In 1997, in Amsterdam, Yotam Ottolenghi finished writing the last chapter of his master’s thesis on the ontological status of the photographic image in aesthetic and analytic philosophy, rode his bicycle to the post office, and sent copies of the manuscript home to Israel. It was his second year away. He was twenty-nine, and nearing the end of an adventure in indecision that began a few months after he had completed the coursework for a fast-track, interdisciplinary bachelor’s and graduate degree at Tel Aviv University—known among students as “the genius program,” because only fifteen freshmen a year were admitted—and decamped with his boyfriend to sample the famously accessible offerings of the city of marijuana cafés, Ecstasy raves, and breakfast hams. When he wasn’t celebrating his release from school, he worked. He edited the Hebrew pages of a Dutch-Jewish weekly known by the acronym NIW, plowed through the essays of Ernst Gombrich, passed the qualifying exams for a doctorate in the United States—he was thinking comparative literature, at Yale—sat through long nights as a desk clerk at the kind of hotel he wouldn’t recommend, and wrote his thesis. “I’m incredibly self-disciplined,” he says. “I never would have not written it.”
One copy went to his thesis adviser in Tel Aviv, and another to Yehuda Elkana, the philosopher who created the genius program. A third copy—“the one I dreaded sending”—went to his parents in Jerusalem, where his father was a chemistry professor at Hebrew University and his mother, a former teacher and herself the daughter of a professor, was at the Education Ministry, running the country’s high schools. It was a moment of truth, Ottolenghi says. He slipped a note into the envelope—“actually, buried it in the manuscript”—which read, “Here is my dissertation. I’ve decided to take a break from academia and go to cooking school.” A few months later, he was in London, rolling puff pastry at the Cordon Bleu.
The moral is that smart people can be masters of many trades, though Ottolenghi claims that it took him a lot longer to “really experience pastry with my hands” (six months) than to make his way through Hegel (an excruciating few weeks). At forty-three, he is not much changed from the recovering geek of his Amsterdam years—lanky, loping, and quite tall, with the same short, sticking-up dark hair and fashionably stubbled chin, and even a version of the same black-rimmed student glasses. The difference is that today he wears the happy smile of a man who has left behind “The Phenomenology of Mind” for baked eggplants with lemon thyme, za’atar, pomegranate seeds, and buttermilk-yogurt sauce—and, in the process, become the pen, prime mover, and public face of a partnership of four close colleagues who have quietly changed the way people in Britain shop and cook and eat.
At last count, his eponymous reach extended to two hugely popular London restaurants, the flagship Ottolenghi, in Islington, and, in Soho, nopi (for North of Piccadilly, but known to foodies as “Ottolenghi’s new place”), as well as three packed gourmet delis, in Notting Hill, Kensington, and Belgravia, which are never without his favorite pastries and his signature platters of butternut-squash salad, roasted aubergine with yogurt topping, grilled broccoli with chili and fried garlic, and fresh green beans. The delis, along with the Islington restaurant, also provide a catering service that will deliver a dinner party to your door or, if you happen to be the Queen, put together a groaning board of snacks (as in “golden and candy beetroot, orange, and olive salad with goat’s cheese, red onion, mint, pumpkin seeds, and orange blossom dressing”) for the eight hundred and fifty people sipping champagne at your jubilee party at the Royal Academy of Arts.
Ottolenghi himself is the author of a weekly food-and-recipe column in the Guardian and a visually irresistible vegetable cookbook called “Plenty”—proof that an education in aesthetics is never wasted—and, with Sami Tamimi, his Palestinian executive chef and one of the early Ottolenghi partners, the co-author of two other cookbooks, the latest of which, “Jerusalem,” is about the food of their home town and the rich symbiosis of Arab and Jewish culinary traditions that survives in the markets and kitchens of an otherwise fractured city. (The book came out in Britain and America this fall, but the British got a preview late last year, when Ottolenghi became the peripatetic guide and narrator of a BBC documentary about his research, “Jerusalem on a Plate.”)
No one who has grown up in the Mediterranean Middle East can really live without the colors and textures and tastes of home. The food that Ottolenghi serves and writes about often includes them all, but it isn’t ethnic cooking, grounded in one tradition, and it certainly isn’t fusion cooking, or its muddled suburban hybrids. He uses the fish and meat and produce that everyone in Britain eats, and then, he says, “borrows from here and there” the tastes that will produce a recipe he likes. His instincts are collaborative and practical. When he started the Guardian column, six years ago, he wanted to create recipes that a home cook could pretty much put together from the shelves of a decent supermarket. (At first, he sent them to friends to test. His bottom line: a harried child-minder in Hackney, with two children of her own to feed.) He was wrong about supermarkets. But his column was so successful that the chain Waitrose began to stock his favorite condiments and spices. And he eventually launched an extensive online catalogue, in the hope of restoring domestic calm to readers like the woman who wanted to make his whitefish-grapefruit-and-fennel seviche. She ignored his advice about the quarter teaspoon of dried fennel pollen—“Don’t worry if you can’t get it, though. This cured fish dish will still taste great”—and wrote to the paper, “I’m a bit of a Yotam fan, but his mere mention fills my husband (who does most of the shopping) with dread. This week’s ‘dried fennel pollen’ might send him over the edge.”
