Oliver Mayerhoffer

Food started at home

I grew up in Cheltenham with a British mother and an Austrian father. Some of my earliest food memories are simple ones: vegetables from Richard’s garden next door, bread made by my Great Aunty Gabbi, and family holidays around Europe where the food changed with the place and the people cooking it.

Those memories came before any idea of writing about food. They taught me that a meal can carry a place, a family habit or a bit of someone’s history without needing to make a grand point of it.

India, aged sixteen

In 2006, I travelled through India with my childhood friend Eliot and our family friend Kumar. We moved by train and bus, from New Delhi and Jaipur to Rishikesh, Kerala and Mumbai, then north into Himachal Pradesh and Manali.

In Rishikesh, a holy man invited me to bathe in the Ganges. I wasn’t especially keen, but found it difficult to refuse. On the journey into the Himalayas, I couldn’t stop yawning; I still don’t know whether it was the altitude or nerves. A 4×4 rolled down the slope ahead of us. Manali stayed with me, and I would like to return with Natalia and Victor.

The trip did not make me an authority on India. It made me more curious about how food, faith, landscape and ordinary life belong together — and how much a visitor still has to learn.

Hospitality taught me to notice the details

My working life included hospitality experience in Austria and Oman, followed by a Mediterranean season connected with Spain. I also built businesses in online marketing and publishing. Across those different jobs, I learned to notice how places treat people, what makes service thoughtful, what the practical details cost and where a promise differs from the reality.

That is still how I like to travel: not just looking at the headline attraction, but noticing the meal, the welcome, the wait, the route back and the small details that affect how a place feels.

Natalia, Siberia and becoming a family

I met Natalia in the early hours at Lonely Beach on Koh Chang in 2014. Neither of us was looking for a relationship. I already knew the island from earlier visits, and Thailand was part of a longer, unsettled chapter of my life.

I had planned to meet my friend Robert in Australia, so I left Thailand to keep that promise. I stayed for roughly one to two months, then returned because I missed Natalia. We married in Krasnoyarsk, her home city in Siberia, in 2015. I remember how warmly her family and friends welcomed me. We also travelled in Russia, including taking the train to Irkutsk.

Our son Victor was born at Nathon Hospital on Koh Samui in November 2016. Visa and living arrangements shaped some of our decisions at the time, and Koh Samui was familiar ground. Our first family journey went from Koh Samui to Hua Hin, then Bangkok and Pattaya, where we lived for a time. Later we spent several years based in Cheltenham, with family routines and weekends in London, Cornwall and elsewhere in the UK. We returned to Asia in 2025.

Why Mangoes & Palm Trees means more to me now

I started Mangoes & Palm Trees in 2018 as a content-publishing project while working on other online businesses. After my brother Daniel died, and later my mother Julie and Natalia’s grandparents, Valentina and Victor Moskalenko, the work took on a different meaning.

By around 2024, the publication had become a living dedication to them — a way to keep recipes, places, family memories and the stories of people we meet. Working on it helped bring me back into the world. I want the work to honour the people we have lost, without making grief the whole story.

Now the archive keeps growing through the food we cook, the places we revisit, the people generous enough to share their stories, and the research needed when memory alone cannot confirm a detail.