A millionaire restaurateur has revealed how poverty meant he once had to survive on just one bowl of soup a day – and his dreams of opening a restaurant were just that.
Hüseyin Özer, 74, now owns restaurants in swanky Mayfair and St Christopher’s Place in Central London, and is gearing up to open his third – Sofra Balik and Sofra Steak – a fish and steakhouse in the capital.
The chef, who was born in a village in Tokat, northern Turkey, says he had a ‘difficult childhood’ and even lived through a poison attempt on his life by his step-mother, reports MyLondon.
In 1975 at the age 21, he embarked on a five-day bus journey to London to learn English in the hopes of fulfilling his dream of owning a restaurant back home.
During his time in the city, he slept rough in public toilets, eating ‘one bowl of tripe soup and a small piece of bread every day’ and worked long nights learning his craft.
He told the website: ‘I had a difficult childhood, between being almost poisoned by my stepmother, sent by my mother to buy a gun to kill my father and then being completely disowned by my family, I knew this wasn’t the life I wanted for myself’.
His parents separated when Hüseyin was just a boy and he grew up feeling unwanted by his parents, and eventually was raised by his grandfather.
Unable to attend primary school in his early years, he taught himself to read and write, before shuttling to Istanbul in 1967 where he found work as a restaurant dishwasher.
Eight years later, he had saved up enough money to fund a bus ride to London, which would mark the start of new beginnings for the chef.
He scored a job working in a doner kebab shop in Mayfair, where he juggled night shifts with English classes during the day.
His luck turned in 1981, when the budding chef secured a £7,500 loan from NatWest bank to purchase the doner shop from its original owners.
The fast-food joint earned a cult following, but over time customers grew tired of the menu and yearned for something new, he says.
Hüseyin turned to the help of two nutritionists to revamp the menu to include grilled meats, fish and desserts inspired by Turkish cuisine.
Success quickly followed, prompting him to expand the chain to trendy St Christopher’s Place in the heart of the city’s West End shopping district.
He says he now recounts his past to inspire others, and adds that the drive behind his latest venture is simply to ‘make people happy’.
