Heart & Parcel - Our Story
Clare and Karolina are two best friends who met in a restaurant in Manchester. They now continue to live and work in Manchester, running their own education and community food project, Heart & Parcel, on the side, running two classes a week in different locations around Manchester. Their small project has grown into a successful enterprise, funding English and cooking classes through catering, supper clubs, markets, and private workshops. So far, over 200 women have come through their doors, cooking a dish together whilst developing their English language skills through sharing stories and making friends along the way.
Every story, encounter and connection has multiple sides to it. Clare and Karolina are continually interested in the different ways in which story-telling can inform and shape the substance of existing relationships and ideas. It is one of the main drivers of Heart & Parcel and has informed Clare and Karolina with the relevant knowledge they need to continue supporting migrant communities in Manchester through food and developing English language skills.
Here, they both contribute their stories of the significance of the restaurant industry, how their friendship blossomed, and how this led to where they are today.
Karolina’s story
My first job in the UK and Manchester was a restaurant job, which is quite typical for migrants – easy to get, flexible, vibrant, good money. I started in a small, family-run Italian trattoria in the suburbs of Manchester. I remember hard work, lots of fun, tears, long hours and good food. For the first time I was trying authentic Italian cuisine, meeting people from around the world and learning restaurant etiquette. I was so new to the business, as well as being new in the country, I didn’t even know what a jug of water meant or why some punters kept ordering half pints instead of getting a pint which would last them for much longer. I was clueless! The restaurant business is lots of fun but can be very cruel as well. Some people exploited the fact that I was inexperienced and new to the country.
After building resilience within this first experience, I moved to the big lively city centre of Manchester and worked in more restaurants. It was a dynamic time. The city centre gives you more opportunities to go out after work to meet many different people and not be restricted to just your restaurant. The job is hard and often exhausting; sometimes you feel like a second-class citizen. But, you have flexibility, freedom, a good social life, free food, often good money and one of the most important things: you find friends for life.
After working in the city centre, I moved back to the suburbs to work for Café Rouge. It was a part-time job because at the time I wanted to slowly walk away from the intensity of restaurant life and focus on my other studies and interests. The UK’s restaurant industry is made up from people around the world. I used to visit them in their home countries and got to know their families, cultures, and the lives they left behind. I met many people during that period – people who are still with me today, some who were important just for a while, housemates, boyfriends, people who I travelled with, who I collaborated with on social work and education projects, who I fell in love with. I met my daughter’s father in the restaurant where we were both working. I found that, as a migrant worker myself, it was more natural and easier to hang out with them. If there were British people, they were always nice but tended to stick with each other, or perhaps it was us migrants doing that? I still don’t really know. But there was one British girl, Clare, who I bonded with straight away. She became one of the most important people in my life. A dear friend, business partner, neighbour and now godmother to my child. I always say we became friends because Clare was born and raised abroad so she was a bit like a foreigner, but the truth is there is so much more to that. The beginning of our friendship saw us going out after work for a drink because even though it’s late and you are physically tired you are still buzzing from a busy night shift. All the places used to close an hour or two after we got there, so we used to spend another few hours on the street continuing conversations that we just didn’t want to end.
I believe it isn’t a coincidence that we met in the restaurant as we both adore food. Food has always been present in our relationship, and its presence has evolved: first working in the hospitality business, eating out, then inviting each other for meals and eventually making dishes together. We both know the best possible presents for us are food related; we have comforted each other on many occasions with heartwarming soups, spicy curries, savoury dumplings, often leaving it on the doorsteps of each other's houses.
This absolute devotion to food and meeting different people from around the world, getting to know them and share our own experiences, encouraged us to start our community education project Heart & Parcel. Everything we learnt there helped us to develop Heart & Parcel to the level it is now. Our fundraising activities require customer service, management, team work, working well under pressure, interpersonal communication, cultural sensitivities and many other skills we wouldn’t have if it weren’t for working in restaurants previously.
Before my daughter Gaja was born, I had a ‘normal’ full time job but still was doing one shift per week in a restaurant, just to feel that atmosphere, that vibe, that freedom. I stopped to have a child but I might come back. This work is like a narcotic. It can make you exhausted but difficult to live without it.
