London-based Maltese chef Nicole Pisani has been named as one of Britain’s 50 most inspirational individuals for providing vulnerable children and their families with healthy meals throughout the coronavirus pandemic.

The 39-year-old, who co-funded UK school meals charity Chefs in Schools two years ago, featured in The Independent’s Happy List 2020: Heroes in a Crisis that celebrates 50 people doing remarkable things in response to the pandemic.

“It’s nice to see that our work is being appreciated. Our team has been working harder than ever before,” Pisani said.

“This all started when we set up the charity Chefs in Schools to change the perception of school food. Then COVID happened. We didn’t want all our work to go to waste... we wanted to find a way to save the charity.”

Pisani was chosen by a panel because of her work through Chefs in Schools, which pairs restaurant-quality chefs with schools to teach children about cooking and help introduce healthier menus.

At the start of the crisis, when children entitled to free school meals were going hungry, she switched the charity’s model to make sure the UK’s most vulnerable kept being fed.

“We wanted to continue offering food to these families and we are now providing them with a hamper a week containing produce and prepared meals made from food that would have otherwise ended up in the landfill,” she says.

The charity is working with food-sharing and surplus-food charities and initiatives. Meals are prepared in school kitchen ‘hubs’ and restaurant kitchens by chefs and other volunteers. They are currently distributing about 800 hampers a week in London that will soon increase by 400. But this is not just a coronavirus-forced stop-gap initiative for Pisani and her team.

We wanted to find a way to save the charity

“This summer we are busier than ever. We want to take this beyond London and beyond COVID to address what is known as holiday hunger – when vulnerable families struggle even more during holidays as they have to provide two meals rather than one,” Pisani notes.

Pisani made the UK headlines in 2015 when she left her position as head chef at the esteemed Nopi restaurant in Soho to prepare lunch for 500 children at the Gayhurst community school in Hackney.

“Originally, I selfishly wanted to leave the restaurant industry, and this was a good opportunity. But now, I could not ask for a more rewarding job – where I wake up every day and feel like I’m not working and that I am paying it forward.

“The older I grow, the more I need this type of fulfillment,” she says.

In an interview with Times of Malta back in 2015, Pisani recounted how she first started working in the food business in London aged 19.

One day her boss asked her to replace somebody who failed to show up for work and it was the first time she felt she had “entered the zone”.

She returned to Malta and joined the Institute for Tourism Studies, earning a placement at London’s Hilton. After that she escaped for a year to Sydney where she became besotted by the fresh produce available.

She returned to Malta at 21 and took over Snoopy’s, her father’s restaurant. Those were the years when the budding chef was given free rein to experiment and present fancy dishes to her patrons.

In 2008, she had a near-fatal car accident after a long night at work and those five days in ITU, recovering from severe head injuries, were a turning point.

A year later she closed Snoopy’s and set off to the UK, eventually landing a job as head chef at Nopi.

After nearly three years, she moved on to Gayhurst community school in Hackney.

The offer came in the form of a tweet by Henry Dimbleby, the co-founder of the fast food restaurant chain Leon and architect of the UK’s School Food Plan that works to improve the standard of food served in schools.

Her work in Hackney became the model for Chefs in Schools and the charity now works to help other schools completely transform the standards of school food and food education.

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