From home cooking Chef David Asante

From home-cooking to catering to the stars

Chef David Asante on bringing the food of his ancestors to the mainstream

IT WAS the rich flavours and continental spices of traditional African food that David Asante's remembers as shaping his early childhood and his love of cooking.

Growing up in south London, he was surrounded by four sisters and his mom, who all gathered in the family kitchen and cooked together.

However, it was seeing his dad - a proud Nigerian and family man - in the kitchen that stayed with him. "I must have been seven or eight at the time, and my dad used to cook Sunday breakfast," recalls David. "We all know that mom cooks in the house, she's the matriarch, she does all the food. But, when dad used to cook...wow, it was incredible. I was the only boy around all my sisters, so when I saw my dad cooking I thought it was amazing, so I said I want to do that too. I was a daddy's boy as well. "I just took a shine to it, I would always comeback to it and I thought I like this; this is something I can do."

At 23, David decided to make the first step into being taken seriously as a budding chef: he cooked for his family and friends.

He organised a barbecue and invited his lovedones to try out his food, giving them the option to rate his food from one to five in a questionnaire.

"One was meant to to be rubbish and five was exceptional," says David. "It was great feedback. There were a lot of fours and fives so I asked myself 'where can I go with this?'"

A young David tried his hand at local and private events, but it was through a friend who owned a couple of restaurants that gave him his first professional break.

David began as sous chef in a Hampstead, London in 2009 before moving to his next opportunity a year later in Islington. He worked his way from sous chef to chef de partie to executive chef.

Despite his early success, David doesn't forget the "roundabouts and

“The gusto and the energy behind that movement was incredible"

From home-cooking to catering to the stars

swings" and the "stuff that just didn't work" on his path. But a midst that, he was behind the launch of catering company in 2008 but it wouldn't be until another four years later that he decided to work himself.

King's Kitchen found a home in corporate London, bringing African, Caribbean and modern European flavours to a diverse and bustling city, while catering to some of the country's - and even the world's - biggest corporation giants. "We did everything from Tesco, Uber to Lloyds and Apple. We had a good stretch," says David.

David's company, along with thousands of others, succumbed to the Covid-19 pandemic last year.

With the catering industry "still struggling and at a standstill," the chef turned his talents elsewhere.

He returned to his brief stints in private cheffing during his days as business-owner, and saw himself catering to some of the biggest names in UK entertainment. "One of them was Idris Elba," he recalls. "He then went on to ask me to cater at his wedding in Morocco in 2019. That was the highlight of my career.

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