Ottolenghi’s first word was ma. He didn’t mean “mama,” and he didn’t mean marak, which is “soup” in Hebrew. He meant the croutons that his mother scattered on the tray of his high chair while the soup was simmering. (“Store-bought croutons,” he maintains.) He can still name everything his parents cooked, from his mother’s beef curry, stuffed red peppers, and gazpacho to his father’s polpettone and polenta. His older sister, Tirza Florentin—a businesswoman who lives in Tel Aviv with her family—says that, as a boy in Jerusalem, he was “very passionate about food,” but much more interested in talking about what he ate and where it came from than in actually cooking any. It was a household of cosmopolitan tastes and backgrounds. Ottolenghi’s mother, who comes from a Berlin Jewish academic family (her uncle was the modernist architect and critic Julius Posener), had arrived in Palestine via Sweden, where she was born, in 1938, the same year that his father’s Florentine merchant family arrived from Italy. Two prominent, secular, Zionist clans had pulled up stakes in the wake of the Hitler-Mussolini military pact and, with it, the certainty of disaster.
Ottolenghi calls them a “strong-minded” and resilient people—smart (one grandfather started the mathematics department at Tel Aviv University) and, like him, masters of many trades (one grandmother worked for Mossad, forging documents for the agents who, most famously, captured Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires and delivered him to an Israeli prison). His sister calls it a family of high unstated expectations “that were simply something we grew into.” The burden of them fell on Yotam when he was twenty-three, and his younger brother, Yiftach, was killed by friendly fire during field exercises toward the end of his military service. “For Yotam, I think it was a tragedy on top of a tragedy,” Florentin says. “Yiftach had been the star; he was outspoken, charming, always in trouble—making us laugh—and very bright. Yotam was the reserved one then. And, like me, he was in a kind of under-the-surface competition with our brother. He wanted to find his niche. When Yiftach died, we were very concerned about how my father would get through the loss. He was a conservative person, which made it terrible for Yotam. Not talking to him about being gay—that was the price he had to pay for a long time.”
Every Israeli boy spends three years immediately after high school in the Israel Defense Force. (Girls spend two.) Ottolenghi had studied Arabic in school—in part, in the hope of avoiding assignment to a fighting unit. He succeeded, and went to Army-intelligence headquarters instead. “Otherwise, I was a conformist boy,” he says. “I studied physics and math because my best friend was good at that, but I was really much more interested in literature. I read a lot in the Army, I had a good time, and made lots of friends, and went home at night for dinner.” A few months before his discharge, he fell in love with a twenty-five-year-old Tel Aviv psychology student named Noam Bar, and that fall—after a summer in Berlin, learning German—he moved to Tel Aviv, started college, and began experimenting with his father’s Florentine pasta sauces. (Bar did the dishes.) He also managed to land a part-time job on the news desk at Haaretz. “I’d arrive at four-thirty in the afternoon, when the news was coming in fast,” he says. “It was very exhilarating—everybody was young, everybody smoked. I was going to become a journalist if not a chef.” His parents were still thinking “a professor.” Four years later, with a thesis to write, he left for Amsterdam with Bar. “We arrived the month of the Rabin assassination, and joined the demonstration,” he says. “That death was the end of a moment of high optimism at home. Israel became a very closed culture again, living according to its own rules. There was a desire growing in me to live somewhere else.”
In Amsterdam, he began to cook in earnest. He prowled the fishmongers for mackerel and herring. He stopped at the butchers he passed for bones, and made his own stocks. He roasted, sautéed, and baked his way through Julia Child, started ordering from Books for Cooks, and “cooked for everyone who asked.” So many people did ask that, at dinnertime, his walkup, on Herengracht, turned into an open house. “We were his guinea pigs,” a Tel Aviv friend named Ilan Safit, who was studying in Amsterdam at the time, told me. “I had a Dutch girlfriend. We were living practically hand to mouth, but even after we got married we must have eaten at Yotam’s every other night. He loved the kitchen. He was obviously an intellectual—a first-class intellectual—but he wasn’t happy writing philosophy in his study. He was happy feeding people. He said, ‘Ilan, I don’t want to go back to academia, I don’t want to live with books.’ ’’
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His father was shocked. “This is not a very good idea” was his reply to the note buried in Ottolenghi’s thesis. His adviser, Ruth Ronen, puts it this way: “Cooking? It was like a metamorphosis, it was so extreme. His thesis was excellent, very thoughtful and intriguing. He had a natural inclination to philosophy—you could feel the urge—and the world of cooking was so far from that; I couldn’t even see the connection. Was I disappointed? In a way, yes.” But his sister told him, “This is the coolest thing.” His mother wanted to see him happy. And his old mentor, Yehuda Elkana (who died in Jerusalem this fall), even claimed some credit for the change. “We had hundreds of candidates for the program,” he told me. “We were looking for the few who had an original attitude to something in life. It could be anything. How you made love, how you made bread, how you ‘made’ philosophy. Yotam had that curiosity and enthusiasm. He would come to my home, and I’d cook for him. I’m a very good cook, so I may have had an influence. Even then, he was proof that the division academics make between ‘cognitive’ and ‘emotional’ is bullshit.”
