The restaurant staffed solely by people who've experienced homelessness

Under a Michelin-starred chef, Home Kitchen is serving up quality food alongside a transformative opportunity for a marginalised group

Under a Michelin-starred chef, Home Kitchen is serving up quality food alongside a transformative opportunity for a marginalised group

It’s 4pm on a Friday, and the staff at Home Kitchen , north London’s buzziest new restaurant, are prepping for another busy evening’s service. Front of house workers are scuttling around polishing silverware and, in the kitchens downstairs, ingredients are being sliced and diced for a busy night ahead. The air is thick with the scent of sizzling meat and punctuated by the clinking of cutlery and the chatter of reservations being taken over the phone.

Watching the glowing tableau, you’d assume Home Kitchen to be a fine dining establishment like any other. Once the home of long-standing institution Odette’s, the Primrose Hill eatery certainly has the plush interiors and expertly curated seasonal menu to compete with London’s best.

But there’s more to Home Kitchen than meets the eye – or tickles the taste buds. Not only is the restaurant run not-for-profit, but nearly all of the staff members have experienced homelessness: a first of its kind in the fine-dining industry. The project is run by a five-strong team, which includes two-time Michelin-starred chef Adam Simmonds and Soup Kitchen London director Alex Brown. Home Kitchen partnered with homelessness charity Crisis and social enterprise Beam to fill eight kitchen and eight front of house roles, when they opened their restaurant in autumn 2024. Other partners include the Beyond Food Foundation, the Only A Pavement Away charity and fellow charity, The Passage.

Funded by a £500,000 crowdfunding drive and social investment loans, Home Kitchen provides staff with a comprehensive package that’s designed to help them avoid returning to homelessness. The 16 staffers are employed on full-time contracts, paid at London Living Wage, have their travel cards covered for zones one and two, and receive catering qualifications in addition to in-house training.

Those heading up Home Kitchen make it clear that they don’t require their staff to talk to journalists like me. Those who choose to, however, have moving stories to share. Popping out of the kitchen to speak to me is French-Algerian chef Mimi, who moved to the UK when she was eight and who is now Home Kitchen’s pastry chef. She’s the first to admit that she was sceptical when her Jobcentre worker told her about the position. “I was like: ‘They’re not gonna accept me, I don’t have experience,’” she remembers. It seemed too good to be true.

Mimi did have experience: just not in the world of croissant lamination and ornate lemon tarts. Back home in Algeria, her mum made the wedding cakes for her community, and Mimi watched her imbue every bake with love and care. Unfortunately, life seemed designed to bat Mimi down. Her voice drops to an almost-whisper as she describes how she left her family home after struggling with depression and stress. She found herself becoming one of London’s forgotten homeless, a population that was recently estimated to have reached 183,000 people.

In the end, a friend took Mimi in, and she met and married her husband, whose family she now lives with. But the care work she was picking up sporadically dried out when Covid hit. When the Home Kitchen offer came, Mimi just “didn’t believe it” she remembers. “Since then, I just fell in love with the place. We’re like a little family here … I really enjoy waking up in the morning, knowing that I’m coming to work: I’m going to see my second family.”

Mimi was trained in the intricacies of her “technically focused” pastry chef role over three weeks, led by head chef Toby Lever. The wider staff base, meanwhile, were funded to qualify on the Beyond Food Foundation’s Fresh Life course before coming to Home Kitchen, to continue their professional development through in-work training.

The main challenge for the eight waiting staff has simply been getting to grips with fine-dining service. “There’s a lot to learn – it takes even trained people a long time to get used to that,” explained Zak Jones, an experienced restaurateur who has been appointed by Home Kitchen’s founders to oversee the day-to-day restaurant operations.

For kitchen porter Genet, Home Kitchen marked her first job in London. When she and her husband moved to the UK from Eritrea, they went straight into Crisis’s care, spending eight months in a hostel before being given housing association accommodation. English isn’t Genet’s first language, and she tells me her initial job searches had been fruitless. “We don’t have home before, me and my husband [were] homeless,” she says. “I will try, but still, I cannot find any job. But Crisis, I will ask. I say: ‘Any job.’”