Andi Oliver bowls into her restaurant, a billowy whirl of kaftan and cackles. Just as she is about to greet me, she pauses. “What is this music?” she cries, throwing her head skywards. “Turn it off, purrrrrlease.”
Oliver strikes me as a woman you don’t mess with. “They’re playing some crap, aren’t they? You don’t want to sit here with some rave track on, do you? You want a bit of Dinah Washington, something that’s going to sex up the air.” She rolls her shoulders before producing another throaty roar.
It’s 9am on a Friday, but the chef, TV presenter and former singer is operating at full tilt. It’s 15 minutes before she pushes her glasses up onto her forehead and “settles” at a table with me.
She opened Andi’s in Stoke Newington, northeast London, in April. Small and full of “beautiful things”, it’s a neighbourhood joint where she wants people to feel “at home” and “happy”. The drinks are strong, the menu short, the dishes informed by pretty much every country I can name. “I like food that has come from all over the world. I’m self-taught so I’m not restricted by the, ‘Ooooh, that’s not how they do it’ ethos.”
Oliver has been cooking all her life. She learnt from her parents, aunt and friends’ mums. She held her first dinner party aged 12. In her thirties, she started running professional kitchens, as well as presenting and appearing on BBC radio and TV food shows such as The Kitchen Cabinet. “Cooking, music, acting — for me, they all come from the same place. You have to do it with your soul, or you’ll sound crap.”
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Frank, wacky and oozing fun, she is made for TV (expletives can be taped over), which might be why she is replacing culinary stalwart Prue Leith as a judge on BBC2’s Great British Menu. Though it’s an appointment her detractors have inevitably dismissed as tokenism. “I think they partially went for me because I’m so different from Prue. It’s not tokenism, though, it’s imaginative casting. I know what I’m talking about with food and people. I do think the world we live in should be reflected on our screens. I do tick a lot of boxes, obviously. I’m black, 53 and menopausal.”
She was 20 when she had her daughter, Miquita, also a TV presenter, who had a great job presenting on Channel 4’s T4. But in 2012, aged 27, Miquita filed for bankruptcy, and was set upon by the tabloids. “I’m so proud of her. She’s had some difficult times, but she dealt with it brilliantly,” says Oliver, as Miquita strides into the restaurant and starts cooing lovingly over her mum.
Menopause aside, Oliver says she’s at her happiest. It’s taken a while for her to get here. She grew up in Suffolk, where she felt as if she was the only black girl for 150 miles. All the girls at school wanted to fight her. Did they win? “Of course they didn’t. But I didn’t want to fight,” she says. Her worst memory is of a teacher making her stand at the front as the rest of the class mocked her plaited hair in German. “Adults being racist is unconscionable. It made me tough, but it also made me kind.”
Oliver moved to London and at 17 was in a “post-punk wild jazz band”, Rip Rig + Panic, with her brother and Neneh Cherry, who is still her best friend. “I was a hedonist, I was a musician, I ran things — I used to run Portobello Road.”
The carefree days ended when her older brother died unexpectedly of sickle-cell anaemia. “It fractured me for a good 10 years. I talked about it for a bit and then I didn’t. A bit of me died when he did. Finally, I had a nervous breakdown.”
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She took a few years out, went into therapy and now takes a step back when a crisis bubbles. “I know there’s no point in freaking out now — stuff’s going to happen.” The worst struck in the first week of her restaurant opening, when, packed with customers, the gas failed and no one was served any food for hours. Oliver’s solution? “I just said, ‘Does everyone want gin?’”
Andi likes
Neneh Cherry, tart cocktails and homey restaurants
Andi hates
Bad music, vegans who dislike vegetables and cooking turkey at Christmas
Make-up: Kevin Fortune using Ren SkinCare
