Every day is a school day with Nisha Katona, who is animatedly talking about the reasons why vegetable-focused dishes are so prominent in Indian cookery. For Hindus it dates back to tribal wars thousands of years ago, she says.

“They thought, ‘We need to find peaceful ways of conflict resolution, and meat gets your blood up, it’s passion-inducing and hard to digest’. So they banned meat,” says the Ormskirk-born chef. “Meat is something that is associated with brutality, and muscle flexing, and none of these are things that are respected within Hinduism,” continues the founder of Mowgli Street Food, whose restaurants can be found in Leeds and Sheffield.

For other religious groups, vegetarianism was adopted because any life was seen as sacred. “Jainism [is a religon] where they even sweep the ground in front of them in case they tread on an insect,” she continues. “I think it’s gripping, you know, the anthropology of food.”

Barely pausing for breath, she goes on to explain how widows were instrumental in the evolution of vegetarianism because men were traditionally barred from the kitchen, as were women who were menstruating or breastfeeding.

Nisha Katona. Picture: PA Photo/Gareth Morgans.

“You’re left with this absolutely trailblazing band of people who were allowed in the kitchen, and that was widows,” she says. Forbidden from eating meat because “all of that passion-giving, heat-giving food [was forbidden] – their life was seen as over when their husbands died”, these women “found really clever ways of creating flavour with very natural ingredients using just vegetables”.

Katona – the daughter of a Hindu Brahmin priest – who has just released her latest cookbook, Meat Free Mowgli, is something of a trailblazer herself. Giving up “earning good money, and a great life” working as a child protection barrister for two decades to pursue her dream of bringing authentic Indian to the British foodie scene, she opened the first Mowgli Street Food restaurant in Liverpool in 2014. Now, five cookbooks and 15 restaurants later (with another six in the works), the 51-year-old is a regular on This Morning, and chairs the Mowgli Trust, which raises funds for children’s charities.

Turning a side hustle into a thriving career is something more and more people are aspiring to following the pandemic. So was it nerve-wracking making the leap from gainful employment to a high-risk industry?

“We nearly lost the house,” Katona says, having remortgaged the home she shares with musician husband Zoltan and daughters Tia and India to get a loan. She used this with her own savings to buy an old Chinese restaurant, which became the first Mowgli to open its doors.

But other people can do it, she believes. “We need to invoke and inspire… particularly female entrepreneurs who come to this stage of life where you’re either empty-nesting, or you’re in a job that is great, but it’s not inspiring you. If I can do it, you can do it.”

Mowgli Street Food founder Nisha Katona on following her dreams with restaurants including Leeds and Sheffield sites