Chef focus: Nelko Yordanov at Belong Chester

When Belong Chester reaches its full capacity, Nelko Yordanov will have quite the job on his hands. The care village will not only have 72 residents receiving nursing and dementia care across its six ‘households’, but also a 25-place nursery, 23 independent living apartments and a public bistro.

Billed as a blueprint for intergenerational care (while other care homes and nurseries are co-located, at Belong they are integrated, with a goal of young and old living life together), Yordanov, the site’s bistro and catering manager, oversees its catering, shaping menus suitable for a wide range of ages, demands and nutritional needs. Its goal is to be at the heart of its community, with members of the public welcome at its bistro.

While flexibility will be key, Yordanov says there are some similarities – meals at the nursery (which has a secure sensory garden) focus on freshly-cooked, home-style dishes, menus which have cross-over with those served at the bistro.

“The site is the size of a village,” he says. “It will have enough people to fill one up. We are a small community, but we are part of the bigger community and we want to bring them in. We are not apart and separate.”

The households have hosts, who take care of residents’ food and drink. Yordanov says they are empowered to put the focus on choice. “It’s about freedom,” he says. “We work in [the residents’] homes, not the other way around. It helps them make meaningful choices.

Belong Chester is welcoming its first residents. Photos credit: life-photo.co.uk 

“The households can eat at any time, anywhere,” he says. “People often ask ‘what time is breakfast’, but people can have it whenever they like. Of course there is structure, everyone needs structure in their day, and there is a social element too – if one person has breakfast at 8.30am, others are likely to join them. But if someone wakes up at 10am or 11am they can have a late breakfast, or a snack and lunch, whatever they would prefer.”

Menus are designed to be practical, but offering choice for residents and flexibility for cooks. “We have the main protein of the day and we provide them with three different ways to cook it,” he explains. “So if it was chicken we might do chicken tikka, white wine and creamy mushroom. People can also come to the bistro and get takeaway meals from there – there is a hot special which changes.

“The hosts have the power to change the menu as well – for the chicken they could turn it into a chicken stroganoff, for example. The kitchen is also always stocked up with easy meals – they can always have a tin of soup or scrambled eggs. We have special training for staff where we teach them how to lay tables and present food – the idea is it should look like we are in a restaurant.”

Each of the households has a kitchen. “There’s nothing better than the smell of bacon or toast,” he explains. “It also helps keep residents active – there are a number who want to help us in the kitchen.”

A focus for Yordanov is all things fresh. During his childhood in Bulgaria, his family rarely bought food, instead growing and rearing what they ate. “My family has always been good eaters and had an appreciation of good food,” he says. “Everything was grown on the doorstep and we used to have animals, so we never used to buy anything – we used to grow or rear it ourselves.”

Raised beds at not-for-profit Belong Chester contain produce to use in the cooking (when Yordanov recently competed in the National Association of Care Catering’s Chef of the Year contest, he used berries grown at another site) as part of his push to take as much inspiration from his childhood as possible.

The Belong Chester care village 

“Our walk-in freezer is the size of a cupboard – we don’t use it. We cook everything as fresh as possible,” he says. “When it comes to meat, vegetables and milk we try to use as much as we can from local suppliers, and we have back-up suppliers which are even smaller.”

Yordanov, 41, began his career as a kitchen porter, and though he initially trained in engineering, completed a second degree in international tourism and hospitality. In 2007 he moved to the UK, over the next decade working in venues including a 14th century Welsh hotel, a café (which he owned), an American-style restaurant, an M&S delicatessen, a cinema and theatre complex and more, before embarking on a care catering career in 2017.

A stint in Germany’s Black Forest running his own restaurant followed (interrupted by the pandemic), before, in October 2021, he joined Belong, touring around other sites as Belong Chester prepared for its soft opening in July, when it welcomed its first few residents.

“It was a fairly big move for me because care hospitality is a little different to the crazy thousand-miles-an-hour hospitality jobs,” he says. “I personally find it more gratifying than normal head chef jobs. When somebody comes in in a normal setting, they pay and they leave and that’s it. It doesn’t make a huge difference to their life. In care I started seeing the difference we make to people’s lives. It might be the main event of their day.

“Most chefs don’t understand care catering – it’s that massive stigma. We might not be serving what Gordon Ramsay would, but we are cooking delicious, home-cooked food.”

Yordanov says a key part of his role will be shaping and developing his staff. “We are very passionate about nurturing our own talent,” he says. “Our strategy is to support and mentor colleagues throughout their career, particularly those new to the profession, by encouraging them to pursue unique opportunities, such as the NACC competition, and allowing them to express their creativity in their work, serving our customers.”

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