Haringey native Hannah Bentley sits down with Owen’s Café and Deli owner Simon Owen

Simon Owen, a humble and reserved man with disproportionately large hands, owns Owen’s Café and Deli (maybe unsurprisingly) on Alexandra Park Road, which sells organic produce and artisanal coffee.

It’s 6pm on a Friday, the café is closed and I’m sitting with Simon at one of the tables. The café’s logo is a peapod containing five peas (one for each of Simon’s sons). A giant papier mâché version of the logo hangs above us, handmade and designed by his wife Sarah.

Before I went to university I worked at Owen’s. Despite knowing Simon for a while, I realised I knew very little about him and began to make small-talk with my boss. To my surprise, this humble man has an incredibly interesting past. Owen’s is regarded as a local
institution and Simon is considered a pillar of the Muswell Hill community, yet many are unaware of this chef ’s star-studded career.

“I knew pretty early on that I wanted to be a chef,” Simon explains. “My mum cooked all the time, I always helped her in the kitchen, and I thought: ‘That’s what I want to do’. So, as soon as I was 16, I was out the door and into catering college.

“Then I went straight from college into work.”

After building up his credentials at multiple Michelin starred restaurants, Simon began working at Reuters in Fleet Street as head chef. “Reuters was definitely my favourite job. Creatively it was great because I had no limit on my budget so I could cook whatever I wanted.”

For 16 years he cooked for the board of directors and their glittering inner social circle. “We had a lot of important guests – I mean, on the board alone it was Robert Maxwell, Rupert Murdoch, these kinds of press barons.

“The chairman of Reuters at the time was Sir Christopher Hogg and he invited Margaret Thatcher for dinner [… It] was just the two of them and me cooking. I’ve got a letter from number ten thanking me for the dinner – a missed opportunity to poison her though!”

Unfortunately, Simon was made redundant in 2000 and began working 36-hour catering shifts to make ends meet. That is, until he got a call from Jamie Oliver’s personal assistant asking if he would be interested in training cooks and writing recipes for the Naked Chef ’s upcoming Channel 4 show Jamie’s School Dinners.

“I met Jamie in Hampstead at the pub, had a chat and said ‘yeah’.”

He considers the show a career highlight and found it “very rewarding to work with some lovely down-to-earth school cooks and make big improvements with the food”. The project’s success landed Simon and Jamie on a plane, Qatar-bound.

“The whole country is bizarre; the shopping malls were like Disneyland. It was horrible – well, not my cup of tea!”

The two were tasked with investigating Qatar’s obesity, or as Simon puts it a “fatfinding mission”.

“There’s so much desert, they don’t grow anything. Every thing’s imported. They eat a lot of fast food, so they were really high on the obesity list.”

When he returned home, Simon became increasingly disappointed that his local high street had nowhere to buy organic produce, fresh bread or, more importantly, “nice wine… [and] cheese”. So, he thought: “I know what I’ll do – I’ll open a shop of my own and be my own boss.”

And in 2010, that’s exactly what he did. He admits it’s hard running his own business, but with “no-one else to answer to […] it has its rewards as well.”

After years of cooking in “harsh” high-end kitchens where “you’re not allowed to speak”, doing “the same thing every day under intense pressure and scrutiny”, he enjoys the quieter life, serving his North London customers the same thing he served school kids: “fresh, honest food”.

To find out more about Owen’s Café and Deli:
Visit owensfoodstore.com

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