About

I was born in Durban South Africa in 1975, while my mother was there for work, she then took me back to Zimbabwe (Rhodesia at the time) where she was from. As a single mother, she worked very hard to support me and we had a house lady that lived on the premises with her family who basically brought me up while my mother was at work. I would be on her back with a blanket while she cleaned and cooked.

As I got older I used to spend a great deal of time with her and her family and eating supper with them. I used to bake and cook from an early age and cooking on an open fire certainly started to become part of my DNA. We moved to Port Alfred, South Africa in 1989 and it was here that I started to experience coastal life in a small town. I really had a great childhood. Having the freedom to spend so much time in the bush taught me all about fire. I started to cook with whatever ingredients were available and it was due to this that I have developed the skill to make something out of thin air.

In 1997 I moved to the UK where I really started to get into my stride as a cook, I had money and access to any ingredient. My rooftop braais (BBQs) became legendary and I used to love cooking for large groups of friends, I moved back to Port Alfred in 2006 and had a Backpackers, restaurant and bar, a large nightclub and a bar with a theatre in it as well as a construction business to name a few. I moved up to Salt Rock in Kwazulu Natal in 2014 and spent a great deal of time cooking and moving into technical cooks as well as perfecting my fire skills. Then times in South Africa became increasingly more violent and crime ridden, so I moved back to the UK in 2018.

I cooked more and more, moved to the Cayman islands during Covid and came back to mud island (UK) in 2021. My social life at this stage was just cooking for people, as much as I could. In 2022 a friend lent me his Kamado Joe Junior and I started to learn about BBQ, Smoking and Low ‘n Slow cooking. The bug bit and it was really great to start a new and different journey. In 2023 that friend and his partner asked if I could manage and instruct at their BBQ school, I accepted and this was a really enjoyable time in my life. Being able to guide people and show them how to pivot when things go wrong was a truly amazing experience. I bought my own Kamado Joe Classic to and decided to start a YouTube channel to hopefully provide a CV to one day find a way to achieve my dream which is to open up a South African BBQ restaurant somewhere nice and sunny like Spain. I look forward to progressing, learning and engaging with people and maybe making some money from eCommerce to fund my dream.