The UK has its fair share of quirky towns. Glastonbury has to be up there with the quirkiest. Wizards walk the streets (genuinely); crystal shops line the high street. Perhaps people who attend the festival decide to never leave – or maybe there’s something in the soil that attracts those who like to live life a little differently. Ayesha Kalaji might only have settled there in 2021, but her proudly quirky gastropub Queen of Cups has already become the culinary jewel of the town’s (no doubt druidic) crown.

Ayesha’s story starts off further north and even further away from the kitchen, however. Growing up in Anglesey, North Wales, she was exposed to Middle Eastern cooking thanks to the breakfasts her Jordanian father made at the weekends and the summers she spent with her grandmother in Jordan, but most of what she ate was British and European in nature. Food was important, but it was never a career option.

With a lecturer for a father, Ayesha naturally followed an academic path. She went to SOAS to do a degree in Middle Eastern politics, languages and history, aiming to become a war correspondent for Al Jazeera. ‘I very quickly realised I hated 9am Arabic lessons, however, which put the brakes on that a bit!’ she explains, ‘so after a bit of soul searching, it was my mother who actually suggested cookery school – provided I finished my degree first.’

Ayesha enrolled onto the course at Leith’s School of Food and Wine and consequently had one of the best years of her life. ‘The first day involved a three-hour lecture on eggs and I thought ‘yep, this is where I’m meant to be’. It gave me the confidence I needed and taught me so much in such a small amount of time.’

Post-culinary school, Ayesha’s first job was at Levantine restaurant The Palomar, but a torn ACL meant she had to stop work for six months and return home to her parents while she had reconstructive surgery. Rather than heading straight back to London, however, she found a job much closer to home. Sosban & The Old Butchers is a small Michelin-starred restaurant run by chef Stephen Stevens, who took Ayesha on and showed her what it takes to cook at that level.

‘This was a chef who trained with the likes of Marcus Wareing and Gordon Ramsay in the ‘90s, and was now single-handedly running the kitchen for a 14-cover restaurant open three nights a week. It was just me and him in the kitchen and we were doing 120-hour weeks. Would I recommend anyone else to do that? No! It was absolutely exhausting. But the man was a genius and I learnt so, so much. He had a level of dedication, precision and passion for his craft that I’ve never seen in anyone else.’

The itch to return to London never went away, however, and after a gruelling but formative year cooking Michelin-starred dishes, Ayesha returned to the capital. After a long stint at The Good Egg (‘It was great but I’m never doing brunch ever again’), she joined the team at Middle Eastern vegetarian restaurant Bubala as sous chef under Helen Graham.

‘Bubala was just so good,’ says Ayesha. ‘The combinations of flavours, the championing of vegetables, the people – I loved it. But the need to go out and do my own thing was starting to become something I couldn’t ignore. The trouble was that I obviously didn’t have enough money to open my own place in London and didn’t have enough of a profile to attract investors. I didn’t really know what to do until a friend of mine invited me down to Glastonbury, as she’d noticed a pub come up for sale.’

That chance mention set some seriously speedy wheels in motion. Within a month or two of seeing the site Ayesha had remortgaged her flat, moved to Glastonbury and opened Queen of Cups in May 2021. Immediately she began cooking the food she wanted to without any real rules. It was Middle Eastern in nature but very much brimming with Ayesha’s own personality; inauthentic from a geographical or historical point of view, but very much a culmination of her interests and experience to date.

It’s difficult to define the menu at Queen of Cups. Sure, local, seasonal British produce meets Middle Eastern technique and lesser-known Jordanian ingredients, but it’s really Ayesha’s ability to weave her own identity through every dish that makes a meal there stand out. Labneh is infused with wild garlic and scattered with a za’atar pangrattato; venison is rubbed in kamouneh spices and served with nasturtium oil with a coffee jus. There’s always something on the menu you won’t have seen or tasted before, and it feels like you wouldn’t find this sort of cooking anywhere else in the world. No wonder it has a Michelin Bib Gourmand and is in the Estrella Damm Top 50 Gastropubs.

The future will no doubt always focus on the restaurant, but Ayesha has her sights set on more TV work and writing a cookbook if time and opportunity allows. ‘I’ll find any excuse to talk about what I love,’ she says. ‘I’m keen to do it all, really – and I see no reason why I shouldn’t want all of that.’