done, sweet and
juicy, and given salt and umami and a
glisten of fat from its barding of
pancetta. The cabbage farcie with the
salted fish and Roberta’s spice mix
pulls it away from the conventional
European, like a huge, edible emerald,
into something else altogether, and
the two fat langoustines (bought this
morning from Billingsgate, like theuncle did what he thought was best
for Nestor’s future. It was at this point
that he approached the Kenyan
stranger, who took him to the
Scottish Refugee Council.
“Those guys were incredible,”
Nestor says. “I was lost. I spoke only
French and my own language,
Lingala. But this was a warm place.
They gave me coffee and asked if I
was hungry. They found someone
who could speak my language. And I
felt safe. It was a massive house with a
TV and lots of activities. They did so
much for me. That is why I want to
help them now. They put me in
school so I could learn English, they
gave me some money, they came to
check up my mental health.. .”
Nestor always loved food, he says,
and remembers long trips with his
father from his home in Kinshasa to
buy ingredients and, especially, fish.
“But where I am from,” he says,
“cooking is not a man’s job. That was
for my mother and my sisters. Now
my father is probably looking down at
me and going, ‘oh yeah’.”
Nestor found work in a popular
Glasgow club and, through a
Senegalese friend he made there, was
offered a kitchen porter’s job in a
restaurant. “He thought I was too
cool to take a KP job,” Nestor recalls,
“because I was the big guy in town,
working on the door of this club, but I
said, “bruh, I’m gonna do the job, I
don’t mind.” I was washing dishes and
earning £70 or £80 a week. I could
buy clothes and do the stuff I wanted
to do. All the great chefs, even
Gordon Ramsay, they started as KPs.”
The restaurant was owned by Nico
Simeone, an inspirational local chef
who saw Nestor’s potential and
trained him in the classical
techniques until he left to work inmuch of his flight: “The journey was
hard. I don’t know how to explain. We
drove. I don’t know what route. Then
took a plane. It was a town in
Scotland, I can’t remember what
town. When you have a young guy
coming from Africa you don’t know
where you are. Your only concern is
to be safe. I had nothing. A bag of
clothes. Then we took a train to
Glasgow and my uncle left me there.
And I was alone.” It’s unclear why his
uncle should have left him there at
that moment, having brought him so
far. He won’t be drawn on the
circumstances except to say that hisDemocratic Republic of the Congo and was helped by Scotland’s refugee council
TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER RICHARD POHLE