Ottolenghi still makes the puff pastry that he learned at the Cordon Bleu. He loved the pastry part of his cooking course; he found “the physicality of pastry” soothing. But he found the savory part—which, in the hierarchy of professional kitchens, is called “cuisine”—so pressured and unnerving that it nearly ended his new career. “I thought, This will only get worse,” he says, and it did. His first cooking job was a trial run at a London restaurant called the Capital. He spent three mind-numbing months whipping egg whites for the pastry chef to fold, and then was promoted to full time in the cold-starter section. “On my first day, the sous-chef said, ‘O.K., now make me a lobster bisque and an amuse-bouche.’ It was terrifying. I couldn’t sleep all night, and by the middle of the next day I was so exhausted that I took my scooter and went home and never went back. I said to Noam, ‘This is not a normal job.’ ”
He was rescued by the well-known London chef Rowley Leigh—an experience on the order of starting out in New York with, say, Daniel Boulud. (“Not charitable, but sweet,” Ottolenghi describes him. “I doubt if he likes my food.”) Leigh placed him at a small restaurant that he had opened in Kensington called Launceston Place, where he quickly became the pastry chef. “I could do what I did best, and I was really teaching myself, because the menu was basically French-English, and French pastry wasn’t my thing. I wanted the vibrancy and freshness of California pastry”—the Ottolenghis had spent a sabbatical year in Mill Valley, when Yotam was ten—“so I bought Alice Waters, and Emily Luchetti’s ‘Stars Desserts.’ I made fresh-fruit galettes and meringue pies. I stayed a year and got a lot of confidence. You can do that with pastry; you learn a certain range of processes, and it’s very contained. I began to think that maybe I had a pastry talent and should get a pâtisserie job—see how it all worked, napoleons, pâte à choux, crème pâtisserie.”
He went to work for a chain of bakeries—a franchise spinoff of the entrepreneurial restaurateur Raymond Blanc. The bakery turned out to be a factory, where the crème pâtisserie came out of a machine. Plus, it was freezing. “Fifteen degrees,” Ottolenghi says. “The guy next to me said we’d be warmer driving a minicab. I did twenty-five shifts, and, on the one where I worked a machine that poured chocolate mousse into sponge cake, I decided that this was not what I needed to know to further my career.” A few days later, he got on his scooter and rode up and down the streets of central London, “searching for bakeries that looked exciting.” On a quiet street in Knightsbridge, he spotted a small traiteur called Baker & Spice, peered through the window, and ran in. “It was completely magical,” he says. “I saw all these walls and counters covered with a marvellous mix of food. There were Middle Eastern salads, Italian Caprese salads, rotisserie chickens, even char-grilled broccoli, and you could see into a small kitchen open to a mews garden, full of light. You could even see Ringo Starr’s house.” A young chef, about his own age, came out of the kitchen and said, “I’m Sami. I’m from Tel Aviv.” Ottolenghi said, “Me, too.”
Sami Tamimi was seventeen when he moved out of his father’s house, in the Old City of East Jerusalem. It wasn’t entirely his decision. “My family was a very traditional Muslim house,” he told me one day in Acton, in West London, where he lives with an English property-research analyst named Jeremy Kelly, his partner of eight years. We were in the kitchen. I had found him making a cheesecake for us to have with coffee; the cake was from a television recipe he had just downloaded, but the gesture of hospitality was timeless, tacit, and very Arab. “I had six siblings and five step-siblings; every time I came home, there was another baby born. And when the whole sexual thing came up—well, in Palestine you can’t tell anyone how you really feel. I was fifteen when I left school; I always knew there was something else in life.” At the time, Tamimi was working at the Mount Zion, a West Jerusalem hotel whose German chef, seeing the makings of a cook, had promoted him from kitchen porter to “head breakfast chef,” a job Tamimi describes as an education in scrambled eggs. Three years later, he said goodbye to his friends, and left for Tel Aviv.
He says that he could “breathe” in Tel Aviv, a city as open then as Jerusalem was staid. He acquired an Anglo-Israeli boyfriend and a decent restaurant job, discovered his talent for catering home-cooked food (“After all those years of dreaming about European food, I realized that the food I grew up with was the food I did best”), and settled into the kind of “good” neighborhood that he describes dryly as “quite unusual for an Arab living in Tel Aviv.” He stayed for the next twelve years. He liked the city—the freedom he’d felt at first, the European cafés and restaurants, and, above all, the chef’s job that he eventually found at Lilith, a fashionable new brasserie whose owner, a transplanted American, served an eclectic “California-Mediterranean” mix of grilled meats and vegetables that was, in many ways, a version of the kind of food Tamimi cooks now. One night, a woman visiting from England ate at Lilith and asked to meet him. She said that she loved his food, and that there would always be a job waiting for him, with her, in London. In 1997, he called the woman, got on a plane, and started working at Baker & Spice—“creating the concept” that made Ottolenghi stop his scooter, on a spring day two years later, and run in, asking for a job.
“We clicked as friends, right away,” Tamimi says. “It was an ‘everything’ mesh. We came from the same place, we tasted food in the same way. And, of course, our cooking was very similar. We both wanted to surprise, but we also wanted our food to taste ‘comfortable.’ Our feeling was: pick good ingredients and let them speak.” They worked together in Knightsbridge for about two years—with Tamimi running savory and Ottolenghi eventually running pastry—and talked, from time to time, about someday opening a place together. In the fall of 2001, Ottolenghi left to find one. Tamimi stayed. “For months, I was thinking yes, no, yes, no,” he says. “Then Yotam asked me to join him, and a few weeks later it was yes.” The Notting Hill deli opened with a bright-red “Ottolenghi” painted in block letters above the door. I asked Tamimi if he thought it should have had his name, too, and he shook his head: “It was Yotam’s vision and his dream. The work was his. The stake was his. I didn’t have money to invest. He risked everything he had. A few years later, I became a partner, but regardless of the cookbooks we do, regardless of our friendship, I’m still working for Yotam. He’s my boss.”