Clare’s story
I had started working at Cafe Rouge in a leafy suburb of Manchester. As it was back then, the UK restaurant industry relied heavily on staff coming in from the EU. The team at Cafe Rouge was Greek, Italian, Slovakian and Polish, with a few British dotted around. I’d recently graduated with an Anthropology degree, which brought me into conversation with Karolina, my incredibly hardworking Polish colleague, and supervisor at the time. I recall some of the first conversations we had, when upon telling her about my newly qualified English language teaching status, she exclaimed quickly in fluent English with a perfect Polish accent ‘could you test my level? My English is so bad’. Our friendship became set with deep discussions of me convincing Karolina her communication skills were absolutely fine. I just couldn’t understand how she felt. I had no experience at the time of what journey she had taken; moving to a new place and having to navigate through a new language. I realised this was the shared sentiment of a lot of migrant workers who came into Manchester. For some reason they were being made to feel their English language skills weren’t good enough, despite communicating at working level.
We spent our days serving this busy establishment, chatting about our lives, nicking food off plates and begging the chefs to add extra items from the menu to our staff meals. We shared a love of appreciating food, in all its glory. We would use our tips to go out for meals and drinks, usually down curry mile where we would order half the menu, washed down with cold crisp lager, talking about our backgrounds in social and community work; Karolina as an interpreter, with a Masters in sociology, myself entering the world of ESOL (government-run English classes), where I volunteered at a local organisation in town.
Our friendship has always been punctuated with food. We use food to start conversations, to share experiences, to show our affection for each other, to say when we are sorry and to thank each other. I remember a night out where we had finished a late shift, gone for a few drinks and snacks in our usual meeting spot, chatted endlessly on the pavement side and had then both cycled our separate ways. When I got home, I had a phone call from a university student who had found Karolina in a bicycle accident on the side of the road. Panicked, I jumped in a taxi and found her, her teeth broken and body bruised, but she was OK. Taking her home in the taxi and putting her to bed, I only thought how lucky it was that the student had called. The week after at work Karolina came in with a huge Polish baked cheesecake for me. She couldn’t believe I had left the comfort of my home to help her. That cheesecake tasted so wonderful.
Over the years, we left Cafe Rouge, Karolina working in a few more restaurants alongside her other work, studies and running a Polish newspaper. We also ran a few short term projects together, serving migrant communities by giving free English classes together. Karolina coordinated and set up the sessions, and I taught the students. But our connection of food never slowed. We used food to explore new territories, to try things out and to bond over the process. Karolina had done this with her previous work in an Italian trattoria and earlier when she first moved over here and lived with an Asian family as an au pair, where she was exposed to the incredible spices and ingredients of the grandmother’s cooking. By this point I was working back and forth from China as a teacher, using my spare time to learn the language to be able to access the rich and complex landscape of Chinese cuisine. I would come back and tell Karolina about all the delicious food I’d tried, in particular the boiled jiaozi and the silky dumplings stuffed with meat and veg, explaining how I would go round to people’s houses and make them with their families. This is when Karolina would open up to me about her Polish roots in cooking, especially folding pierogi, the Polish equivalent, with her mum and grandmother – it was the same process I had experienced in China. On our days off, Karolina would host these dinner parties with her friends where we would be treated to a feast of Polish fare; sour rye soup, russian salad, pierogi, fish, pâté, fresh bread and sharp pickles. The way it was presented was always so perfect and with love. One time I came round early to help out – we folded sauerkraut and mushroom pierogies over a bottle of chilled white and realised what a relaxing and satisfying way to spend your time folding dumplings was.
It was only when I came back from my last stint in China that we decided to lay out our existing strengths, loves, thoughts and beliefs to start Heart & Parcel, a project based on female friendship, cooking, sharing experiences, skill sharing and developing English language skills that are much needed for migrant communities who come to settle in the UK.
Today
Publishing our first cookbook this year was the highlight for us, being able to give a platform to these stories and recipes by women from migrant communities with not only incredible home cooking skills, but also with so much knowledge and ideas to share. This achievement was our realization of what we had created within Heart & Parcel: a space born out of a positive and nurturing supporting female friendship, peppered with the necessary aides to display these notions of love and care, with a drive to support and develop.
Food symbolises everything between relationships: it binds people together; it becomes the vehicle for communication when words simply can’t convey the true weight of your expression; it becomes the symbol of what you are. For us, it all started with food.
