Jess Murphy did not set out to build a multicultural kitchen in Galway. In fact, when her award-winning restaurant first opened in 2011, she admits her approach to operating the business was all wrong.
“I was that competitive asshole chef when I opened this place,” she says. “My whole working life had been a competition, so I was competing with employees in the kitchen and not nurturing them. I grew up as a chef in the days of Marco Pierre White – it was no guts, no glory and women had to masculate themselves. You had to be one of the lads. I learned everything good in Kai, but I learned the hard way.”
I’m meeting the New Zealander turned Galway woman a few weeks after her trip to New York, where she was named the 2025 winner of the international Parabere Care award for her fair, sustainable and ethical approach to running a restaurant. The prestigious award recognises women-run hospitality businesses and owners who prioritise work-life integration.
Murphy’s staff – who at various times have come from Afghanistan, Georgia, Syria and Jordan – are testament to her open-minded attitude to hiring. Bringing together cooking practices from parts of Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, Kai restaurant has a varied, internationally inspired menu, using local ingredients, attracting diners from across the country.
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Yet, Murphy is loath to be cast as a white saviour building a “United Nations of food” in her kitchen. The mixed backgrounds of her staff are a “completely organic” development and not a targeted approach, she says. “It’s the same with women, more women work for me now. But you take what you can get. This is not a Miss World contest of employees.
“Everybody’s equal in my kitchen – whether you wash dishes or cook on an open fire grill, you’re all the same. We train our kitchen porters like I was trained. We all washed dishes and then worked ourselves up. The best chefs in the world come from the sink because it teaches you everything. I always look back at my kitchen porter days and I’m like man, that was such a privilege. It was heavy on the work but easy on the mind.”
Born and brought up in the town of Wairoa on New Zealand‘s north island, Murphy dropped out of school aged 15 and started her first job as a kitchen porter the following year. She washed dishes in a steakhouse at night to put herself through culinary school, and booked a one-way ticket to Australia aged 20 where she subsequently met and married her Irish husband, Dave. After stints working in kitchens in Wales, and back in New Zealand, the couple moved to Ireland in the early 2000s, where Murphy honed her craft working under Kevin Thornton in his Michelin-star restaurant in the Fitzwilliam Hotel.
“We lived like backpackers until we got a one-bedroom bedsit,” she recalls. “It was a crazy time but an amazing experience. I know now how to bone out a pig’s head, turn it into a sausage and marinate it in poitín for six weeks. He taught me a lot about Irish food – about Irish apples, different potato varieties, how to respect ancient Irish cooking practices like with cheese and milk.”
In 2006, Murphy and her husband packed up their belongings again and moved to Galway. After stints as head chef with ArdBia restaurant and work with Sheridan’s Cheesemongers and the now-closed Bar 8, the couple opened Kai restaurant in 2011. It wasn’t until six years later, in 2017, that Murphy’s culinary expertise introduced her to a new cohort of Galway residents living in a local international protection accommodation centre.
“It just so happened that a good friend of mine was hosting a dinner with some guys in direct provision and he asked me to run the kitchen. I was a big travel buff and there were lots of Syrians there at the time. There had been lots of talk about how the Irish lost their food culture during the famine but I felt, no one is keeping track of these guys who are moving to Ireland. Let’s just make sure the same thing doesn’t happen to them and their food, and let’s start recording their recipes.
“I’m not a psychologist, I can’t help these people fix most of their problems. But I am a chef and what food does is gives people their dignity back. There’s no borders with food, you don’t need to speak the same language. When you’re cooking, the light comes back into a person’s eyes.
“Sharing a mint tea, even pouring someone a glass of water, is the biggest dignity you can give someone. You’re saying, ‘Come into my house, I’ll get you that glass of water, I’ll sit down while you drink your tea’.”
