Last Christmas I was in prison. This year I'm working in a London fine-dining restaurant

For Sebastian, Christmas Day 2023 was not what most people think of when they think of Christmas. He took some food from the prison canteen back to his cell. The meal in the canteen wasn’t where the action was. Sebastian made fritters with the chicken, cooked in his kettle. Others made rice, dumplings and fried chicken. “It wasn’t all that,” he says of his year inside, but adds: “Christmas Day was actually all right, not too bad. Everyone in the cells was making food.” This year, Sebastian will be plating up meals in a very different environment: Home Kitchen, a restaurant run by two-Michelin-starred chef Adam Simmonds, where diners in London’s well-heeled Regent’s Park will come for a festive treat.

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Opened in September and backed by organisations including Big Issue Invest, Home Kitchen appears to be a perfectly normal restaurant. Its menu describes dishes in the modern fashion, listing only their constituent parts (“MONKFISH/ JERUSALEM ARTICHOKE/ FISH VELOUTE”), and does not use the £ sign. The lights are dim and the colours are subtle. But get speaking to someone in the kitchen, like Sebastian, and you realise something very special is going on.

Those cooking the fine-dining menu and serving it to diners come from a range of backgrounds but have one thing in common: their experience of homelessness and housing insecurity. Home Kitchen offers them not just a living wage and training in a proper, fancy kitchen, but a route to transform their lives. Big Issue visited when the restaurant opened in September, and returned in the run-up to Christmas to see what difference a year can make in the lives of the trainees.

“I didn’t think of coming home and being in a restaurant to cook food. I’ve got a nice chance,” says Sebastian, 23, who left prison after a year-long sentence in February. “I’ve got new friends. I feel more organised.”

After leaving prison, Sebastian’s housing situation was precarious, and he is moving between friends’ places while he tries to secure supported accommodation.

Those leaving prison are at particular risk of homelessness: 13.1% of prison leavers were released into homelessness in 2023/24, up from 11.3% in 2022/23. On average, 800 people go straight from prison to homelessness each month, and the number of prison leavers sleeping rough in the three months after leaving prison has increased by 45% to 3,375.

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In Sebastian’s case, this has looked like a long and demotivating struggle for somewhere reliable to live. Last month, he thought he’d found somewhere, only for the landlord to increase the asking price from £1,000 a month to £1,500 a month. 

This Christmas, he’s looking forward to celebrating with family and friends. “It’s gonna be nice. I’m gonna be outside, enjoying Christmas,” he says. But Home Kitchen has allowed him to start looking at life on a long-term scale. With the skills he picks up, he’s hoping to work towards becoming a private chef and see where food can take him. “I’m just going to keep on going until it takes me somewhere good. I want to go to a different country with it, and see different cuisines and different places,” he says. “Right now I need to learn everything, and I’ll be good to go.”

Unsurprisingly for an industry that was forced to close, then adapt or die, the pandemic has changed hospitality. While the number of vacancies in the industry has fallen below 100,000, it remains higher than pre-Covid numbers. Meanwhile, as figures show 13.2% of people aged 16 to 24 in the UK are not in education, employment or training, the Labour government has made these young people a point of focus.

“We will transform those opportunities, but young people will be required to take them up,” said work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall. “It is so damaging for young people not to have skills or not to be in work.”

Yet while opportunities may be one thing, barriers to work are another. Take Lily, an Iranian refugee who works in Home Kitchen’s front of house, serving food and wine and making sure customers have a good time. In the two years she waited for her asylum claim to be processed after arriving in the UK with her young son, she wasn’t allowed to work.

“It’s horrible, you don’t have permission to work, you don’t have permission to make a decision for yourself and your family,” she says. That meant that when she was granted status last November, and given just two weeks to leave her accommodation, she had no income to help her find a new place for her and her son to live. Landlords wouldn’t accept someone without a job, she says.

Lily was not alone in this experience. As it attempted to clear the backlog of asylum decisions last autumn, the Conservative government reduced the amount of time newly recognised refugees had to find somewhere new to live. The result was predictable – and predicted.

As Big Issue reported, the number of refugees evicted into homelessness tripled, with charities forced to hand out tents and sleeping bags, while cities struggled to deal with the numbers on the streets. Statistics released in the months afterwards showed over 5,000 refugee households became homeless during this period.

For Lily, then, last Christmas was an uncertain time – struggling to find somewhere to live while many services shut down during the holidays. 

“Most people during the Christmas holidays enjoy the weekend, they’re planning to travel and enjoy the holidays. But I was planning for nothing. I was planning how to resolve the housing situation. It was horrible for me,” she says. 

On Christmas Day, she stayed with friends and cried.

This Christmas will be different. Her job at Home Kitchen has allowed her to plan for a fun Christmas for her seven-year-old son, as well as feel more confident, comfortable and cheerful.

“Hopefully after three difficult years, we’re going to enjoy our Christmas this year,” she says. “This year is the first year I’m feeling that Christmas is here.”

She adds: “Until I found the job here, I didn’t have any days when I was feeling safe and happy. Nowadays I am feeling more comfortable, more happy.”

Find out more about Home Kitchen here.

Support your local restaurants this Christmas, if you can

Kitty Slydell-Cooper, head of communications at Countertalk, a hospitality recruitment network.

This has been another tough year for hospitality, with rising costs and falling consumer spending power. Christmas falls on a tricky date for operators this year – whereas usually people would be socialising after work right up until the 23rd or 24th, this year many establishments will see their last significant trading day on the 20th, as people are unlikely to come into the office on the Monday or Tuesday. Losing these days is significant.  

The festive season is historically the time of year when businesses build up reserves to tide them through the quieter months; however pressures from the minimum wage increase and the new service charge legislation means that any excess at this time of year may simply go into a business’s survival, meaning that we may see a new spate of closures towards the spring.

From our own research we have not seen the new service charge legislation have a huge impact on the take-home pay of staff members, as most establishments have adjusted base wages down to take account of the increased tronc, so staff members will be even more reliant on the service charge from this period.  

In other words, if consumers can spend, then they should! Tip generously because you know it’s all going into the pockets of the workers. Be nice because it’s been a tricky year for everyone, and keep supporting the establishments you love far beyond the festive period. With the imminent rise in NI and both wages and produce costs set to rise still further, the hospitality sector needs your custom more than ever! 

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. This Christmas, you can make a lasting change on a vendor’s life. Buy a magazine from your local vendor in the street every week. If you can’t reach them, buy a Vendor Support Kit.

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