The former Barrafina chef shares recipes from her new cookbook, Sabor including Galician octopus and a Riojan chorizo and potato stew
Eighteen years ago, a young woman called Nieves Barragán Mohacho left Santurtzi, the small Basque town where she had grown up and lived all her life, and travelled to London to take up an offer of work in the kitchen at the Barbican branch of the French chain Simply Nico (a friend’s boyfriend was its sous chef). This wasn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, her dream job. Unable to speak English, and without any previous experience, the only position available to her was that of kitchen porter, which meant she spent her days – and what long days they were – cleaning salad and peeling potatoes. But even as she waited for the night bus home to her room in Crystal Palace, bone-tired after a 16-hour shift, Barragán was unable to shake off a powerful sense that this vast and lonely city was exactly where she was meant to be. “I haven’t even started yet,” she would say, when her mother enquired how much longer she was planning on staying.
“Can you imagine it?” she asks, when we meet in a pub in Borough Market at that enchanted summer hour when the stall holders outside are just winding up, and the office workers and City boys are just piling in. “I had to change buses in Brixton at one in the morning, which was not something I told my mum. It was hard. I was the only girl in the kitchen, and sometimes the guys liked to make … jokes. I was working six days a week, trying to learn English as I went along and meanwhile speaking to the other staff mostly in French. But I wanted it so much. I needed action. I didn’t mind the work at all. Whatever I was asked to do, I would become the fastest at it. I was only a porter for three or four months. One day, someone [more senior] wasn’t there, and I was, and I was ready.” Over the next 18 months, she worked her way through every section. “Wow! So much new information. Here were fruit and vegetables I’d never seen before in my life. I started to taste different flavours, to understand the way colour works on a plate.”
Related: Cookery masterclass: Nieves Barragán Mohacho
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