Benjamin Onalaja's path to success has not been an easy one, but he's learned a lot along the way. The M.E.N's Jenna Campbell reports
If you’ve ever found yourself crawling bumper-to-bumper along Great Ancoats Street you might have spotted Soul & Surf, a small restaurant with tables and chairs pitched up outside, selling soul food and cocktails.
The path that led Ben to the point of opening his own restaurant in 2021 was one fraught with difficulty. In 2016 he was jailed for his involvement in a bogus police officer scheme and for running an £82,000 hi-tech ‘sim-splitting’ bank fraud. “My mum is my biggest supporter and she was like ‘do you know what, I can see you really want to do this', so she helped me fund the idea. The food we do here is modern, West African food, so there’s this rice which we call jollof rice and I wanted to try and introduce a bit of African spice to Ancoats and the Northern Quarter.
As well as the soul boxes, the restaurant’s brunch menu nods to the contemporary element with dishes like the Biscoff Bad Boy laden with salted caramel sauce and the Breakfast waffle with sausages, bacon and maple syrup, appealing to the Northern Quarter brunch crowd. “It is what it is and it got to the point where I thought 'I’m not going to let this bring me down anymore', but I won’t lie it did for a bit. I lost confidence.
“He said he has never heard anyone say that before, so when I asked him if I could have my engineering books sent to the prison to revise, he said I could stay in and revise. And because of that motivation to try and come out and do those exams, and because I didn’t concern myself with what was going on in the prison too much, that kept me grounded.
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