Mani Niall was a young cook when he heard the news that changed his life. He was the kitchen and catering manager at a vegetarian restaurant in the Fairfax district of Los Angeles, and one day his manager came to him with a request.
Michael Jackson had come in. He loved the food. He was “a vegetarian now,” and he wanted someone to bring meals to his studio.
Niall’s first delivery went to Quincy Jones’ Westlake studios, right in the middle of the “Thriller” recording sessions. He brought a red chile enchilada, a ginger-miso salad and blueberry bars. The secretary handed him $40 for an $18 order.
Within weeks he was dropping off food at the studio and at photo shoots. Before long he was cooking in Michael’s home. Michael’s favorite was a smoky red chile sauce from New Mexico, poured over enchiladas, nachos and potato skins. To cool things down, there was honey vanilla ice cream and cookies.
Niall went on to become Michael’s first private chef, from 1982 to 1985. In 2024 he wrote about those years in a first-person essay called “Midnight Snacks with Michael Jackson” for the food site California Eating. And he has talked about them on camera, too, so you can hear him describe in his own words what it was like to cook for Michael.
Michael’s first private chef talks about cooking for him
The night Niall remembers best came “just months” after they met.
At the time, the Jackson family home on Hayvenhurst, in Encino, California, was being renovated. Michael was renting a condo while the work went on, and that’s where Niall made him dinner.
When the meal was over, Michael did something nobody would expect from a man that famous. He sang for his supper.
“He finished up and began to serenade me, “See, you feed me, and I sing,” he chuckled as if he were embarrassed.”
Then came the song. Michael didn’t pick one of his own. “Then he launched into “Here, There and Everywhere” from Revolver,” Niall wrote. That’s a Beatles song from their 1966 album.
It’s hard to know how you’d even react to that. You’ve just cleared the plates, and Michael Jackson is singing a Beatles tune across the table, just for you.
When he finished, Michael asked a simple question. “Do you like The Beatles?”
Of course he did, Niall told him.
That’s when Michael dropped the name. “Well, Paul will be here next week. He and Linda are vegetarian, can you bring us lunch in the studio?”
Paul, as in Paul McCartney.
Niall did his best to keep a straight face. “I played it cool, but inside I was bubbling over,” he wrote. Then he turned and gaped at Michael. Looking back, he put it simply: “my life would never be the same.”
His essay doesn’t say what happened next with that lunch, so we’ll leave that part where he left it.
What we do know is that the work kept coming. Michael later hired Niall as his private chef for the 1984 Victory Tour with his brothers. The tour kicked off in Kansas City on July 6, 1984, and ran about five and a half months. That’s a lot of meals, on a lot of nights far from home.
Michael had paid him in song. Niall had his own goofy way of returning the favor. According to his author note, “Niall would occasionally do the moonwalk, badly, just to make the singer laugh.”