Sabrina Ghayour, the accidental chef

Her love affair with food began when she was just 6 years old. Inspired to recreate some of the dishes she had seen on television by celebrated chefs Ken Hom and Madhur Jaffrey, Sabrina Ghayour pored over cookbooks searching for recipes to try out in the family kitchen.

“The first dish I ever created was actually a Cantonese dish of wonton soup! Ever since I was given my first cookbook, I’ve just loved cooking, and reading cookbooks repeatedly from cover to cover. I can’t tell you what it is about them but I guess they are a window into other cultures, other people’s kitchens and weird and wonderful ingredients from around the world,” Ghayour said.

Born in Tehran, Ghayour moved to London in 1979 at the beginning of the Iranian revolution. Her parents separated around the same time — her father moved to Los Angeles with his new wife, while Ghayour, her mother and grandmother settled in west London.

“They don’t cook, so when I started pottering about in the kitchen, my grandmother would always say: ‘Darling girl, why do you want to cook? Why don’t we just buy a readymade meal and save you all the hassle?’ It always made me laugh — she saw cooking as a chore and never knew why I loved it so much,” the 38-year-old said laughingly.

Even as her passion and culinary repertoire grew, Ghayour wouldn’t have the opportunity to capitalise on her skills until, after working in events and marketing for restaurateurs for 15 years, she was made redundant in 2011.

“It was around that time that Thomas Keller was doing his £250 [Dh1,550]-a-head pop-up version of The French Laundry in Harrods. I was hoping to go, it was out of my price range, so I joked on Twitter that I’d do my own version, called The French Laundrette, for £2.50 [Dh15] per person instead,” Ghayour said.

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Sabrina Ghayour, the accidental chef