Tamimi writes poetry, in Arabic, and paints. There is a haunting gouache on his living-room wall—lines of script painted over with bright-yellow flowers and green leaves. The poem, he told me, is “about the things you’re supposed to remember and the things you have to forget”; the flowers are “the way I felt after it was written.” There are layers of irony (or innocence) in a lot of what Tamimi says, and, perhaps because of this, he stays away from the kind of exposure that Ottolenghi is able to embrace—and weather. When they worked on “Jerusalem,” it was Ottolenghi who did the travelling, the interviewing, and nearly all the writing, but it was Tamimi who in many ways talked him through the experience. “We’d sit down and think about little things we’d done as children—things associated with a recipe,” Tamimi says. “We’d tell stories. We’d compare the smells and tastes and sounds that were our memories of food. It was mind-blowing, for me, to be re-created through that book.” This fall, he went with Ottolenghi on two “Jerusalem” book tours—first in England, then in Canada and the United States—and admits to having enjoyed them both. He discovered two nephews looking for him on Facebook, and even talked by phone to a brother who hadn’t spoken to him since the day that, as a gay man, he became unwelcome in their father’s house. He and Kelly are going to East Jerusalem for a week at Christmas—his first trip to Israel in nine years. (He had told me that after the second intifada started, in 2000, visiting “became unbearable, the hatred on both sides was too intense.”) “I don’t know what will happen, but I’m going,” he says. “We’ll see.”
In Acton that day, he said, “I’m very private. I don’t think I’m built to be Yotam’s sort of famous person.” Ottolenghi—who stopped cooking at the restaurant and deli kitchens when he took on the column and, with it, the job of creating, testing, and writing new recipes each week—still visits them almost every day, to check out the food and talk to the chefs and the staff. The customers recognize him. They stop him to say hello. They ask about recipes. Some take out their smartphones and ask him to pose with them for a picture. (He obliges.) Tamimi never leaves the kitchen if he can help it, and he shoos away any customer (including me) who invades his space during lunch or dinner service, hoping to watch him work. “I’m happy in our kitchens,” he told me. “I divide my week between them, working with the chefs all day, and you can’t do that and have a public image. It would be easy for me to visit a kitchen, taste, and leave, but my idea of teaching our chefs is to work with them, to work as hard as they work—to compete. They’re young, they respect that, and I like passing what I know to other generations. I have so much knowledge in my head that it just comes out. You spend your life learning, and a time comes when you want to share it.”
Ottolenghi likes to write. “He wasn’t interested in sports,” his mother says. “He was interested in trying his hand at a short story.” He expects that, one day, he will produce a book about food that isn’t a cookbook—something literary, maybe a memoir full of experiences and ideas. “Jerusalem” includes his nimble, often eloquent evocations of the city and its multitude of different peoples, and of the helplessness both he and Tamimi feel as “that elusive dream of peace in the Middle East” fades. He put it this way: “It takes a giant leap of faith, but we are happy to take it—what have we got to lose?—to imagine that hummus will eventually bring Jerusalemites together, if nothing else will.”
In the fall of 2004, a literary agent named Felicity Rubinstein, who lived a few blocks from the Notting Hill deli, suggested that Ottolenghi write a cookbook. She wasn’t thinking about literature. “I wanted the recipes,” she says. “I was shopping at Yotam’s all the time—the food was different from anything I’d ever eaten—but I was spending a lot of money there. I thought, I could do this myself if I had a book.” At the time, Ottolenghi had only one deli, and the Islington restaurant had just opened. He was working at both kitchens with Tamimi, doing pastry or savory or both, as the need arose. They were absorbing each other’s recipes and techniques. His ideas for a book were, perhaps, still more philosophical than gastronomic. “I heard back that it was ‘maybe no recipes, maybe no paper,’ ” Rubinstein says. She told him to think again.
A year later, with the Kensington deli open, he was ready. By then, he had established a name, and also what in the restaurant trade is called a “look”—thanks, in large part, to a commuting Israeli architect and friend named Alex Meitlis, whom he credits with the clean, white, laid-back elegance that all the Ottolenghis share, from the red logo on their white menus to the chairs and countertops and tables. (Meitlis told me, “Yotam has absolutely no ego when it comes to how much of the aesthetic success is his.”) His one problem was the limited reach of his reputation. He had a big following in the trendy boroughs of central London, but not much farther, and to fast-track that to a good book deal, as they would have said in the genius program, his choice was apparently between flinging pots and flipping fritters, as a wannabe television-chef celebrity, and producing a weekly column in the kind of national newspaper whose readers would like his butternut-squash salads and his green beans. The Guardian was “inevitable,” Rubinstein says.
Ottolenghi isn’t a vegetarian. He once told me that he hadn’t left the country of “no seafood, no pork” in order to cook for people who wouldn’t eat anything but plants. But many of the customers who ate his beans and salads assumed that he was one of those people—and, as it turned out, the only available space in the Guardian’s overflowing food pages was the “vegetarian slot.” The slot had for years been filled by Rose Elliot, an ardent herbivore and astrologer with an army of sandal-wearing fans, who had departed the paper with an M.B.E. and the royalties from more than fifty books waiting in the bank.
