Nisha Katona MBE, founder of Liverpool-headquartered Mowgli Street Food, was not always bound for a life in foodservice. The daughter of two doctors, she grew up in nearby Skelmersdale and was a child protection barrister for 20 years. In 2008, the UK’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport appointed her a trustee of National Museums Liverpool, and in 2009 she was appointed Ambassador for Diversity in Public Appointments by the UK Cabinet Office.
Feeling the call of her heritage, a career U-turn saw Katona switch to teaching about Indian cuisine, and the foundation of the first Mowgli Street Food restaurant, on Bold Street in Liverpool, in 2014. Her passion for serving fresh, authentic, Indian home-style food quickly saw the chain win several awards, while Katona herself received an MBE in the New Year Honours List in 2019 for services to the food industry. In July 2021, she was also selected to join the UK’s newly formed Hospitality Council, a team of leading industry experts assembled to deliver the government’s Hospitality Strategy to help hospitality firms to re-open, recover and become more resilient following the Covid pandemic.
Katona is also now a published author (her books include Pimp My Rice and The Spice Tree, while her new tome The Curry Bible will publish in June), TV presenter, and founder of the Mowgli Trust charity, which donates more than £500,000 to local and world charities every year.
She’s a very busy lady, therefore, but still finds plenty of time to ponder the travails of the UK foodservice sector. “It’s a really difficult time in hospitality. It’s merciless. You’re constantly at it,” she says.
Yet, Katona has always had a keen eye for spotting opportunity. “When I first thought about building a restaurant, I looked for a gap in the market. You see what is absent in the market and whether your passions and skills can uniquely fill it,” she says.
Back in 2014, what was missing, she felt, was a restaurant that could successfully replicate “the way that Indians ate at home – which is actually a really healthy, light, virtuosic, ‘zingy’ way of eating. That is why I built Mowgli into that gap,” she says.
The premise of Mowgli was the food had to have the same vibe as when served in an Indian home: to be utterly addictive. “That’s the bottom line,” she says. “These flavors are good for you. You feel healthier having eaten it, that’s the secret. And, thank God, Liverpool honored that and we grew from there. We became the first National Indian chain, which is ridiculous because Indian food first came to the UK in the 1700s.”
The oxygen of feedback
The chain has 33,000 people visiting its 26 locations across the country every week. “If you’re a founder, you never have a day off,” laughs Katona. And that includes manning the chain’s social media channels, alongside her daughter, where they hungrily gauge feedback from customers on their restaurant experiences, as well as making suggestions for new dishes.
“I live and breathe that social media. All that feedback, I see it – you can’t bury your head in the sand. Very often I throw things out to the public to say, ‘Look, I’m thinking of bringing this dish in. What do you think of this?’ For instance, I had a Kati [omelet] roll on the menu and it just didn’t sell. But it’s delicious. So, I asked social media and it responded saying, ‘Nobody in England is going to order an omelet in an Indian restaurant.’ So, I changed its name and we increased the sales. You’ve got to listen to the audience. Customer feedback is your absolute oxygen. You have to be humble to what they want.”
Another passion of Katona’s is ensuring that Mowgli gives back – supporting various causes such as cancer charities, children’s hospices and many others, via The Mowgli Trust. And it empowers its employees to take charge of that. “Every Mowgli has a house charity, and there is always someone in each restaurant dedicated to finding ways internally of raising money for it. So, when that person goes to a table and drops the bill off, they can talk to customers about what that charity does, and bring it alive. Each one of them becomes an advocate.”
Walking tall
Katona’s guiding philosophy is that these employees will go on to build “even better businesses than me, and they will have charitable giving at the heart of what they do,” she says. “That is the aim of the Mowgli Trust, to enrich lives in the cities we go to, starting with our own people. They are raising money for something that is life-changing. It makes people walk taller.”
Liverpool, she believes, is a city that truly embraces this. “Liverpool has the most uninhibited, open-hearted people. They’re from immigrant stock, so they work hard to make others feel at home in their city. That’s the genesis of it. They are extremely broad-minded,” she says.
Katona “can’t wait” to get to the FCSI EAME Conference and “share a room with people” in “one of the most beleaguered industries,” she says. “That’s an absolute privilege. It’s a wartime mentality in hospitality right now, but as entrepreneurs that is when we are at our best – when we are firefighting, thinking: ‘How do we fix this?’ We are, intrinsically, honestly, optimistic people, a glass-half-full people, and that is the attitude that will get us out of this recession and keep the economy going. That’s the attitude that creates jobs, social capital, and keeps the lights on in the high streets – making our cities places people want to live in. That’s what the food industry does. There’s nothing more invigorating than that.”
Michael Jones
