Description
Some recipes are never written down. They live in a grandmother’s hands, in the smell of a kitchen on a Sunday, in the dish a mother makes when you come home after too long away. Hey! Food is Ready is a cookbook full of exactly those recipes, shared by 20 chefs from 22 countries who learnt to cook at home and now cook for a living.
Each chef opens their kitchen and tells you, in their own words, where the dish comes from and who taught it to them. There is a MasterChef India contestant who found her way back to cooking through a joint family of 35 in West Bengal. There are refugees, immigrants, stay-at-home parents and retirees, all carrying a taste of home to a new country. You will travel from Brazil to Singapore and from Japan to Jamaica without leaving your stove, and every plate arrives with a story attached.
The book comes from Hey! Food is Ready, the cultural catering and workshop marketplace that started in 2021 when founder Yuru Guo, then a student at Durham University, began matching home cooks with people who missed the taste of home. Five years on, that small idea has become the UK’s first corporate catering marketplace for authentic world cuisines, with more than 125 chefs from over 60 countries and over 30,000 meals served for the likes of Google, Barclays, Condé Nast and Amazon. In 2025 Yuru was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe list. This book is the community’s first chance to feed you at home.
Inside are 43 recipes that are generous, forgiving and made for a crowded table: Nagasaki champon noodles, Tunisian orange cake, Jamaican jerk chicken with rice and peas, Zambian bean and sausage stew, pandan chiffon cupcakes and a proper British roast. Yuru adds her own family favourite, a pickled cabbage and pork stew her grandmother made every winter. With stunning photography throughout, it is as much a portrait of the people behind the food as it is a book you will cook from again and again.
Hey! Food is Ready is the world on a plate. Every recipe remembers someone, and every meal calls you home.