At first, Ottolenghi thought he should refuse the column. He said this to me one night at nopi, as we were sitting down to a carnivore’s feast of sharing dishes that began with gurnard, a fish from the Celtic Sea, which the chef, a Malaysian from Australia, had filleted into a beautiful chunk of white flesh, marinated in a complex curry-lime-and-coconut paste, wrapped in a pandan leaf, steamed, and served with a pineapple sambal. (Not for the home cook.) Ottolenghi, who has a huge appetite, had ordered half the dishes on the menu. We finished the fish, cleaned a plate of zucchini-and-manouri-cheese fritters with lime yogurt, and moved on to a baby chicken—simmered for an hour, marinated overnight in Asian wine and spices, then flash-fried crisp—so tender that you could munch the bones. We washed them down with a good, light Austrian white, and I asked him what changed his mind. “My agent,” he said. “She told me, ‘Yotam, beggars can’t be choosers. The day you take that column, you’ll get a book deal.’ ” He took the column, and three months later he had the deal. His first recipe was for “seriously zesty bread salad,” which appeared with the addendum: “Will taste amazing alongside a piece of slightly charred meat from the barbecue.” There were so many letters that week from angry readers that, despite his frequent pleas “to get my brief expanded,” he had to swear off any mention of flesh until the fall of 2010, when Merope Mills, the editor of the Guardian Weekend and a “big Yotam advocate,” called to say, “The shackles have lifted—write anything you want.”
By then, of course, he was seriously into vegetables, and today at least one recipe of the two or three in each of his columns remains a vegetable dish. “I found it appealing—the idea of celebrating vegetables or pulses without making them taste like meat, or as complements to meat, but to be what they are,” he says. “It does no favor to vegetarians, making vegetables second best.” In his first cookbook, “Ottolenghi,” vegetable dishes were often spiked with a bit of meat: try the caramelized endive, smothered in bread crumbs, Parmesan, thyme, and cream, and roasted with a topping of serrano ham. With “Plenty”—a collection, for the most part, of his favorite vegetarian columns—the vegetables stood alone, their ontological status deliciously revealed. The book, which sold nearly half a million copies in Britain, became a best-seller in Germany, Holland, and America. A Russian translation is on the way.
Noam Bar, who moved to London with Ottolenghi in 1997, doesn’t cook. Nor, in fact, was he still living with Ottolenghi when the Notting Hill deli opened, five years later. But he had remained Ottolenghi’s closest friend—“the one person in the world who I knew would never let me down,” Ottolenghi says—and had also become his business partner, the éminence grise of the operation. “Our M.B.A.,” Ottolenghi calls him. “He put the company together.” It was Bar who pushed Ottolenghi to open his own place, searched with him for the right place, structured a backers’ prospectus that would spread the risk among small investors (who are “more than satisfied,” he says), and, over the years, has sat at the negotiating table for every one of Ottolenghi’s contracts. “Noam’s the one who rattles the cage,” Ottolenghi told me. Rubinstein put it this way: “He’s more abrasive than Yotam, but he’s much softer than he appears, and Yotam is much steelier than he seems.”
Bar is another polymath. He grew up in Haifa, where his father—a Polish Jew and a Holocaust survivor—was a chemical engineer and his mother taught literature and Bible studies at a junior high school. “I had a problem with Haifa,” he said, in the middle of a conversation one morning at his house in Hammersmith. “I couldn’t express myself in that middle-class city. Actually, I couldn’t express myself in Israel. It was opera seria then. Today, it takes a lot out of me just to be there.” He has not stopped running since he left. In Amsterdam, he started a company that offered “premium-line telephone services” (horoscopes, dating, and the weather). The Internet killed it. In London, he went back to school for his business degree, and in 2000, when he and Ottolenghi ended their nine-year affair—a parting that left them both shattered—he flew to Dharamsala to meditate and study Tibetan medicine. A year later, he was back in London, getting a degree in homeopathy, which he still practices, in Marylebone, twice a week. When he can get away, he flies to Tanzania and volunteers with a homeopathic project that provides supportive treatment to aids victims. The rest of his time is spent keeping the Ottolenghi brand current—“Jerusalem” was originally his idea—profitable, and realistic. Meitlis calls him “the wind behind everybody’s wings.”
“My job at Ottolenghi is asking the ‘now what, now where’ question—it’s about strategy, about keeping an edge,” Bar told me. “Food is not my passion. Nothing infuriates Yotam more than me in the kitchen, making comments about the food. My passion is the organism—it’s about people working together with a sense of movement and purpose.” He says of Ottolenghi and Tamimi, “Yotam is inventive; he has the ultimate, the most discerning, palate. Sami is more traditional, but he’s the kitchen authority; his hand goes into the salt, and his fingers know it’s the right amount.”
And he says of himself, “I’m the one who’s either solving problems or looking for the next new thing. The fact is that most restaurants fail. You have to stay one step ahead. We were fine in Notting Hill for a while, but the back room was always too small. Then there was Islington. We know how to fix things now, but in 2004, when we bought Islington, we didn’t know what we were doing with a restaurant. It’s been a big success, but, at the beginning, I’d go for dinner, there would be eight people. Maybe. I’d want to slit my wrists. And Belgravia? We opened Belgravia in 2007, and it was another catchment. We’re still working on a hot breakfast there. Last year, the problem was nopi, because Soho is definitely another catchment. You can’t do an Islington there.” He meant that a couple of North London literati looking to sample and share, in Islington, after the curtain falls across the street at the Almeida, is not the same as a couple of testy businessmen walking a few blocks from their offices to Soho, looking to seal a deal. “We had to reinvent the wheel at every level, without making the mistake of ‘surprising’ at every level.”
