London’s funniest food duo, Rhiannon Butler and Maria Georgiou, dish on why the creative industry is just playing pretend, the lost art of committing to your cringe, and their plot for an interactive food musical.
“We’re the classic comedy set-up,” Rhiannon tells me as I sit down for coffee with London’s funniest food scene duo, not far from their studio in Dalston.
“I was the height I am now,” Maria chimes in, “whereas I was very vertically challenged, like toddler size,” Rhiannon laughs.
The comedic-looking pair don’t just look fun. For almost a decade, Maria Georgiou and Rhiannon Butler have run the city’s most sought-after culinary experiences, combining fine food with comedy and design in unexpected ways.
What they call “the funnest job in the world” spans from hosting a pre-marathon dinner with Adidas to launch their lightest and fastest racing shoe ever, to running around town feeling up packaging for a hot sauce that cosplays as heat rub cream, the result of a collaboration with East London pizza parlour Dough Hands.
Yet, keeping that joy alive can be a hustle. Behind the scenes, they navigate an industry that seems to have forgotten how to play. Fuelled by a post-pandemic boom that spiked UK event marketing by 23% and pop-ups by 18%, the market is increasingly stiff.
It is a high-pressure trade where creatives are burned out by back-to-back Zoom calls, rigid brand guidelines, and demands for dull AI renders that substitute for moodboards. Social media kills the vibe further, stripping in-person experiences of joy and turning buzzwords like “community” into meaningless marketing speech.
So, should everyone in the creative industry be playing more? Mam Sham definitely think so — and despite what our parents taught us, they’re playing with food to prove it.
The duo had me at ‘hello’ with a stockpile of inside jokes, which they fired tirelessly throughout our conversation. At one point, they reveal their photo library, showing me candid shots of their friend group dressed up at one of their birthday parties: Maria as an eerily accurate George Michael and Rhiannon as Avril Lavigne.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do for our anniversary”, Maria says, “I think we should do this. We fucking need that. We need escapism”, she adds.
Growing up in London, they have been each other’s playmates since the first day of secondary school. “We were very childlike,” Rhiannon remembers of the days back at their all-girls school, where most of their peers were naturally into makeup and boys.
“We actually just wanted to muck about and play make-believe, and then that turned into us making films and things like that,” Maria says.
It’s obvious the two share the kind of closeness that can only flourish through trauma-bonding, from navigating school as quirky kids who loved The Warriors and Battle Royale to facing the grim reality of trying to break into the creative industry.
“No one would hire us,” they both confess. Rhiannon interned at an art gallery, while Maria exhausted herself in advertising agencies. Hospitality was their financial lifeline, as it often is for many creatives. “Joke’s on them,” Maria quips, “that’s where I found myself.”
The duo truly tried going down their own paths, but living a life where they weren’t together felt like playing pretend. They found their way back through Mam Sham, an idea born from their proximity to chefs and hospitality life, but also from their unshakeable drive to have a creative outlet.
Mam Sham’s first supper club, hosted almost a decade ago, saw an attendance of 80 people and featured produce from a last-minute shop at a greengrocer in Dalston.
“I think it was just me, [my friend] Luke and one other person in the kitchen, which was insane,” Rhiannon says. “It was all you can drink. For £35,” Maria adds. “It was pure.”
The name came from a chance wordplay. Both raised by their mothers and heavily influenced by early 2010’s “girlboss” feminism, they wanted a clear reference to women.
Their top choices — different translations of the word mum — were already taken online. One of them joked that the whole thing was “such shambles.” The two words mashed together, and Mam Sham got their punchline.
“I’m so glad we came up with a nonsense name that means nothing,” Rhiannon confesses. The signature never held them back, allowing them complete freedom to shape the business around whatever they wanted to play with next.
And play they did, building an extensive portfolio of edible visual gags. A holiday project shows a shiny silver box of “Mam Sham Christmas Co.” festive paper chains that swap actual craft paper for alternating strips of ham and Swiss cheese.
Their work for Paramore’s Hayley Williams transformed a song into a soft serve collaboration with bakery Flaky by Dee, serving it up in a retro supermarket juice carton branded with the lyrics, “100% pure ice in my OJ.”
In 2024, they brought the “Lesbian (R)evolution” to the table for Tinder UK’s Pride dinner, turning coming-out stories and queer stereotypes from the Lesbian Supper Club podcast into a high-concept feast featuring flannel shirt laundry detergent, edible boot polish, and concrete matcha ice cream.
After ten years in the business, though, the friends have learned it isn’t – at least, it can’t always be – kicks and giggles. On daily Zoom calls with agencies, they experience firsthand how devoid of playfulness the industry can be.
“So many peers will be like ‘Oh I’m so busy today, I’m on back-to-back calls from 8:00 am until 8:00 pm,” Maria notes. “You end up mirroring whoever you’re working with,” she adds.
“You wanna appease them slightly. And sometimes you do slip into a new role.” For them, the loss of playfulness in creative fields comes mostly from strict brand guidelines, cemented mood boards and even AI. “Lots of brands demand that you create an exact replica of what you’re going to make in AI before you’ve even designed it,” Maria says.
Ultimately, the partners yearn to keep that feeling of building up an idea alive, which only ever comes through throwing silly thoughts back and forth. “I’m sure you’ve had it with your friends,” she says, “‘it’s like ‘and then you could do this, and then this and this’ and you get like animated and excited.”
“I can literally bet you so much money that no one is having fun at those events.”
Maria Georgiou
Recently, brands quickly spotted an opportunity to use food to tell their stories, but it spawned a strange, unappetizing cultural paradox: we are obsessed with consuming food through our screens rather than our mouths.
