Women of Substance: Minal Patel
She left Gujarat with a clear head and a strong belief. Twenty years on, the head chef at Prashad has a Bib Gourmand, a Chef of the Year title and one thing still firmly in her sights.
Some people tell you who they are. Minal Patel shows you, and she does it on a plate.
Sit down at Prashad, the family-run vegetarian restaurant in Drighlington, and the first thing that reaches you is not the awards on the wall. It is the food. Gujarati cooking, done properly, built from herbs and spices and the kind of care you cannot fake. One mouthful and you understand why people travel from all over the world to eat here. This is a woman who has spent two decades getting one thing exactly right, and it shows.
But this is a Women of Substance feature, and Prashad is only half the story. The other half is Minal herself, and how a girl from Gujarat became one of the most quietly determined chefs in the north of England.
Learning at her mother's side
Minal grew up in Gujarat, in a family that had been vegetarian for generations. Cooking was not a career choice so much as an inheritance. In Indian culture, she says, the mother teaches the daughter young, at thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and the lessons are about more than food. They are about health, about family, and about how you look after the people around you. That is where her passion started, at her mother's side, and it never left her.
She had a passing interest in beauty. Food won easily. “I was clear from a very young age,” she says. “I knew what I wanted to do.” That clarity matters, because it is the thread that runs through everything that came after.
Home from home
In 2004 she married Bobby Patel and moved to Yorkshire. It could have been a hard landing. Instead she found somewhere that felt oddly familiar. “It was like coming home from home,” she says. “Very similar lifestyle, very calm, the people very nice, the communities living together.” Twenty-two years on, she has now lived in Yorkshire for as long as she once lived in India. She and Bobby have a fourteen-year-old daughter, and she still lives close to her in-laws, ten minutes from Halifax.
Those in-laws, Kaushy and Mohan Patel, are the reason Prashad exists. They started out selling Gujarati snacks and dishes from a backstreet in Bradford and grew it by hand into something special. When Minal came to the kitchen, she was cooking inside a reputation somebody else had built, and she has never pretended otherwise. She learned the day-to-day from her father-in-law, picked up the equipment, the techniques and the language, and made the kitchen her own. She has led it since 2004.
Twenty years at the same stove
Two decades in one kitchen is relentless. Ask her what keeps the apron on through the hard days and the answer is simple. It is the food, and it is the people who come to eat it. “I believe in my cuisine,” she says. “There is nowhere else like it.” She is not being arrogant when she tells you her food is the best. She is telling you she has done the work, and she knows what the work is worth.
“I always think my food is the best.”
That belief has been earned. Prashad shot to national attention in 2010, finishing runner-up on Ramsay's Best Restaurant. Off the back of it, Minal trained under the Michelin-starred chefs Gordon Ramsay and Atul Kochhar, learning in their kitchens the parts of the craft she had never been taught at home. The restaurant has held the Michelin Guide's Bib Gourmand for thirteen years running, alongside two AA rosettes. It is one of only two places in the whole of Yorkshire to hold both.
A breakthrough year
Then came 2025. Minal represented the north east and Yorkshire on Great British Menu, the first time authentic Gujarati food had appeared on the show in its twenty-year history. Her “cat's eye” curry, inspired by the Halifax inventor Percy Shaw, stopped veteran judge Michael O'Hare in his tracks. She narrowly missed the regional final, but she had already made her point.
Days later, and just after International Women's Day, she was named Chef of the Year at the Oliver Awards in Leeds. She was the first woman ever to win it. In an industry that is still overwhelmingly male at the top, that first matters, and she knows it.
The word she never listened to
This is where the Women of Substance thread pulls tightest. Minal's story is built on a word she refused to accept, and that word is no. When she wanted to go abroad and marry Bobby, plenty of people told her it was not for her. “I said, no, definitely it is for me,” she remembers. “I had belief. Everybody has the right to live and the right to dream. Nobody can tell me.”
“So many people said it is not for you. I said, no, definitely it is for me.”
Ask her what she would say to a sixteen-year-old girl standing where she once stood, unsure whether she is even allowed to want something big, and she does not reach for anything grand. “If you believe in yourself, you just go for it,” she says. “Once you are clear in your mind, you do not need to listen to anybody. Go step by step. Keep trying towards your goal.” She did the courses. She read the recipes. Then she created her own. That is the method, and it is open to anyone willing to put the years in.
The star in her sights
She is not finished, and she will tell you so plainly. “This is my journey,” she says. “I want to learn, I want to be strong, then I can be successful. If I have not worked twenty years, how can I expect success in one? You have to give your time.”
And the goal at the end of all that time? A Michelin star. She says it without drama, the way she says most things. “My passion is to get the Michelin star. I am on that journey.” She is careful to put it the right way round. “It is food, not fame. The work is first, and the success will come. The food will give you the success.”
“It is food, not fame. The work is first, and the success will come.”
On the evidence so far, it would be a brave person who bet against her. Minal Patel came to Yorkshire with a clear head and a strong belief, and she has spent twenty years turning both into some of the finest vegetarian cooking in the country. She wants the star. Watch her get it.
Practical Information