Bar thrives on his intimations of disaster. “You have ten minutes of Noam, maximum,” their general manager and fourth partner, Cornelia Staeubli, says. “He gets bored, and he’s on another planet—or another problem that nobody else has seen. He loves change, and Yotam doesn’t. We will sometimes do Noam’s idea just to prove him wrong.” Bar says that their arguments are “loud but never personal. It was never difficult, working with Yotam on a new basis. We were always more than lovers. We had that deep trust; we broke up, I went to India, and a year later we had new lives, but we still had it. We’re very complementary. Yotam is measured. I’m forward-looking, always pushing. Yotam says, ‘Stop! Let’s wait and think.’ I say, ‘Let’s do it now!’ A restaurant is like a bicycle—if it stops moving, it has no life.”
The partners call themselves a family. They eat at one another’s houses, take vacations together, and occasionally even rent a house in the country together for a weekend, to reconnect—or, as Meitlis puts it, “to celebrate their different obsessions.” “Three gay guys and a mother hen” is how their friends describe them, which isn’t entirely accurate, since the family now includes their lovers and spouses and parents and brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews, and the list goes on. Staeubli, a blue-eyed Swiss beauty of forty-four, is, de facto, the mother hen. Bar calls her “the foreman,” and says he can see her “moving armies around in World War Two, calm and energized in a crisis.” Ottolenghi says, “She makes everything work.” She shares his obsession with “the context of food,” with the balance of buzz and quiet in a restaurant, and, especially, with the way the mood and clarity of its spaces can anticipate and echo the look and taste of the food in front of you on the table. “She’s tough, too,” he told me. “She’ll spot the one speck of dirt on the floor—the way I’ll see the one tart that’s badly displayed—and stand there until it’s gone. But there’s the other side. I’ve seen her go out and buy a sleeping bag for a waitress who didn’t have a bed. She looks after a staff of two hundred people. She takes care of us all.”
Staeubli comes from Goldau, a mountain town in the canton of Schwyz so remote that, when she left it, at nineteen, for an au-pair job in America, it had “maybe a thousand people, just like me.” She still talks about the thrill of landing at J.F.K.: “The smells, the elbows out, I loved it all. I loved that there were so many nationalities in those visa lines, everyone with the same goal—to start their lives.” (In her best of all possible worlds, she would open a New York Ottolenghi, “big, like Eataly.”) Her job turned out to be in a New Jersey suburb. The family was rich, the children spoiled, and after three months she decided that she was “not an au-pair person” and fled to the Lower East Side, where she waitressed happily until her visa expired and she had to go back to Switzerland. She stayed there for ten years, and, at thirty-two, quit the last of a series of dull office jobs and set off to see the world. She flew to Southeast Asia, and eventually on to Sydney in the middle of a winter so cold that she got on a bus for Queensland. The trip took forty-eight hours, and at the end of it she fell in love with a backpacking Englishman who had boarded along the way. They spent a week together in the sun, on Airlie Beach. Three months later, she arrived at Heathrow to the same multicultural mix of people that had delighted her in New York, and she and the man from the bus—a journalist named Peter Lowe, who is now the managing editor at Sky News—got married.
Nine years ago, Staeubli sold her half of a small Internet café-cum-restaurant that she and a friend had opened in Putney a year earlier, and went out looking for a job closer to the Notting Hill apartment where she and Lowe then lived. She passed a “Sales Assistant Wanted” sign in the window of the Notting Hill deli, met Ottolenghi, and started working the next day. “I came home that night crying,” she told me late one afternoon, over tea at their apartment. “I said to Peter, ‘I can’t do it, it’s too chaotic there.’ He said, ‘Try till Christmas.’ ” By April, she was managing the store. A year later, she was managing managers, and doing it so efficiently and agreeably that she was invited into the business. “I know I’m the ‘mother hen,’ ” she said. “I don’t have children of my own, so I like that. But I don’t mother them. I love them. I do the hiring, the staff, the managers, and the chefs. I fill in when someone on the staff’s away. My job is to make everything O.K.” She spends her days whizzing around London, from deli to restaurant to the next deli, and knows before anyone else when something’s wrong.
I asked her what, exactly, the problem had been at nopi, which opened in February last year and is now arguably one of the city’s hottest restaurants, and she said, “At first, it was all sharing plates, like Islington. I told Yotam, ‘We haven’t got the right customers here yet. We’ve got your most boring fans, the food bloggers and the ladies over fifty who sit with a glass of water and talk about your beautiful salads, and then order a single plate to share.’ Sharing is fine at night, but the rich guys we need for lunch in Soho, the ones with offices in the neighborhood, don’t want to be disturbed or distracted by the food. They don’t want a cluttered table. They want a main dish, fish or meat, and if they get that they’ll order a nice, expensive wine to wash it down. Yotam got that wrong.” (She meant he was nervous about diluting the Ottolenghi signature.) “But Noam and I fixed it. It didn’t take long. You can share tastes, or you can dig into your own big steak. We’re very popular now.”