According to Digiday, there has been a 30% surge in client demand for food content creators, because cooking videos offer a low-barrier, high-engagement way to hack the algorithm.
In an era defined by food insecurity and Ozempic-induced appetite loss, marketing has become weirdly food-centric. “Luxury is always the opposite of what’s going on,” Maria explains.
It creates a bizarre standard of aesthetic, untouchable dishes. “A lot of food that is being created you almost don’t want to touch,” Rhiannon says about the fashion industry’s notoriously complicated relationship with eating.
To capitalise on this visual feast, brands manufacture sterile dinners tailored entirely for the feed. But social media, the duo argues, is the ultimate killjoy. Because everything is produced for the screen, audiences already know influencers are simply paid to be there. “I can literally bet you so much money that no one is having fun at those events,” Maria asserts.
Yet, this highly curated approach is reaching a breaking point. A recent Food Trend Report for Marketing Professionals highlights that with food trends moving 4.4 times faster than they did seven years ago, audiences are experiencing fatigue and actively rebelling against artificial perfection, with 42% of consumers now only engaging with trends that feel authentically personal to them.
Rhiannon feels for new businesses forced to angle their entire existence through social media, which “likes it when you copy someone else. If you do someone else’s dance, if you do someone else’s song, if you do a trend. It likes reproduction”, says Maria, who often just wants to throw her phone in the sea.
The contrast to their early days is brutal. “The content wasn’t even important,” they remember. “We didn’t have to post five times a week, we did it for the IRL, not for the feed.”
Happily, not all brands fall into this trap. Take their work with Levi’s and pop star Sigrid, where they truly got to sit down with someone else’s creative work and interpret her music into a tangible feast, bringing the album to life with, say, “eyedrops that you can sprinkle on your dessert”.
Or their collaboration with Selfridges’ Joke Shop, where they fully embraced the theme by serving cocktails with disappearing inks and itching powder made of chilli flakes.
Still, Mam Sham’s vision shines brightest at their own signature supper clubs, running for almost ten years now. In the beginning, things were incredibly DIY, as they relied on friends to help out for free.
Now, putting on these massive events is incredibly expensive, meaning they more often than not need sponsors to keep ticket prices accessible. “We don’t want it to be a snooty £100 ticket event,” Rhiannon says. The demand is staggering: 7,000 people tried to get tickets for their last supper club, which sold out in just 30 seconds.
The concept is still the same: three comedy acts served with three courses in which the food is the punchline. They aren’t afraid of crossing boundaries and pushing their audience’s comfort zones. “We’re like, is that fucking mental? Are people gonna get it? But it’s our house,” Maria says.
For a charity event raising money for the Pad Project, they pulled off an infamous bloody tampon stunt. “You know in period ads how the blood is always blue?”, Rhiannon explains they wanted to mimic that. “Just by mistake it was the most perfect period blood looking Kool-Aid,” she laughs. “A rich, dark red, with lumps everywhere. We couldn’t have made it more perfect if we had tried.”
Everyone received their food packaged in Shampax boxes custom-designed by Maria. While some guests found it “fucking gross,” it brought out a feral energy in others.
“It was kind of like a social experiment,” Rhiannon remembers. “Almost like a witch’s coven. People were like ‘yes! Periods! And blood! And tampons!” she laughs. “That wasn’t okay for social media, for sure”, Maria joins.
If there are any other frontiers in food and creativity they still want to cross, that is a live musical. “We’ve written the songs for it already,” Rhiannon seems off-the-charts excited. “We’ll allocate full work days with this amazing friend, Milo, and we’ll go to the studio and record songs,” she says.
Reflecting on their decade-long journey and their evolution, Maria sums it up with a scene: “We’ve been in the conversation for ten years. We’ve gone to the toilet, and we’ve come back. We’re freshened up.”
For them, the future looks clear and bright: “the ten-year plan is, obviously we’ll do the musical, naturally it’ll hit the runway, we’ll then get a TV show, a film, then there’ll be the documentary,” Rhiannon predicts, “then we’ll probably get cancelled for something,” Maria laughs. “For being embarrassing.”
Ironically, the secret to Mam Sham is their complete refusal to avert to cringeness. “You’ll enjoy it more when you stop labelling it,” Maria says. “I just feel like to truly play, you need to detach yourself from what you’re going to be perceived as. And you need to actually commit to the bit.”
In an industry terrified of looking silly, caring too much about perception can become a trap. “If you put so much on how you’re being perceived. You’re going to lack control of that,” she notes, particularly about women’s experience.
“Also it’s a bit sad that people are being so worried about not being cringe or not being embarrassing. It restricts your play,” she continues. “It restricts how much you’re putting yourself out there. And it just makes you like everyone else.”
Ultimately, refusing to conform is what keeps them on top of London’s food scene. “What I love about Mam Sham is that we’ve never tried to create something different,” Maria concludes.
“It just is different because it’s just authentically who we are. And I think that if we were so concerned with not being embarrassing or not wanting to be judged. Then maybe we wouldn’t have done all the things that we’ve done.”
By the time we’re saying our goodbyes, the duo is figuring out where to go for lunch, and I must’ve let something slip about how cool it must be to work with your best friend. They laugh, mostly agreeingly.
They definitely feel lucky to be building this together, relying on their lifelong friendship to bring each other back to reality whenever one is “tripping out a bit”.
If they ever get too stressed, Maria tells me, they keep their egos checked by looking up to the true heroes of hospitality. “Dinner ladies do it every day,” Rhiannon laughs. “They’ll serve like, 400 children, and they’ll get it done by lunchtime. They’re just getting on with it.
“We’re just dinner ladies, really.”
Featured image courtesy of Mam Sham.