Nokx Majozi’s journey from ‘joke within the community’ in South Africa to successful chef
Rising star Majozi says making a career as a chef was considered an unusual career path – but now she’s seen as an inspiration.
Born and raised in South Africa, chef Nokx Majozi says she was initially viewed as a “joke within the community” for wanting to study cookery and hospitality as this was not familiar to those around her.
However, she pursued her dream and has since worked as a chef across the world, sharing her “joy” for cooking, and wants to help bring the cultures and influences of South African cuisine to kitchens everywhere.
She is now seen as an inspiration within her community back home and has released a new cookbook, The South African Cook Book: Authentic flavour-packed recipes from Cape Town to Durban.
“I always believe my story begins at home,” Majozi tells the Press Association.
“I want to transport people to where I come from, to the beginning, and to inspire the young women or the young chefs in South Africa that, sometimes, the beginning may not be great, but look at me now.
“I want to tell a story that there are so many things that you can go through, but home is always home.”
Majozi, who now lives in London, was inspired to cook by watching her parents in their home kitchen in Durban, located on the on the east coast of South Africa.
She says her mother’s cooking was “traditional”, but her father’s was “more elevated” with influences from other countries, thanks to his overseas connections and food exchanges at the harbour where he worked.
She loved her mother’s dumplings and her father’s fish curry, describing these as some of her parents’ “specialities” growing up.
“When I was having that moment with my dad when he was cooking, I was chopping or doing something to help him, that’s when I realised you can take something so simple and elevate it,” she says.
“That’s how my love of cooking started.”
Majozi soon knew she wanted to make this her career, but she says her family and the local community were not familiar with studying cookery and did not “believe” her at first.
She continued: “I realised I just want to learn. I just want to go to college and learn how to cook – and that’s where the problem started.
“My family didn’t believe, or they didn’t know, that you could spend time in college and learn how to cook, there was nothing like that. They said, ‘No, that’s not a course’.
“Even the community, it was very difficult to explain this to them. I was like a joke within the community, like, ‘You don’t know how to cook’.
“It was like a failure from your parents, that they didn’t teach you how to cook.”
Majozi was determined, however, and she studied at college for three years before working in a four-star Hotel in Durban called Riverside – and this is where she got her name Nokx, short for Nokuthula.
She then moved to the United States after being recruited by Disney to cook South African cuisine at its Florida resort, and she described this opportunity as “amazing”.
“That’s when the community and everyone started to understand and say, ‘Wow, this can get you a job, you can go overseas’, and I was the first one in the community to do this,” she says.
“It was something very rare, especially where I come from, for someone to go overseas for work.”
After moving to the UK in the early 2000s, Majozi says she worked at the InterContinental London Park Hotel and The Pie Room at the Rosewood hotel in London, before recently joining the team at Fallow as the chef in residence.
She was selected as one of Jay Rayner’s Rising Stars in 2022, has appeared on Sunday Brunch and James Martin’s Saturday Morning and has been featured in numerous publications.
Majozi has now released a South African cookbook – something she “always dreamed of making” – and says she loves transporting people to different places through food.
“Our food is very vibrant with colour, it’s got bold flavours – we are not scared to go for it – and it’s very diverse and inspired by different people,” she says.
“I never actually knew until I started to travel and I realised, ‘Oh, this is from Australia, this is German, this is Polish food’… it’s multicultural, South Africa, and the food as well.”
While many of the recipes in the cookbook are traditional and “authentic”, Majozi says she wanted to make them “accessible”, with many of the ingredients available at local supermarkets or through Amazon.
She says each recipe has a story behind it and she believes adding a small “twist” to a recipe – whether incorporating a new ingredient or tweaking an original recipe – can make a “huge difference”.
Two of her favourite meals in the book are bunny chow, a type of street food, and the seven colours meal, which she says “represents togetherness, family and a celebration of food and heritage”.
Speaking about why she loves cooking, she explained: “It’s a joy.
“You can have the same ingredients, but you can do 20 or 60 things with them.
“The beautiful thing is the more you work with different people – especially in London, you have different people of different countries and culture – there’s so much you learn from them.
“We can talk about food any time, with any stranger, and when you’re cooking and people are enjoying your food, for me that is just the best thing ever.
“It puts a smile on my face in a different way.”
For those wanting to cook South African food at home, Majozi advises people to have maize meal (similar to polenta), tomatoes, a chutney such as Mrs. H.S.Balls, rice and a medium curry powder.
She says the salads are a great place to start in the cookbook for beginners, along with the mango chicken wings or the Malva pudding, which is “South Africa’s answer to sticky toffee pudding”.
Sharing her main hope for her cookbook, she adds: “I just want people to be able to cook something that they’ve never tried before.
“Not a lot of people know about South African food, but with this book, it can help people try something new, understand our culture and our food, and how food varies across provinces when visiting.
“Everyone knows about wine, but we can’t forget about the food – pair the wine with some food.”
The South African Cook Book: Authentic flavour-packed recipes from Cape Town to Durban by Nokx Majozi is published in hardback by Bloomsbury Publishing, priced £26. Photography by Yuki Sugiura. Available now