On my last night in London, a Friday, Ottolenghi and I cooked from “Jerusalem” in the Notting Hill apartment that he shares with Karl Allen, a quirky and quietly impressive Northern Irishman whom he met at the gym twelve years ago—and married in September, in Massachusetts, where gay marriage has been legal for eight years. Allen, who is a law graduate, a former British Airways flight attendant, and a keen-eyed collector of vintage fifties antiques—he found the outsized cabbage-leaf chandelier that hangs like a flashy hat above the receptionist’s stand at nopi—has been managing the company’s Kensington deli since it opened, in 2005. (“You function at eighty per cent when you fly,” he says. “You don’t realize it until you’ve spent a week in one time zone. I met Yotam and I wanted that.”) His plan is to quit Kensington “when the first baby arrives” and become a house parent, eventually selling antiques or designing interiors from home. With family in mind, they have bought a large house on a quiet street in Camden—a short walk from Ottolenghi’s test kitchen, in an old building under the Camden railway arches, and the adjoining prep kitchen where the bread for his restaurants and delis is now baked and the pastry is prepared for on-site finishing. “Pretty, respectable, and bourgeois” is how Ottolenghi happily describes the house. It has five bedrooms, a deep garden, and a proper kitchen to replace the one he cooks in now, which is minuscule, or, as he put it when I walked in, “a case of the cobbler goes barefoot.” Every inch was taken.
Ottolenghi cleared some space for us on a serving counter above a shelf of tottering pots and bowls and unpacked the fixings, which, in keeping with his “any decent supermarket” home-recipe rule, he had just picked up at the local Waitrose. He tweeted a picture of the radishes he’d bought, glistening in the sink, “because they look so fresh,” and then a message to say that, regrettably, they were tasteless—after which we took a break, opened some white wine, and stepped onto a narrow balcony off the kitchen for a clandestine cigarette. Ottolenghi rarely smokes. His real vice is drugstore candy, which he keeps stashed in the glove compartment of an eight-year-old Prius, and dips into on his daily rounds. He is almost preternaturally energetic, perhaps because of the sugar but more likely because of the Pilates classes he takes twice a week and never misses. He started Pilates twelve years ago, with a terrible “bending-over-the-stove” backache. Eight years later, he qualified as an instructor—something he hopes will come in handy on the off chance that London ever stops eating Ottolenghi.
My first job that night was to help assemble a “one-pot Sephardic hybrid” inspired by a dish called plov—a barberry, cardamom, onion, chicken, and rice concoction, originally hours in preparation, that Bukharan Jews introduced to Jerusalem and still serve in one form or another at celebrations. “You have to remember that, for Jews, Jerusalem was never an affluent town,” Ottolenghi told me. “It was different for Palestinians. The Arab middle class was affluent. But for most Jews it was a poor immigrant town. They cooked with what they had. There is no one recipe. In fact, we never replicate recipes. We replicate the idea of a dish. We replicated the idea of plov.” The barberries—a sour, dried berry from Iran—went into an infusion of water and sugar to plump and sweeten. The chicken thighs went into a marinade of olive oil, green cardamom pods, cinnamon sticks, and cloves, along with salt and pepper. Sliced onions slowly caramelized in a frying pan, and we began chopping herbs and tearing lettuces for a raw cauliflower salad. I looked at my watch: we’d been back in the kitchen less than twenty minutes, and talking all the time. Ottolenghi had been so carefree and relaxed, juggling pots and pans in that ridiculous space, that it was impossible to imagine him as the panicked apprentice who had once fled on a moped from the cold starter station of a London restaurant.
He consulted his list—he is a compulsive list-maker—and announced that dessert was next, whereupon he opened two packages of phyllo pastry, melted a good third of a pound of butter, brushed some onto a baking tray, and began layering the tray with sheets of buttered phyllo. The name of the dish was mutabbaq. It was Palestinian, and was traditionally filled with “hard-core” goat or ewe cheese, which, Ottolenghi allowed, was an acquired taste. He and Tamimi had decided, instead, on the combination of ricotta and soft white goat cheese that he now mixed together with a fork and spread over half the phyllo sheets, leaving me to cover the mixture with the rest. It took me seven sheets, but the last one looked respectable. He checked it out. “Phyllo masks all mistakes,” he said, reaching around me for a small pot to hold the sugar, lemon juice, and water for a pastry syrup. While the syrup boiled, he tackled the bowl of chicken. Soon the spicy smell of the thighs, browned with the cloves and cardamom pods of the marinade sticking to their skin, was mingling with the sour-sweet smell of barberries and caramelized onions in a pot of simmering basmati rice. We opened another bottle of wine, filled a dish with some olives left over from the cauliflower salad, and crashed.
It had been what his friends call “a Yotam week.” He had worked mornings at the test kitchen with his assistant, Sarah Stephens, a young Tasmanian chef of surpassing patience, whose job, at the moment, was to produce a large number of interesting, attractive dishes for the British food photographer Jonathan Lovekin, who had taken the pictures for “Plenty” and whom I met that Monday, waiting in a patch of light by the front door, to start taking them for “Jerusalem.” (We ate the morning’s offerings for lunch.) He had visited the prep bakeries next door, where the pastry chef (Lebanese-Brazilian) taught me how to work the dough laminator (think of an old-fashioned clothes wringer, only horizontal and sleek steel) and to hand-roll croissants (so addictive it was hard to stop), and a staff of sous-chefs from Australia, Poland, and Brazil fed me leftover crackers, smothered in salt caramel and chocolate, which they called “brittle.” He had played the fall guy in an interview routine at a cabaret in Soho, appearing between a campy standup-comedy act and a famous cross-dressing singer; agreed to four more television hours, this time for Channel 4, which would take him from Morocco to Tunisia, Turkey, and back to Israel by the end of the summer (they began airing this month); met for a long Islington breakfast with a group of American women (chefs, food writers, and their friends) on an eating spree in London and Paris; hosted a butchery demonstration at nopi; endured a humorless session with a group of Dutch students, who were horrified to learn that he ate meat, shopped occasionally at a supermarket, and stretched his carbon footprint by importing his pomegranate molasses from Beirut; prepared for the class that he and Tamimi teach, on alternate Saturdays, at Leiths cookery school, in West London; written three columns; and made time for countless hours eating and talking with me.
