The Reporter's Kitchen Read online

  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, ‘Okay, 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, pâté 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 marvelous 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 drily 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 traveling, the interviewing, and nearly all the writing, but it was Tamimi w
ho 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 pictures. (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 MBE 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, Ramael Scully (born in Malaysia, raised in 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 bestseller 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 MBA,” 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 s
atisfied,” 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 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.”