The name ‘Lia’s Kitchen’ was first uttered on a road trip to the Gower Peninsula in Wales (UK) by some of our dearest friends, but its concept had been hatching for many years. My kitchen has become a place of gatherings, forming new bonds and creating a nomadic family for many of our new friends who also found themselves in Cardiff Wales in the early 2000s.

Lia’s Kitchen first started as a chaotic blog to record recipes, cultural food trails and those beautiful moments when familiar and new people entered my kitchen to share food and a little part of their lives with each other.

A mistress of deviation, I allowed politics and nostalgia to creep in. After all food for me has always been about the environment, the people I love, my homes, connections between cultures and countries, the people it supports and should nurture in more ways that just a physical.

Eventually Lia’s Kitchen opened its doors to beautiful strangers, organised supper clubs and pop-up dinners at other locations, attended local farmers’ markets and appeared as a guest cook at various locations and venues to create unique gatherings, events and menus as part of our nomadic/travelling kitchen ethos.

In 2015 our kitchen started delivering cooking classes, tailored to personal or group needs but also specifically focussing on food waste reduction through the Love Food Hate Waste campaign. That was a year when we started collaborations for monthly recipes with Welsh growers inspired by the seasonal contents of each month’s vegetable box grown organically in Wales. It was a joy using organic local ingredients to develop recipes inspired by Greece and the globe, enriched by r ingredients and spices in abundance in my vibrant multicultural neighborhood of Roath, Cardiff.

Our food waste reduction work grew stronger as we run school and community workshops, market stalls and eventually Wasteless Suppers with an aim to not only salvage surplus food but to inspire people to change they way they view and consumer food, and to help them understand the value of food that we often waste. You can find out more about Wasteless by reading our blogs here and visiting our Wasteless page.

We are also proud to have worked with Oasis Cardiff, a charity supporting refugees, at the early development of their food ventures, the set up of the Refugee Mobile Kitchen trailer at the Festival of Voice 2018 and the drafting of their successful Plate project proposal.

Appearances on Channel 4’s The Food Chain and BBC Radio 4’s Food programme has given Lia’s Kitchen a new audience! And I make regular appearances on the Eleri Sion BBC Radio Wales show to share recipes, tips and ideas, and to hopefully inspire people to eat in the ethical and tasty Lia’s Kitchen Way.

Since 2019 Lia’s Kitchen is a Community Interest Company. We thought long and hard about the choice to adopt a formal social enterprise business structure. There are many business in our beautiful town and increasingly in the UK which has the same social ethos as us and operate in a commendable ethical and sustainable way. But we chose to not go down the route of a restaurant and café quite consciously and to dedicate Lia’s Kitchen more on projects which aim to engage with a diverse segment of our society. We want to focus on a dissemination of messages around ethical eating from environmental, sourcing, low impact approaches to embracing the nomadic nature of our society. Simply speaking we want to run events which help build the world we want to live in around our table.

Collaboration is at the heart of Lia’s Kitchen venture. We have wonderful partners that we work with such as the amazing Green Squirrel. Nothing is more beautiful and inspiring than working with people with passion and strong ethos. Here’s to the future and all it brings for Lia’s Kitchen and you. And thank you from my heart for your support to date.

Welcome and come on into Lia’s Kitchen kitchen…..

I am Lia Moutselou, a curious Greek who’s base has been Cardiff, Wales since 2002.