A few months ago, The Cold Magazine met Helen Graham – co-founder of viral veggie concept Bubala – to document her cooking process. She had just announced the release of her first cookbook, Centrepiece, a vegetarian cookbook that aims to showcase the potential of vegetables as central elements of dinner parties through 100 moreish, craveable recipes. Throughout her 10 years as a chef at some of London’s most innovative restaurants, Helen has become a household name amongst chefs in the city. When she joined forces with Marc Summers to create Bubala, she developed vegetarian recipes that satisfied even the most ferocious meat-eaters and effortlessly convinced them to forgo animal protein, even if just for one meal. Helen was the executive chef of Bubala from their opening in 2019 to 2023. Since leaving, she has been focusing on writing Centrepiece while also hosting supper clubs, cooking classes, and collabs with some of London’s best restaurants.
We sat down in her East London living room to discuss her culinary journey throughout London kitchens and using vegetables as a showstopper for dinner parties.
The Cold Magazine (CM): Helen, how did you first get in the kitchen?
Helen Graham (HG): Through quite an unconventional route. I studied History of Art at university. The day I walked into halls, a guy who lived in my hall was hanging home-cured sausages from the rafters, and he had coq au vin on the boil. It turned out that everyone in my hall was just really into food. So, for the next three years, I frittered away my entire student loan. We were doing ‘come dine with me’ competitions, taking it really seriously. After leaving uni, I knew I wanted to work in food, but it took me a long time to find my place in the industry. At the time, Gordon Ramsay was the only kind of person, or that visible, on TV, and as a woman, it obviously made it really scary for me to go into kitchens, so I did everything adjacent to that. I liked food styling, some writing, and some catering, and eventually, I braved it and went in, but it took me a few years.
CM: After catering, what was your first job in a professional kitchen?
HG: The Palomar had just opened and my friend was about to start working there. She was like, “come on, it’s gonna be a big deal, it’s gonna be really fun.” She talked to me into it, and it was crazy. It was opened by a brother and sister, Zoe and Layo [Paskin], who used to run a club, and it had that club energy; it was just so fun and so frenetic, and it felt like back in 2014, like the vibiest, most exciting opening. I felt very excited to be there. I was in from that point. I was in restaurants for ten years, much to my parents’ misery. I was at the Palomar for a year and a half.
Then I went to The Good Egg. It had just opened in Stoke Newington. And then I went back into the Palomar group, The Barbary that had just opened. So, three brand new openings. After the Barbary, I had a little stint at Ottolenghi in the test kitchen.
After that, I was like, “Right, I’m done with restaurants. I’m out.” I put an advert on Facebook in a chef’s group called London Chef Collective, being like “I’m looking for a part-time job, just while I sort myself out.” This guy, Marc Summers, messaged me about running Bubala as a pop-up concept. And I was like, no, no, no. I’m gonna get a proper job. I’m gonna have a desk, have a 9 to 5, I’m done with this. But he was really persuasive.
CM: Besides your years at Bubala working exclusively in a vegetarian context, how did you come to realise that vegetables too deserve to be centrepieces?
HG: Look, I’m not a vegetarian. When I met Marc, he had this idea for Bubala: treating vegetables in a very different way, and it changed the way I cooked at home and the way I saw vegetables. I just loved making something so full of flavour, so unusual, so exciting that it changed people’s whole idea of what vegetables could be. Early reviews, people on their way out, being like, “Oh, I didn’t realise this was a vegetarian restaurant. I just realised I didn’t have a steak,” and I was like, that’s great. That’s so cool.
I think that a lot of vegetarian cooking out there is all about health and nutrition, and there’s totally a space for that. I also feel like there should be a space for vegetables to be fun, vibrant, playful, delicious and not necessarily healthy. I was seeing people’s reaction to that and I think that just really kick-started something in me. I also don’t cook meat or fish at home. So, this is the way I cook. This is the way I entertain. I love it, and Centrepiece was about me sharing that with people.
CM: What was the starting point when you got the book deal?
HG: Panic! It was really intimidating; it’s one hundred recipes. I think my approach to creating the book really developed over time. I started writing the book, being like, ‘right, I’m just gonna wake up and go into the vegetable shop and see what takes my fancy and cook on a whim’. Sometimes that would yield something amazing, and sometimes it wouldn’t. I started structuring it around how I would like to eat a meal and what vegetables I wanted to showcase. I wanted at least two or three courgette mains, and I want this book to be accessible, starting with a vegetable and then building a dish around it, and that’s how things just started to come together in a really exciting way.
CM: How’s the book release been going so far?
HG: The launch has been great; it’s been quite a whirlwind. I had the launch party last week at Natoora, which was so beautiful. It felt like a wedding to my book. All my favourite people were there, it was emotional, and I gave a speech. It was about how the book came to mean so much. I wrote it just after I left Bubala, and I was really burnt out. I hadn’t done any socialising for the six years I was there, and I was exhausted. It was ironic, the idea of pitching this dinner party book at a time when I hadn’t thrown a dinner party in years. The book was a way for me to find myself, find my way back to people and entertain. A way to manifest the life I wanted after restaurants.
The launch was full of people I had met after I left, so it all felt very meaningful. Now it’s sort of a whirlwind. I’m doing supper clubs, I’ve got a week of cookery classes at Borough Kitchen, and I’ve got an Instagram schedule with posts happening every second of the day. It’s really intense, and I guess there’s no real blueprint for it. I feel very privileged to be able to do it, and you only get one chance to release a debut book. So, if you’re not exhausted, you’re not doing it right, are you?
CM: What are the next few events you’d like the readers of Cold to know about?
HG: I’m doing a pop-up supper club at the Camberwell Arms on April 30th, and there are still some tickets. I’m doing a talk at Honey and Co. on April 22nd, I’m going to Toppings in Edinburgh on April 27th and in Bath on May 14th. I’ve got a chat with Ben Lippett at Bàrd Books, which is a cool independent book shop, on May 12th. We’re going to be chatting about leaving restaurants, because he’s also a former restaurant chef and this new chapter that comes after and what that looks like for both of us, so that’s going to be a lovely talk.Centrepiece, written by Helen Graham, published by Octopus Books, released 09/04/2026