Receipts at Ibrahim Dogus’s Westminster Kitchen restaurant remind patrons: “Immigrants make Britain great”
“I GOT SHOT just below the belly,” says Ibrahim Dogus over a steak lunch at Westminster Kitchen Grill House, a meat-heavy establishment just across the river from Parliament. That incident was in 2002, when Mr Dogus was a young Kurdish community leader in north London. Today he owns a beer brand, four restaurants including Westminster Kitchen, runs the British Kebab Awards and serves as mayor of the borough of Lambeth.
The first lesson prospective MPs can learn from Mr Dogus’s rise is the importance of community support. Having arrived in Britain as a 14-year-old refugee from Turkey, he was elected leader of Halkevi, London’s Kurdish community centre, at 19. Overcoming sectarian divides was one of his main tasks. “I had to say, ‘You may have political differences in relation to what is going on in Turkey or Kurdistan. No problems. But we all live in London’,” he says.
This approach speaks to Mr Dogus’s second lesson: network, network, network. His first restaurant, within walking distance of Westminster, proved to be a convenient venue for lobbying MPs on Kurdish rights. In 2013 he launched the British Kebab Awards, which extended his reach. “You know who the key players are, so just give them the awards,” he told a colleague at the time, making short work of the complicated business of judging.
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Elizabeth Warren Says She Made $1.9 Million From Legal Work Over 30 YearsI’m a San Francisco-based reporter covering breaking news at Forbes. Previously, I’ve reported for USA Today, Business Insider, The San Francisco Business Times and San Jose Inside. I studied journalism at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and was an editor at The Daily Orange, the university’s independent student newspaper. Follow me on Twitter rachsandl or shoot me an email rsandlerforbes.com.
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