Community cafe offers 'hope and hot meals'

A community cafe has launched in Sheffield to provide a place for people to gather in one of the poorest areas of the city.

Hope Kitchen Social Cafe was set up by Gabriela Socol and offers "pay as you feel" meals to residents in Longley, using surplus food from local supermarkets.

The café, which will be open three days a week, is based at the Longley4Green Community Centre and has received funding from NHS South Yorkshire's This Is Us programme, which focuses on areas with high levels of inequality and deprivation.

Socol said: "I want people to come here and eat and see what we can do for their health and wellbeing. To help combat loneliness we have to spread that kindness."

Socol, originally from Romania, was previously the head chef and head of training at the Food Works, a community interest company dedicated to tackling food waste in Sheffield.

The new cafe will benefit from a weekly delivery of surplus food from Fareshare, which currently supports almost 400 charities and community groups.

Socol, 48, said: "Many people mistakenly think that surplus food means low quality or unhealthy food.

"We shatter that myth completely. Everything we serve is cooked fresh from scratch."

The former chef, who has also worked in restaurants in Japan, had for a long time earmarked her neighbourhood in Longley as the place to launch the cafe.

"I know the community. You never know if they can afford to have lunch or not, so this is the place, we don't have prices.

"It's just if you can contribute to something, you are more than welcome. If you can pay for others to have a meal, we are more than happy to receive any help."

Barbara Russell is the business development manager at the community centre and said the project is "perfect" for the area.

"It's in the lowest indices of multiple deprivation, which means it's one of the poorest areas in the whole country. And what comes alongside that are the health issues, a lot driven by poverty.

"We've got higher than average levels of mental and physical health, single parents, young single parents with no support from families."

Russell believes that many of the health inequalities between north and south Sheffield are driven by not just income but also knowledge of nutrition.

"Our aim is to use food as the mechanism for engaging with people, hopefully working with them on cooking meals in the kitchen so they learn how to cook.

"We will help to move them away from traditional processed food, which is often very cheap but also not particularly healthy for people, and then engage them in some of the other gateway services."

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