Taz Khan MBE, Founder of London’s Community Kitchen, is opening a community café and cookery school in Alperton, near Wembley, in partnership with the Grand Union Development Trust charity and St George, part of the Berkeley Group.
The Cordon Bleu chef turned Social Entrepreneur and Acamadecian of the Royal Academy of Culinary Arts operates a ‘zero waste, zero hunger’ charitable organisation, where his focus for the last ten years has been on preventing good food from going to landfill and instead distributing it back into communities that find themselves in food insecurity, without reliable access to enough nutritious, affordable, and healthy food.
Each week, London’s Community Kitchen supports circa 25,000 individuals, and intercepts around 75 metric tonnes of food from going to landfill.
Taz’s latest initiative in Alperton will first see him and his team transform the state-of-the-art, multi-purpose Community Hub and Centre at the 22-acre Grand Union development into a community café, set to open early next year.
The Hub was gifted to the community under the stewardship of the Grand Union Development Trust to oversee its success.
The café will be run by students from the College of North West London in Brent as part of an employment training pathway, serving freshly-prepared, high quality food.
A small cookery school is also set to open at the Hub, providing adults and children with regular workshops on healthy food and nutrition, cooking with new produce, and how to eat well on a budget.
Annually, London’s Community Kitchen delivers community courses to over 2,000 people and seeks to create employment pathways for more than 500 individuals.
Taz Khan MBE, founder of London’s Community Kitchen, said: “We remain focused on battling food insecurity through a zero waste mentality, and work hard to ensure we have the right partners on board to help us support communities across London. We currently run the largest, single day food operation near Alperton on Wembley Road, helping around 1,000 families every single Saturday, many of which join our short-term cookery courses, and so it is important for us to have a permanent base here.”
London’s Community Kitchen will form part of the new all-encompassing canalside community, comprising 3,350 homes, of which 35% are affordable. Grand Union has a mix of one, two and three bedroom homes, as well as a canalside piazza, Anytime Fitness gym, Benham & Reeves estate agents, two-lane bowling alley, entertainment room, residents’ lounge, Co-op, Peapods nursery and Crepes+Coffee café, which operates from the development’s narrowboat PAVO. 10 acres of green space, restaurants, and coffee shops are also part of St George’s wider plans for the new community.
