Plant-based restaurant pioneer Bobsy Gaia’s journey from war-torn Beirut to Hong Kong

Making an entrance I was born on November 23, 1964, in Beirut, Lebanon. My father is half-Lebanese, and was involved in running the family business. My mother is English. Mummy thought she wasn’t going to pop for a few more weeks. So off she went to a house party with daddy and ate some spicy food.

She started feeling a bit off and ran to the loo, thinking it was indigestion. To her surprise, her water broke and she thinks she saw my head pop out. Luckily, the hospital was round the corner. She and daddy jumped in the car, and I was born quickly and without fuss. Mummy has always said I was excited to come into this world.

War child April 13, 1975, was the day the Lebanese civil war started. It was a school day. But mummy woke us and said, “You’re not going to school.” This was music to my ears because I never liked school. She told us that men from Pierre Gemayel’s Christian Lebanese Phalanges Party had ambushed a bus, killing more than 25 passengers. I was only 10, too young to understand what was going on politi­cally. But that was how the civil war broke into my con­scious­ness.

For the next month, life went on as usual – until our school bus was nearly hijacked. We lived in the Christian, eastern part of Beirut, but our school, Charlie Saad High School, was beyond the Muslim western part. Our school bus was stopped on the way home by Palestinian gunmen who got on and started shouting. It was a moment of absolute terror. Thankfully, the bus driver talked sense into the gunmen and we got home safely. After that, we changed to a school in our area.

Bangkok bound Mummy had had enough. She moved back to the UK with my little sister. I didn’t see either of them again for almost 10 years. The next time I saw them was when I moved to the UK. It was 1984 and I got into art college in Hastings (then known as Hastings College of Arts and Technology), where mummy lived.