When Nicola Kagoro returned to Zimbabwe after a five-year stint as executive chef at one of Cape Town’s premier vegan restaurants, her vision had been to take what she had learned about affordable plant-based food and bring it home to Harare.
“Our dinners were six-course vegan meals with an international vegan chef: me,” she says. However, she soon had a bruising realisation: back in 2016, when she was first setting up, local people simply had no interest in buying what she was selling.
After a while, however, attracting people to Kagoro’s table became less of a struggle. Her reputation from Cape Town reached the Zimbabwean capital and veganism, or at least plant-based food, became almost trendy. “[The dinners] went from $1 to me charging close to US$60 [£50] to have a seat at the table,” she says.