Ottolenghi works hard, and the challenge for him is long-term: how to maintain the Ottolenghi signature and, at the same time, not exhaust its appeal in a notoriously trendy and capricious city. nopi was an attempt at both. It tastes different—more Asian and exotic—and looks different, with a gleaming brass counter and brass tabletops and fixtures replacing the pristine Corian white of Islington and the delis. “We wanted a brasserie feel, something fresh,” Meitlis told me. “So we kept the white walls but made it as mellow and deep as possible, and let the brass shine.” Ottolenghi admits that it looks terrific. Whatever hesitations he had at first are long resolved. “We wanted to get everything right—right away,” he says. “It’s not easy to keep on reinventing.” He worries (or, more accurately, Bar and Staeubli worry for him) about the downside of so much success—about the gorgeous Ottolenghi-catered buffet becoming the ubiquitous Ottolenghi buffet. One writer recently grumbled about walking into an Ottolenghi dinner party and wondering what had happened to serious English food, served in the proper English dinner order. Another quoted his wife saying that ninety-four per cent of the DNA in every Ottolenghi dish is identical—arguably a case more of expectation than of reality. Ottolenghi experiments all the time. Lately, he has been incorporating tastes he discovered this year in Turkey into recipes at his test kitchen. Tamimi, who loves Japan—he says that “taste is a part of me, it’s why I travel”—has been working with Asian seaweeds and vinegars. As for me, I would be hard put to explain what, genomically speaking, the Malaysian-spiced gurnard I sampled at nopi had in common with the Turkish-inspired zucchini fritters I also ate that night—beyond the fact that they were both good, in an unmistakable Ottolenghi way.
At seven, Allen came home from the Kensington deli and took a Friday-night nap on the living-room couch. When he and Ottolenghi met, Allen was in the habit of driving to Gloucestershire on Fridays, to work on an old cottage that he had bought to sell. “I grew up in the countryside,” he told me. “I can rough it in a sleeping bag. But Yotam? It would have killed him. Luckily, it was sold.” The phone woke him. Bar, who was coming to dinner with his boyfriend of four years, Garry Chang—a young Taiwanese doctor with the National Health Service—had called to say they were running late. We turned off the pot, and I peeked in. The plov was as beautiful as it smelled. “The senses are not so separate,” Ottolenghi had said one day in Camden, en route to a High Street diner for a quick lunch. “They’re synesthetic. They need to work together.” He called this his aesthetic. The word, at work, is “smiling.” Staeubli, who coined the expression, says, “Sami can make food smile,” and Allen swears that he has seen Yotam walk into one of his delis or restaurants and take away half the food on display or the salad about to be served “because it’s not smiling.” The smiliest dish I’d seen that week was shakshuka—a North African breakfast from “Plenty,” cooked and served in little cast-iron skillets. It wasn’t fancy: a couple of eggs poached in a spicy saffron-onion-tomato-and-bell-pepper sauce, flecked with fresh herbs and dappled with drops of yogurt. But it was irresistible. I could taste it before I raised my fork.
Bar and Chang arrived at the apartment toward nine. Allen and I set the table. Ottolenghi put the mutabbaq in the oven, turned the plov back on, and chopped some parsley, coriander, and dill, for sprinkling. A few minutes later, we sat down and ate serious Jerusalem food served in the proper English dinner order. The plov was delicious, if you didn’t count the undercooked rice and the pinkish chicken near the bone. Ottolenghi, who is known to be very precise at work—“He’s always asking, ‘How much of that? A teaspoon? A half teaspoon?’ ” Allen says—tends to get lost in thought, or conversation, when he cooks at home. He had doubled the number of chicken thighs in his recipe and added some extra rice, but not the extra water with which to cover and cook it all. (“The big secret at Yotam’s house is that the food is much better when Karl cooks it,” Meitlis, who stays in their spare bedroom when he comes to London, says.) It didn’t matter. We chewed the rice, avoided the pink, and asked for seconds.
The pastry was a sweet success. We ate it slowly, and talked till midnight. Ottolenghi was leaving for Israel in a few weeks, to be with his parents on the twentieth anniversary of his brother’s death. He has been flying to Israel two or three times a year since he left for Amsterdam. He says that “the sense of a network there, the security in that, is what gives me the cohesion that I don’t have here.” He calls it “the feeling that, when I’m at my parents’ house, anything wrong or difficult can be fixed.” The Ottolenghis have both retired. His father gardens; his mother volunteers with the women of Checkpoint Watch, documenting the trauma of border crossings for Palestinians. Once a year, they spend a week in England with Ottolenghi and Allen. His father has become a fan. Three years ago, at Yotam’s fortieth-birthday party (three days and thirty guests in a rented Dorset mansion), Professor Ottolenghi stood up, raised his glass, and said, “My wish for Yotam today is that he keep not listening to my advice.” ♦
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