Laura Davis meets the chef who regularly swaps life in his city restaurant for teaching cooks on the Zanzibar coast

HIS hands may be chopping vegetables to serve at his restaurant in Liverpool city centre, but Sean Millar’s mind is sunning itself on the Zanzibar coast.

There, where vanilla pods can be picked straight from the plant during an afternoon’s stroll and papayas grow in the back garden, he spends several weeks each year helping to train the local chefs.

It’s a voluntary position for Sean, who runs The Side Door, on Hope Street, but there are plenty of rewards – an abundance of fresh ingredients, enthusiastic students and the chance to make a difference to a small community that is trying to reinvent itself.

“It’s quite humbling really. The first time I went there, they were all a little bit cautious of me, but the fellow I work for said he’s never known anyone to be accepted so much,” says the 40-year-old, who is originally from Shrewsbury, in Shropshire, but now lives in Aigburth.

“I got invited by one of the elders of the village to have something to eat in his hut because he’d heard what I’d been doing with his people and he appreciated it.”

Sean, below, left, teaches 12 chefs based on Mafia Island, part of the Zanzibar archipelago, as well as a further eight on the island of Unguja (often referred to as “Zanzibar”).

On Mafia Island, the chefs work for guests staying at a hotel, made up of 12 huts on a cashew and coconut plantation.

As well as the tourists, local people go to the hotel to eat and dignitaries come from the mainland.

It was while staying there during a visit to the region that Sean was asked by the owner to get involved.

“The people that work for him are from the local village on the east coast of the island and have lived there pretty much all of their lives,” explains the Daily Post food columnist, who became interested in cooking at the age of 15 while working in a pub in his home town.

“What they could do was great, they could all cook, but you give them a piece of tuna fish, for example, and they only know one way of doing it. When they’re catering for the wealthy westerners, they wanted to vary their food so I just show them another dozen ways to use that fish and the things they’ve got around them.

“They use a lot of spice in their food because Zanzibar in particular is known as the ‘Spice Island’. They use a lot of tamarind pulp, which is like a bark that you boil down, a lot of ginger and chillies.

“The staple African diet is called ugali which is like cornmeal, it’s a lot like polenta – they can roll it into balls, so a lot of the traditional food is quite heavy. You can get a fish called a grupa – they pan fry it and it becomes very heavy, and then they’ll plonk a big tamarind curry sauce on top. When you’re in 100-degree heat, a lot of western people want something lighter.”

One thing there is no shortage of is ingredients of the sort that British chefs are prepared to splash out on to get them just right.

“They have all the raw ingredients, the spices and the fish in particular and they have chicken farmed. You can even get lamb from northern Tanzania, near the Serengeti National Park, and we get it sent down to the coast and then to the island,” says Sean, who studied to be a chef on a two-year scholarship to Switzerland.

“I’ve done a lot of pudding work with them, using the coconut they grow, mangoes and fresh ginger, which before they were never using. Zanzibar is famed for its vanilla pods and you can literally go and pick them off the trees, whereas here you’d pay a fortune for them.

“I did some chutneys with them because they had papaya growing outside the kitchen door and we put that with some seared jack fish, which is like tuna, and some pickled red onions and peppers.”

At the moment, Sean visits Zanzibar twice a year, but is keen to make longer trips if he can be spared from The Side Door. He says he finds working in both environments equally enjoyable but obviously quite different.

“There’s the bartering with the local fishermen. Obviously, here I can pick up the phone and call my fishmonger and I’ll be pretty much able to guarantee that I’ll get what I order. There you’re just reliant on the fellas on their bikes when they come in with it all strapped to the handlebars,” he laughs.

“You can’t go to these sorts of places with a big ego. You have to be prepared to learn from them as well.”