Yotam Ottolenghi

Early life

Yotam Ottolenghi was born in Jerusalem and grew up in Jerusalem's Ramat Denya neighbourhood. He has an older sister, Tirza Florentin and a late younger brother, Yiftach. His father was a chemistry teacher at the Hebrew University and his mother a teacher. As a child, he often spent his summers in Italy. His grandparents were Italian, and he and his family stayed with them in their house, in the hills outside Florence. He served in the IDF intelligence headquarters. He studied at Tel Aviv University before completing a master's degree in comparative literature. At this time he also worked on the news desk of Haaretz, one of Israel's largest daily papers. He moved to Amsterdam with his then-partner Noam Bar. By 1997 he had completed his master's degree in philosophy and comparative literature; his thesis was on the ontological status of the photographic image in aesthetic and analytic philosophy. During his time there, Ottolenghi edited the Hebrew pages of a Dutch-Jewish weekly, NIW. Later in 1997, he moved again, this time to the UK, planning to start a PhD but before he enrolled he signed up to train at Le Cordon Bleu cookery school in London for six months. He got a job as head pastry chef at the London boutique bakery Baker & Spice and this is where he met Sami Tamimi and Dan Lepard.

Career

Following a six-month course at the London-based French cookery school, Le Cordon Bleu, in 1997, Ottolenghi worked as a pastry chef at The Capital Restaurant, the Michelin-starred restaurant in Knightsbridge. From there he moved to work in the pastry section of the Kensington Place restaurant and that of the sister restaurant, Launceston Place, for a year, under the chef Rowley Leigh. He eventually became head pastry chef at Baker and Spice in Chelsea, London, where he met Sami Tamimi – co-founder of their delicatessens and restaurants and co-author of the Ottolenghi and Jerusalem cookery books – in 1999.

Together with Noam Bar, Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi set up the first Ottolenghi deli in Notting Hill in 2002, selling both sweet and savoury food. Joined later by Swiss-born general manager Cornelia Staeubli, Ottolenghi often describes the success of the business as a team-based effort. The food in Ottolenghi is known to be bold, exciting, sometimes challenging. Three more delis opened: Islington (2004), Kensington (2005), which closed in 2013, and Belgravia (2007). A formal restaurant, NOPI (2011), followed and a further restaurant opened off Spitalfields market in London in 2014.

Behind the design of the delis and restaurants is architect Alex Meitlis who, together with the Ottolenghi team has created a bold image: signature white tables and counters that provide a blank canvas for the colours of the food. The Soho restaurant NOPI has a different look with masses of marble and brass. NOPI was the winner of the Gourmet award at the Conde Naste Traveller 2011 Innovation and Design awards. In 2012 the Restaurant & Bar Design Awards awarded NOPI as the winner of the best Identity category.

Ottolenghi was a co-judge of BBC Radio 4's Food and Farming Awards 2016. He is also the author of four cookery books.

Ottolenghi's cooking style is rooted in his Middle Eastern upbringing: "a distinctive mix of Middle Eastern flavours – Syrian, Turkish, Lebanese, Iranian, Israeli and Armenian – with a western twist". His "particular skill" is in marrying the food of his native Israel with a wider range of textures and flavours from the Mediterranean, Middle East and Asia. His palate of flavours is unapologetically bold and loud: "noisy". Signature dishes include butternut squash salad with red onion, tahini and za'atar, roasted aubergine with turmeric yogurt and pomegranate seeds, chargrilled broccoli with chilli and fried garlic and meringues.

Ottolenghi is known for emphasizing the use of vegetables at the same time as eating and loving meat. He defends the right to have an approach to cooking and eating that does not fit in with conventional distinctions and barriers: "You can be vegetarian and eat fish [...] there are no hard core divisions any more". This remark led to controversy within the vegetarian community encouraging Ottolenghi to later recant via Twitter: "To all, fish eaters are NOT vegetarians". Author of "The New Vegetarian" column in The Guardian magazine from 1996 to 2010, his weekly recipe contributions were, at first, exclusively vegetarian although, again, he courted controversy by mentioning where a particular dish would work well with a cut of meat or fish. Maintaining his position against the traditional distinctions and barriers between meat and vegetables – "I'm not burdened by rules, I don't think in terms of ideology" – his relationship with vegetables is to "celebrate vegetables or pulses without making them taste like meat, or as complements to meat, but to be what they are. It does no favour to vegetarians, making vegetables second best. Meat should be a celebration, not everyday. There is so much else out there". The recipes in his column in The Guardian have been expanded to include meat since 2010. Plenty and Plenty More, Ottolenghi's sole-authored recipe collections, are entirely vegetarian. His two books co-authored with Sami Tamimi, Ottolenghi and Jerusalem, include meat and fish dishes.

Ottolenghi was the subject of four television documentaries. In the first documentary, Jerusalem on a Plate, shown on BBC4 in December 2011, Ottolenghi met and cooked in Jerusalem with both Arabs and Jews in restaurants and at home, drawing on hundreds of years of tradition. In November 2012, Ottolenghi appeared in Ottolenghi's Mediterranean Feast for More4; the documentary was a culinary journey of discovery through Morocco, Istanbul, Tunisia and Israel. In November 2013, Ottolenghi was in Ottolenghi's Mediterranean Island Feast, also shown on More4, in which he traveled to Corsica, Mallorca, Sardinia and Crete, exploring the flavours and secrets of these culinary jewels.

In January 2017 it was announced that Ottolenghi would be replacing star chef Marco Pierre White for season nine of Masterchef Australia.

Personal life

Ottolenghi and his husband, Karl Ottolenghi-Allen, live in London with their two sons.

Ottolenghi's business partner, Sami Tamimi, was born and raised in the Palestinian Territories; Yotam Ottolenghi was born and raised in Israel. The link between food and politics is not one that is overly important to the two men, who didn't meet until they were both living and working in London, in 1999. They are, however, happy to be persuaded that the making and eating of hummus may help to forge links in the Middle East: "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". The so-called 'hummus wars' – "the political and nationalistic discussions about hummus" – are detailed by Ottolenghi in his cook book, Jerusalem.

Ottolenghi is a supporter of gay marriage and gay parenting. In an article on coming out as a gay parent, he discussed how important he thinks it is for surrogacy to be an option more widely available to those who cannot conceive naturally.

Awards

Works