Founder & Head Chef · +258

Gabriella.
The cook behind Plus258.

Mozambican-raised. Portuguese-influenced. The food I cater is the food I was raised on — cooked on real fire, shared at long tables, no shortcuts. This is the story behind the catering.

My story

From the supposed-to-be career to the kitchen

I grew up in Mozambique, in a house that smelled of charcoal and piri-piri most evenings. My grandmother cooked, my mother cooked, my aunts cooked — and on weekends the whole street did too, because half of celebrating anything in Mozambique is feeding everyone who turned up.

That isn't, however, what I was raised to do. Like a lot of Mozambican kids, the conversation about my future skipped right past food: an engineer, a doctor, a lawyer — those were the acceptable answers. So I studied. I graduated. And somewhere between the diploma and the first job I realised the passion just wasn't there. It was somewhere else entirely — in the home cooking I'd grown up with, the food I made for the people I love.

Plus258 is what happened when I stopped arguing with that. The "+258" in the name is Mozambique's country code — my reminder, on every box and every menu, that every dish is a direct line back to the coast.

The cuisine I cook

Mozambican food, explained

People often ask me what Mozambican food is, and the honest answer is that it's the most enthusiastically borrowed cuisine you'll ever eat. Five hundred years of Portuguese trade brought olive oil, garlic, slow-cooked stews and dessert traditions. Indian influence — through Goa and the Indian Ocean trade routes — brought samosas, spice blends, and the habit of frying small parcels of flavour. African roots run underneath all of it: charcoal grilling, maize, coconut, peanut, dried fish, palm oil.

And tying everything together is piri-piri: the small bird's-eye chilli that gives Mozambican-Portuguese food its signature heat. We marinate chicken in it, dress fish with it, drizzle it over potatoes. It isn't there to be aggressive — it's there to lift everything else: the garlic, the lemon, the smoke.

When I cater an event, I'm cooking that cuisine. Not a softened European take on it. Not a pan-African generalisation. The actual food I grew up with — piri-peri chicken on the grill, charcoal- grilled fish with garlic and lemon, feijoada with rice, samosas and rissóis fried to order. If you've never had it, that's the best reason to book us.

How I cook

Three things I won't compromise on

01

Real fire

Charcoal grills give Mozambican food its character. I won't substitute a flat-top, a gas grill or an oven for it. If the venue can't accommodate charcoal, I tell you up front.

02

Hand-made

Every samosa I serve is hand-folded. Every rissol is hand-shaped. Mass-pressed versions are fine — they just aren't what I do.

03

Cooked for your guests, not for storage

I cook to be eaten that day. Nothing stays in the fridge for the next event. If we can't use it that day, we don't make it.

"You bring the occasion. I'll bring the feast — the actual one, the one I'd cook for my own family."

— Gabriella

Talk to me directly

Tell me about your event

Every booking goes through me personally — no call centre, no junior account manager. Send your date, guest count and what kind of day you're planning, and I'll come back to you with a tailored menu and a quote.

Send Gabriella your details