Aaliyah Rivers with her son Dean

This article is part of our ‘Welcome To Somers Town’ feature

THE day after the fatal shooting of 26-year-old Nahom Medhanie in March, Spicy Laass café gave out free tea and cake for shaken residents living in the surrounding streets.

So many people came that they did it again the next day, and the next, for the following seven days.

“We just did what we had to do,” said Aaliyah Rivers, who runs the Ossulston Street café with her partner Terry Sylvan.

“That’s someone’s child, that’s our child. That was our next generation. We did it for the community, to make people feel safe and together again.”

Spicy Laass also catered a vigil in Nahom’s memory last month, where Ms Rivers, who was a teaching assistant before she set up the cafe, realised he had been one of her students when he was at school.

Ms Rivers and Mr Sylvan opened Spicy Laass around a year ago, serving up a home-made menu of Pakistani and Grenadian dishes that are popular with King’s Cross tech workers and local families alike.

“Our food is cooked from scratch, with love, and our homemade patties are the cheapest and best in town,” added Ms Rivers, who has plans for a new build-your-own Desi burrito station at lunchtimes.

She moved to the area some 18 years ago, and it was while working as a TA that Ms Rivers became the “A to Z of Somers Town” – the go-to person for events and activities and a face in the community that all the parents knew.

After that, she worked at the Somers Town Community Association running sustainable cooking classes and compost scheme before moving over to the café that shares a building with the STCA.

She warned some community schemes which came with the arrival of tech giants in King’s Cross felt like “tick boxing”, adding: “People are struggling – our wages are not going up, the price of food and oil and gas and electricity are going up. It’s ridiculous. The little man always loses out and a lot more needs to be done.

“Even Google and Facebook need to pull their socks up. Somers Town is being squeezed. But if you gentrify everything, you’re not going to have the real people that know what built these walls.”

Spicy Laass is open Tuesday to Friday at 150 Ossulston Street, and available for private catering.