Halfway between Liverpool Street and Shoreditch High Street, there is a blue facade with large windows and yellow lettering. Enter Sohaila and you’ll be in two spaces at once. Downstairs, a cosy wine bar showcasing some of the most inventive winemakers from around the Mediterranean, with a heavy focus on Lebanese wines; upstairs, a restaurant taking local British produce and transforming them through a Lebanese lens. Sohaila is the business arm of Fat Macy’s, a charity organisation that helps train homeless Londoners in the kitchen to break the cycle.
We sat down with Nathalie Moukarzel, co-founder of Sohaila to chat about the work Fat Macy’s is doing, Lebanese cooking with British ingredients and their unique wine selection.
Tristan Benhamou: You started Sohaila four and a half years ago, can you tell us about how it came to be?
Nathalie Moukarzel: Yeah, absolutely. We are a social enterprise, so we are a charity and a business that are alongside each other. We have been going now for 10 years with Fat Macy’s.
We were running a catering company beforehand and running our training programme through the catering company. And we really wanted a permanent space so that we could do more succinct clear training. And that’s why we’re here.
TB: So what is Fat Macy’s?
NM: It consists of a training programme, which is a 200 hour milestone programme. We work with people who are experiencing homelessness and train them in the kitchen, as chef.
For every hour someone trains with us, the business puts money or donates money over into the charity. When someone finishes their programme, they can apply for a grant, and move and use that money to move from a hostel and into their own home, essentially.
That’s why we exist. It’s very long winded and complicated, sounding, but it’s not. And we have to have a business element to make money to pay for the training and the donations.
So the catering company was doing that, and now we have Sohaila, which sits alongside it. Fat Macy’s is called Fat Macy’s because a lot of our trainees live in the YMCA. And one of the trainees living there decided that they wanted to call it Fat Macy’s, because Macy’s is an anagram of YMCA, and they said that when you live there, you get fat, because you only eat meat and potatoes.
So we rolled with it, and 10 years later, we realised that maybe it’s not quite on brand, but, you know, life is life an we are where we are.
TB: Do you hire the people who have completed the program?
NM: So we do have some people, some graduates that have come to work with us, and that which is absolutely wonderful. I think for us, the main goal is that people actually move on into other hospitality environments because if we’ve trained them to a place where they’re just good enough to go anywhere, then really we’ve done our job.
TB: Can you tell us more about Sohaila, about the last four years?
NM: The food that we do is Lebanese-inspired. My heritage is Lebanese, and it’s the food that we were training and teaching to our trainees in the hostels initially.
When we opened up the restaurant, we decided to call it Sohaila, because that is a Lebanese name. It’s my grandmother’s name, and we felt like it would allow for people to better understand the sort of food that we were doing.
The business, having a restaurant, is a wonderful and very silly thing to do.
And I think it has been challenging, it will continue to be a challenge. but quite beautifully, in many ways. And I think that the team has adapted and changed so much over the past 4 years, it’s just been kind of wicked to see what we can do.
TB: What was your background before starting Fat Macy’s and later Sohaila?
NM: I was working as a chef, so I worked in a few different restaurants. I met my business partner, Meg, while she was working for a charity, and I was working in a restaurant, and she had the concept for the training programme, and that’s how it all came together.
TB: How does the produce your greengrocers (All Greens) offers affect the seasonal changes in the menu?
NM: The menu changes quite a lot. It’s a lovely, moving menu, and I think the team do a really incredible job of finding out what’s sustainable, what’s seasonal, what’s going on, and adapting some quite traditional recipes to suit that, and make them a little bit more modern or eclectic. And it’s very exciting. It’s really lovely.
TB: Can you tell us some of your favourite items on the menu?
NM: Oh, that’s a tough one. I know it sounds very trite to do the whole, ‘I love it all’. But it’s all pretty great.
The octopus is a top hit at the moment. I wasn’t here when it first came on the menu, and I tried it when I came back, and I just think that the team had just done an incredible job with making it just absolutely delicious, but the other thing next to it is, of course, the leeks. And the leeks we get from All Greens, and they are a real special number. There’s lots of just good, joyous, happy times with them.
Come and eat the leeks.
