In Conversation With Trevor: Zimbabwe chef gets Amazon Prime TV deal

By In Conversation With Trevor | Jul. 28, 2024

Zimbabwean chef Nicola Kagoro (left) In Conversation With Trevor Ncube recently

Zimbabwean chef Nicola Kagoro has revealed that she will be collaborating with celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay to showcase her vegan recipes on Amazon Prime TV next year.

Kagoro (NC), who is also known as Chef Cola, broke the news on the platform In Conversation with Trevor hosted by Alpha Media Holdings chairman Trevor Ncube (TN).

She spoke about her rise to stardom and how she became a vegan chef.

Below are extracts from the interview.

TN: Today I'm in conversation with Nicola Kagoro otherwise known as Chef Cola. Chef Cola welcome to In Conversation With Trevor.

NK: Thank you. It’s an honour to be here.

TN: I'm so delighted to have you here.

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I have been watching you on social media and to have the opportunity to sit with you and to hear your story is absolutely amazing.

So Chef Nicola, I gather you have been at Great Zimbabwe, what's been happening there?

NK: Well, I was in Great Zimbabwe doing a food tour.

So there is a young gentleman, who comes from Sweden, who invited me out to tour the whole of Great Zimbabwe, especially in the rural community.

So we were going to schools, going to churches, going to hotels and airbnbs and just teaching people how to cook affordable tasty vegan food on the budget.

And when I say on a budget, it's not like something cheap. It's what you can afford whatever value of money that you want to use on any recipe.

TN: So which kind of meals were you teaching people around Great Zimbabwe?

NK: So, I was teaching them meals that they already have in their hotels, kind of like giving them some more flavour and then also introducing them to new meals and then one thing that I enjoy doing is using the indigenous ingredients that they have in their local community.

So for example, there are a lot of avocados and fruits in those areas, so working with those types of ingredients, it's nothing, it's not a surprise to them.

TN: Wow! So you are using ingredients that are available within the local communities to make them taste food as it were, and how did this Swedish young person find you?

NK: Good question. It was because of Forbes Botswana. I was invited by Forbes to speak and he was just interested that okay ‘you are speaking on Forbes and you are a vegan chef and you are actually the first person that Forbes has invited to do a live cooking demo.’

So he signed up for my cooking class and he was quite impressed with what I do and that's how I got the job.

TN: The cooking class was that virtual, was that physical with him?

NK: No, the cooking class was a part of the Forbes summit and after I did my talk, the first 60 to 100 people who signed on basically were allowed to come and I held a private cooking class for Forbes.

So he was one of the first people to sign up and the rest is history.

TN: Where was this Forbes gathering?

NK: It was in Botswana this year.

TN: Talk to me about it.

NK: Let me go back to my relationship with Forbes. It started when I was 31.

Forbes has this 30 on the 30 list and unfortunately I was 31 at the time and I wasn't able to get onto the list.

So what they did was that they gave me a two to three page spread in that magazine issue at the time and then I thought that was just that and I didn't realise that they were watching me over the years.

So fast forward about three years, they invited me to become a speaker on the Forbes summit and one of the highlights was showcasing African vegan on a budget, how to run a business in Africa that's sustainable and also using things such as social media to build your brand.

So that's how the relationships with Forbes Africa started.

TN: Has it been a profitable event, I mean the relationship with Forbes Africa?

NK: It's been profitable in the sense that, one networking, I have gained a lot of good connections.

Two, I’m learning a lot from other people who come and visit the summit and being inspired to grow my business a little bit better because I realised how minimal my business was compared to someone like Nick Cannon who is a multi millionaire and he was explaining how he became a millionaire for the first time at the age of 21.

So it was very beneficial in a sense that I took away lessons that I'm going to carry on throughout my journey.

TN: The question that I have in my mind is why vegan. Why vegan?

NK: It was God's grace. I studied Hospitality in Cape Town and it was a three-year programme and I always knew that hospitality management I attended this Culinary Academy called (Capsicum) and at that time, it wasn't officially registered as a school that could take International students.

I had to leave South Africa and then come back and register at a school that has a license that would allow me to get a student visa.

So I went to the International Hotel school and at that time being a chef wasn't something that was really popular.

It was like ‘you are going to go study to be a cook, we don't want to cook, go study hotel management.’ That was my mom.

So I went into hotel management for three years and one of the conditions for me to graduate was that I needed to find my own job for the last six months of my course in any hotel.

And in any department, in a hotel, a kitchen happens to be a department in a hotel.

So I got a job at this place called Plant, a small Café, and when I applied for the interview I had no idea what veganism was and I just walked in and they said okay make us a dish.

