The Happy Pot: Malaysian Rendang With Nigerian Soul in London

Walk past The Happy Pot at a London market, and you often smell it before you see the stall. Slow-cooked beef rendang, coconut rice, bright pickles and golden fried chicken. It is the kind of food that makes people describe it as “comfort in a bowl” and come back day after day.

Behind it all is Yvette, a Nigerian-born, London-based cook who swapped a career in international development for a life serving Malaysian-inspired comfort food.

From climate grants to comfort food

Before The Happy Pot, Yvette worked as a Grants Manager at KPMG, checking that UK-funded climate projects in Africa and Asia were using money where it was most needed. The work took her across the world and often to Asia.

She already had a quiet dream of being self-employed and trading at festivals, but waited until her project ended in October 2019 to make the jump. After travelling through Asia and Mexico, she started trading in January 2020, only to pause almost immediately when COVID arrived. The timing was harsh, but the idea for The Happy Pot was already alive.

Discovering rendang and familiar flavours

Food has always been a thread in Yvette’s life. She grew up in Warri in southern Nigeria, where slow-cooked dishes and coconut rice are everyday joys.

On work trips to Asia she would visit her Malaysian friend Chun, and together they would eat their way through roti canai, nasi lemak and char kway teow. What stayed with her most was rendang. The deep, layered flavour reminded her of Nigerian cooking, where dishes are simmered for hours and hold heat, sweetness and savouriness all at once. Tasting coconut rice in Malaysia felt unexpectedly like home.

She took cooking classes, watched how different families made rendang and slowly created her own recipe. It brings together spices like star anise, cinnamon and cardamom, along with toasted coconut that nods to both Malaysian kitchens and her mum’s favourite ingredients.

Comfort in a bowl, for many homes

Today, The Happy Pot’s menu is built around that first love: beef rendang. From there Yvette has added jackfruit and chicken rendang, vegan fried tofu, Malaysian style fried chicken, pickles and dumplings. She makes everything from scratch and is involved in every part of the business, from cooking to design.

Her customers come from everywhere. Malaysian and Indonesian visitors are often excited to see rendang on the menu and curious about why a Nigerian woman is cooking it. They ask about her story and tell her the food reminds them of home. Non Asian customers usually start by asking about spice levels, and African customers sometimes arrive wishing she were cooking Afro-Caribbean dishes, but many leave converted to Malaysian flavours.

One father and daughter even came to her stall every day during their holiday in London because they could not stop thinking about her food. Comments like “this is comfort in a bowl” and “this reminds me of home” are the feedback she treasures most.

She wants The Happy Pot to be “a place where people can trust the food and temporarily forget what is going on in the big bad world we are living in”.

For now, that place is a market stall, where bowls of rendang carry flavours from Warri to Kuala Lumpur. In the future, she dreams of a permanent site and taking The Happy Pot to more cities across the UK.

If you are looking for food that tastes like travel and home at the same time, The Happy Pot is a very good place to start.

Check the video of the interview at @nova.esea

📍 Locations

Southbank Centre Food Market, London (One month guest spot from 30 January, Fridays to Sundays)

Other London street food and festival pop-ups – check their instagram for the latest

👉 Instagram / website

Instagram: @the_happypot

Website: thehappypot.co.uk

Got a favourite bite from the stall? Tell us in the comments!

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