Unimaginable tragedy and blind luck – the two happening just weeks apart – set Ryan Riley on the path to where he is now.
At 29, Ryan is the founder of Life Kitchen, a venue where cancer patients are taught recipes that make up for the loss of taste that can often accompany the disease. Named as one of the 1,000 Most Influential Londoners (despite being really from Sunderland), he is mates with the likes of Nigella Lawson and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, and a regular on TV and radio.
Getting to that point, with also a major publishing contract and three books to his name, started nine years ago, when Ryan’s mother died of cancer following a two-year illness where he had acted as one of her main carers. Just a few weeks later he won £28,000 on a £1 bet at a casino in Newcastle and took the decision to leave Sunderland and seek his fortune with London in the company of best friend, Kim.
Read more: recipe book launched for cooking on a budget
He said: “My friend said let’s go out and we went to a casino. I said yes, anything to cheer myself up, and I won £28,000 that night from a £1 side bet. It was just crazy and with that money I thought, this is a once in a lifetime thing. I thought I should do something.
"I took Kimberley, my best friend, to London. We paid our rent up front for a year, we didn’t have any plans but my mother had just died, Kim had lost her mother a few years before and it was just like: ‘What can we do with our lives now?’
“We flew out of Newcastle Airport, had a little holiday in Barcelona, then flew into London and ended up living there for seven years.”
In London, Ryan and Kim set about various adventures, starting off with a food stand at Camden Market before Ryan got a job at a food magazine and then worked as a food stylist. But his mother’s last few months, when her cancer saw her lose her sense of taste, never went away.
Ryan said: “I had a circle of people, and a skill, and I thought: maybe I can do something with what my mam was going through. I thought about the idea for months and months and then I got drunk and it gave me the confidence to tweet it. I said: ‘My mother passed away three years ago and I want to do a cooking class for people who’ve lost their sense of taste. Can anyone help with venues, resources, that sort of thing’? That went semi viral and it got the attention of Radio 4. The next day I was invited onto the Today programme and that was the launching of the idea.
“I was trying to move on with my life but moving on felt a little bit strange because my mother had died and then three weeks later I won all that money and moved to a different city. People say you shouldn’t make big decisions in the wake of grief and I just did it all. I guess that was probably why it kept nagging in my head.
“Now I had a circle of influential friends and I had a skill – I could cook at least a bit, enough to get by. There was an element of naivety but I have this phrase that naivety is achiev-ity for me. If I’d known all the stuff that Life Kitchen was going to take to do, I might not have set out to do it.
"But because I didn’t, I launched it on Radio 4, came off air and someone from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s team had left me a voicemail. They asked me to launch Life Kitchen with them.”
In the next few months Ryan linked up with Prof Barry Smith, founder of the Centre for the Study of the Senses at the University of London, who provided the science to back up the recipes Ryan had been developing. With help from some of the famous friends he had picked up in the capital, Life Kitchen became a big success in London and toured to other cities (including Blackfriars in Newcastle).
And in 2019 it gained a permanent venue when a former lodge in Sunderland’s Mowbray Park became available and was converted with work and materials donated by construction firm McAlpine. Nigella Lawson travelled north to perform the opening.
Though Covid took away some of the project’s momentum, and Life Kitchen had to re-open later than other venues as the cancer patients it works with often have compromised immune systems, the venue has helped many people at a time when they most need it, helping Ryan build bonds with a number of people going through the same things as his mother in her last months. A new book is in the offing with the loss of taste sustained by some people with Covid offering a new avenue for Ryan’s work.
The journey of the last nine years has, Ryan said, included “incredible ups and downs and loads of mistakes made”, but a sense of fearlessness has kept him going.
“I was unafraid to ask people for what I want, or go on live TV and cook. A lot of people wouldn’t do that but I just thought, I’ve got to.”
He adds: “There’s so many amazing people who never get any chances. My chance started with my mother dying, which is a strange chance to get; my mother dying and then winning £28,000 just a few weeks later.
“They were two complete opposite ends of the scale, trauma and elation, and I met them in the middle and did something with them. Whether that was right or wrong, I’m yet to see!”
- Ryan Riley will be writing a fortnightly recipe column for The Journal, starting this Saturday.
READ NEXT:
* Chilean street food spot opens in Newcastle
