Who made all the pies?

From South Africa via Disney World to the pie room in Holborn Dining Room, Nokx Majozi brings a wealth of experience and culinary influences to her cooking. Clare Considine met Nokx to track her journey and discuss her plans to bring South African cuisine to the world.

“That place will always be in my heart! It opened doors that I never thought possible. I’m so grateful,” says Nokx Majozi, Head Pie Maker and Sous-Chef at Holborn Dining Room in Rosewood, London, misty-eyed.

The place in question? Animal Kingdom at Disney World, Florida. In 1998, Disney built a new section of the park and wanted a restaurant that would represent the different regions of Africa. At 21, Majozi was not long out of culinary school but was recruited to represent her country, South Africa.

Amongst animatronic lions and tigers, Majozi introduced the food she grew up with – dishes like a vibrant bean stew, Chaka Laka, or Bobotie, a Moussaka-adjacent home favourite – to wide-eyed joy-seekers from across the globe who’d had their fill of pizza and chips. “It was a moment of being proud,” she beams. “You need to be proud of who you are and where you come from”.

There’s no doubt that Majozi takes every opportunity to share the magic of her roots. Her Instagram brims with hefty clues to her heritage. From within the confines of a terribly British pie-making brief, she creates mini works of art that bridge her motherland with rainy London. There are Peri Peri Scotch eggs, a traditional South African milk tart called melktert and a dinky but stunningly intricate one-person pie, covered in a weave pattern and topped with a delicate ring to replicate traditional African baskets.

When we meet, we sit on high stools at a large, thick marble table that takes up the majority of the space in the Holborn Dining Room’s fabled pie room. The air feels still as Majozi settles, winding down from the lunch shift. The walls are a blanket of antique brass pie moulds in the small workshop tucked away at the end of the bustling main dining room. An old wooden bookshelf heaves with individual handmade pies, each a masterpiece that feels at once thoroughly modern and at the same time like a mini anachronism. Fittingly, they wouldn’t look out of place in a Disney feast scene. I half expect to have my chair pulled out by a talking candelabra. “I love this room,” Majozi sighs.

The pie room is, unquestionably, Majozi’s castle. Her job title of Head Pie Maker sounds like it could have been plucked straight from a Roald Dahl book, but it is her daily reality. There are times, she explains, when she still works in the Holborn’s main dining room, but she is often ensconced in this cavern of calm. Here, windows open out to the street so passers-by can watch Majozi and her female-heavy team beavering away at their pies, bona fide craftspeople.

The pie room was, in fact, the brainchild of Majozi’s boss, Calum Franklin. When the restaurant opened in 2014, he found a 100-year-old pie tin in the basement, kick-starting a nerdish zeal to dig deep into Britain’s pie heritage. Majozi had joined the team as the restaurant opened, and she was instantly drawn to the pie-making side of operations. “I remember I did this French pie, and I thought, ‘this is me,’” Majozi describes. “I had a moment to myself. I could take my time, I could see how I could make it even better. Those were all of the things that I needed at that time.” Four years later, Majozi was crowned Pie Queen.

Growing up in rural South Africa, Majozi didn’t see people doing what she does now. “There was an advert in the newspaper looking for a chef, and I was wondering, what’s a chef?!” she laughs.

Majozi is the second of five siblings. “My full name - Nokuthula - means Peaceful,” she explains. “I was very quiet and calm. A little bit shy.” So she grew up finding creative ways to garner her parents’ attention. Her father had a port job that often took him away from home. But he would always return bearing fish from the harbour and a few free days in which to cook it. Majozi quickly learnt that the best place to spend time with him was in the kitchen. She loved to watch him experiment.

So it should have been no surprise to the family when Majozi announced that she was ditching her plans to study nutrition at university to go to chef school. But they were not happy. “They were worried about their child,” she says. “I get it. How could they tell everyone that I was learning how to cook?! I’m a female – I was supposed to know how to do that anyway!”

But the newspaper advert had presented a possibility that Majozi had not thought open to her. “It said ‘be a chef, travel the world,’” she recalls. “So that was something I instantly knew I wanted to do”. Plus, she was excited to find out that she could actually cook as a career: “There was no role model at that time. So I thought, ‘I’m going to be doing something so unique. I’m going to be the first one.’”

When Majozi’s father refused to pay her fees for culinary school, she headed off there anyway. By the end of the first term, she’d managed to get a bursary for her first year. “Second year, I got another, third year another one. So all my fees were paid,” she laughs. “My dad was like ‘wow!’”

Once Majozi completed her studies, she was offered a job at a hotel in Miami. She would spend her off time visiting different parts of the country, including California, Chicago and New York. She was particularly fond of San Francisco because it reminded her of Cape Town. She’d sneak away for alone time with the culinary greats in each place she visited as her friends headed off to Burger King. “I started to enjoy going solo to eat,” she says, describing, eyes closed, the first time she tried Bouillabaisse in a stuffy French restaurant in the Florida Keys.

From Miami, Majozi was head-hunted to the Disney position. It was then, she explains that her family finally understood the master plan. “They were so proud,” she beams. “We lived in the countryside, and everyone’s eyes were opened. I was the first one in the community who had ever gone abroad. Whenever I go back now, I’m kind of a big thing. Everyone was putting me down, but I’ve become something very powerful and inspiring to the community”.

Majozi moved to London 16 years ago and has spent more than half of that time at Rosewood. Here, amongst the suet and bronze, she has found a spiritual home. So, if and when she leaves, it will be to one place: “I will go home,” she says decisively.

Citing the likes of Clare Smyth and Asma Khan, she talks about the importance of visibility; of female role models. She wants to open a cooking school; to show a new generation of young South African women that cooking is a real job that opens up a world of possibilities, magic and fairytales.

“I want to bring what I learnt from the world to South Africa,” she says, jumping down from her stool to get set up for the evening shift. “I want to bring our South African food to the world.”