Sous-chef in the Kai kitchen, Mexican-American Jade Montoya, agrees that an appreciation of food is the easiest way to overcome cultural barriers. Brought up in New Mexico in a household where she was encouraged to speak English rather than Spanish, Montoya only started to rediscover her Latin American heritage as an adult.
“My parents were raised at a time when it wasn’t okay to speak Spanish and there was a pressure to be Americanised and get away from Mexican culture. I’ve been putting a lot of effort into connecting myself back to that culture, and food has been the easiest way to do that.”
Before moving to Ireland last year to join her wife, Montoya spent 22 years living in the city of Phoenix in Arizona. Watching the anti-immigrant crackdown that has become synonymous with the Trump administration play out among friends and former colleagues makes “my heart ache”, says Montoya.
All that negativity about issues like the housing crisis, that has nothing to do with Abdul down the road, that’s to do with our Government
— Jess Murphy
“I have friends who are worried they are going to be pulled over by Ice (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) because of their immigration status.” What many supporters of Trump’s immigration policies don’t realise is the US restaurant system is “run on the backs of immigrants”, she says. “You cannot find a single kitchen in the US that does not have a backbone of immigrants.
“Irish people can learn that this American narrative of walls and differences between cultures is actually non-existent. We’re all just human beings trying to survive and get by, day by day. People here could learn to let go of these prejudices and just realise we’re all doing the same thing, just trying to get by.”
Ali Ghulamali, who has lived for in Ireland for four years and recently applied for citizenship, believes Ireland is a “calmer, safer” place for people seeking asylum when compared to other European countries. The Afghan teacher, now a kitchen porter in Kai, fled his home country via Iran and Turkey before crossing the Aegean Sea by boat to the Greek island of Lesbos, where he spent two years in a refugee camp. He was advised to leave before the 2021 Taliban takeover because his job with a German company working with displaced children made him a target under the new authoritarian regime.
Ghulamali left behind his wife, with whom he speaks daily via FaceTime. “As soon as I got my (refugee) papers I applied for my wife to come here. I miss her a lot, it would be very good to have her with me here. Now she is stuck at home, she can’t leave the house any more.
“Before the Taliban women worked in offices like here, with no problems. But now things are very bad, very dangerous for women. That makes me sad of course.”
Under Taliban rule, women cannot speak or show their faces outside their homes, cannot be heard singing or reading aloud inside their homes, cannot look directly at men they are not related to by blood or marriage, are barred from attending school and must be veiled from head to toe when they leave their homes.
“We all want her to come here,” says Murphy, who provided a support reference for Ghulamali’s family reunification application for his wife. “I want her to be able to come into Kai and have a cappuccino and wait for Ali to finish work, the normal things wives and partners do.”
In recent years, Murphy’s staff have included people from Mauritius, Ghana, Spain, Germany, Australia and New Zealand. This diversity reflects the general population living in Ireland, she says. The growing anti-immigrant, xenophobic rhetoric which is slowly but steadily gaining ground in certain parts of Irish society is not reflective of the real Ireland most people live in, she adds.
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“As somebody who is an immigrant themselves, that’s not my Ireland, the Ireland I’ve made my home. All that negativity about issues like the housing crisis, that has nothing to do with Abdul down the road, that’s to do with our Government. The same Government which is killing small to medium business owners every month. The amazing Irish I’ve trained are moving to England and Australia, so we’re left with the immigrants and foreigners.
“And with them here, our restaurants are getting better, our food is getting better, our farming is getting better. The food in Kai is Irish but it’s also about whoever’s working in the kitchen. If you happen to be from Turkey and you make mercimek lentil soup, then teach me how to make it. We could have khachapuri (cheese-filled bread) because the Georgian lads have been working.
“I’m a realist and I run a business, I’m not some hippy dippy. But Dave and I have ended up being parents to 25 people here and that has an umbrella effect. I trained one Georgian chef who now owns his own takeaway business in Tbilisi with his mum. I like that we have this legacy of Kai babies all over the world going back to their homes with what they learned here.”