I created the most horrible dish I have probably ever cooked in my life and they just liked my personality and they are like ‘we are going to give you a shot.’

So at that time, Plant was a cafe and the lady was growing towards it becoming a restaurant and it was South Africa's top leading traditional vegan restaurant.

So when she trained me for about eight months, I then became the executive chef for Plant for about five years.

TN: So you fail in your first attempt to cook a vegan meal? Talk to me about that. What was the experience like? Were you in tears?

NK: Well, they were very friendly about it, like you know, when your child makes you like a very horrible Mother's Day breakfast and you still have to like eat it and be like this is yummy.

That was the reaction, but then they saw potential because I had culinary experience, so they knew that I had potential but…

TN: So the way they reacted to your failure, was it actually positive?

NK: I like to say they allowed me to fail and they started training me.

So at first, I would get in there, obviously I wasn't the head chef from the beginning, so at first they will be like ‘okay why don't you wash dishes clean and just study the kitchen and the reason why we are doing this is that you know where everything goes and stays which is very important.’

So once in a while, I was doing that.

I will be watching the chef cook this, do that when an order came in and they realised that I actually have this urge to want to learn and actually be in the forefront and they started teaching me how to become a vegan chef and by the time we moved from becoming a cafe to a restaurant, I was already equipped to become the head chef and the reason why I got that job as the head chef once again its God's grace.

The lady who was training me, she actually had to go to China to do an undercover documentary about a dog meat festival that the Chinese do and she actually ended up just staying there.

She told the owner to say ‘I believe that Chef Cola can actually be the head chef and let's give her a shot.’

And that's how I got that job. It literally fell into my laps.

TN: So cooking vegan meals falls in your lap, and you take it on, are you now enjoying it, have you fully embraced it? Are you a vegan yourself?

NK: So when I did the stint and for five years I then came back to Zim and I realised that I want to continue cooking vegan food because it's actually something that I enjoy.

So that's when I started African vegan on a budget and it is something that I enjoy and I'm continuing to do.

TN: What do you enjoy about cooking vegan meals?

NK: A lot of people think that it's for the love of animals, but yes a love of animals but then I love cooking vegan meals because, one, we actually are not eating meat every single day in our diet.

So I like to challenge myself showing people that we can actually have nutritional meals and diets that are not consumed with meat and meat doesn't equal wealth.

Then also seeing that when I started in 2011 veganism was considered something to be more of like a white people thing and more of if you don't have money.

It’s more for health reasons especially for people of colour showing us that this is actually a healthier lifestyle.

TN: Nicola Kagoro otherwise known as Chef Cola, we have got a world exclusive. Shall we share with the world what this world exclusive is, this good stuff that's happened?

NK: Okay, so I am in collaboration with Amazon Prime TV and I'm going to be collaborating with Gordon and Tilly Ramsay to do a few episodes on basically veganism.

So this is something that's kind of like a 360 for me because my journey with TV started off on ZBC with a show called Battle of the chefs and, with that show, it was literally the executive producer looked for 250 people to apply professional and non-professional chefs and then out of the 250 people 15 were chosen to actually feature on TV and then out of those 15 people I came out of the season number nine.

For season three, I'd like to say I didn't win the season, but I won the season because Battle of the Chefs is one of the platforms that actually propelled me to become a celebrity chef and an influencer so now we have Gordon Ramsey so it's crazy.

TN: When is the Gordon Ramsey Amazon Prime?

NK: The feature is starting in 2025.

TN: So you officially have the exclusive. Talk to me about what that means to you?

NK: It was unbelievable. It’s something that it feel it still feels like a dream because when you are a chef, one of the things that you always hear is like Gordon Ramsay, Oliver James or all of these great chefs and to now have them look at you and want to work with your recipes that are vegan and African is inspiring, it's a blessing and it's an honourr.

I still actually can't believe it.

I'm still pinching myself and it just shows me that something bigger is yet to come.

What I would love to see is for us to have our own Zimbabwe inspired show on such a platform that's vegan yes.

TN: How did they find you?

NK: Well just like with most of the things that have happened to me in life I have been head- haunted.

So they literally reached out to me last year around October. I got an email and I actually thought that this was too good to be true and they kept on insisting.

So we set up a Zoom meeting and I was just like oh wow this is actually a reality.

So this has been in the making for about eight months and they are like, okay we see you, we have interviewed you, we like your style and we will get back to you because this is a global casting.

So I was chosen from chefs around the world, who produced amazing recipes and amazing things and its God's grace honestly.