Roast, Borough Market

British Muslim businessman Iqbal Wahhab has made it his personal mission to help rehabilitate disenfranchised men by giving them work and responsibility. Through his thriving restaurant Roast at London’s Borough Market, Iqbal hires ex-offenders and helps train them for a career in the food industry. This is one of his most heartening success stories – Mohammed, a young Muslim and ex-offender:

I first met Mohammed at one of the regular breakfasts I’ve been hosting over many years with Switchback, a project taking people recently released from prison and placing them into jobs in the hospitality sector so they don’t re-offend. About 60 per cent of young offenders end up back in prison within a year. For those in work, that figure drops to nearer 10 per cent.

 Mohammed was keen not to go back into the East London gang of drug dealers that had got him into prison. I liked him and he genuinely sought a better life. I’d just acquired an Indian fast-food place in Soho and gave him a job there, which he loved and did really well in. When we sold it, I asked him if he’d be interested in a vacancy we had in the kitchen of my Borough Market restaurant, Roast. He took it but hated it!

 He stopped coming in and our chef and manager tried calling him but he didn’t reply. I then got hold of him myself and he had become down on himself, not because he didn’t like the kitchen environment but because he felt he had let me down.

 The problem was easily solved – there was another vacancy as a runner (the people who take dishes to the table), which he took and did well in and then got promoted to waiter without any involvement by me.