Yotam Ottolenghi
Chef with an incredible flair for bringing food to life
Yotam Ottolenghi’s fare is typically luscious, with healthy salads and hot plates followed by the most wicked desserts, on offer at his popular Ottolenghi establishments and in his new restaurant NOPI, in London. Meanwhile his cookery books are bringing international fame to Yotam and the close-knit circle of friends that make up his endeavours. The admired chef also has a degree in philosophy and is a master of Pilates.
From Fantastic Man n° 14 – 2011
Text by CAROLINE ROUX
Photography by PAUL WETHERELL
When Yotam Ottolenghi appeared on the BBC’s ‘MasterChef’ television programme this spring, one of the contestants (a woman obsessed by her own vegetarianism) burst into the sort of hot, messy tears shed by teenage girls when they finally find themselves in the physical presence of Justin Bieber. Near to speechless, she gasped her way through a few incomplete words. Though he’s barely ever been on TV – and it’s hard to equate a weekly cookery column in the ‘Guardian’ with superstardom – Yotam, with his contemporary take on fresh ingredients, his clever recipes and his super-smart Ottolenghi eateries, certainly has fans.
They sidle up to him in the street, and interrupt his conversations in his own restaurants, to heap him with praise. Sometimes, when he pops into Lutyens & Rubinstein, the upscale bookstore near his west London home, you see people turn and whisper. “He’s one of our local celebrities,” laughs the bookshop’s co-owner, Felicity Rubinstein, who is also his agent, quite aware that other local worthies have ranged from Tina Turner to David Cameron over the years. “It does create a stir every time he pays a visit.”
Ottolenghi comes from Israel but is one of those naturalised Londoners who says he wouldn’t like to live anywhere else. He’s been in the city for 14 years now and opened his first eponymous café/restaurant/deli in Ledbury Road in Notting Hill in 2002. With its sparkling white interior, huge platters heaped high with technicolour salads and outrageous windowfuls of meringues the size of side plates, it was an overnight success. West London flocked to the call of preserved lemons and pomegranate seeds, chargrilled broccoli with chilli and garlic, harissa-marinated chicken with grapefruit salad, lentil and chard soup, hazelnut cupcakes and pistachio shortbread – all dishes deriving from his own Middle-Eastern roots, enhanced by his unique alchemical layering of flavours. He is the king of the lemony-tasting sumac, a spice made from the crushed berries of a Mediterranean tree; the tsar of za’atar, an earthy, tangy blend of thyme, sesame and salt; the master of salads brought to life with just the right amount of hand-shredded mint. Did he think it would be the sensation it has proved to be? “I still haven’t quite got to grips with that,” says Yotam, brow furrowed. “It’s true. I still don’t feel it a hundred per cent – maybe it’s an innate anxiety.” But he’s gone on (with his partners – we’ll get to them) to open another deli in Islington, a shop in Kensington and most recently a fully-fledged deluxe restaurant in Soho, called NOPI, a dazzling affair where the fashionable and the foodies are falling over themselves to secure a reservation.
The first time we meet, it’s a rain-soaked summer afternoon in London, and NOPI’s glittering interior feels even more welcoming than usual. It’s that lovely lull between lunch and dinner, and we sit at the long brass bar. I’m in need of a double caffè macchiato. Yotam, in neat black cord Paul Smith jeans, a white ETRO shirt and black lace-ups (“always shoes, never trainers”) is sipping an English breakfast tea. Our conversation drifts through a couple of lost years in Amsterdam working nights in a sleazy hotel, past the dangers of pomegranate juice (“Delicious, but too acidic!”), and on to a childhood marked out by a love of all foods – including Swedish fish balls. In 1977 his family spent a year in San Francisco. “It was amazing,” says Yotam. “Ice cream and burgers and hot dogs; colour televisions and cars with electric windows.”
The tales of empty calories are interrupted by an impromptu call to the kitchen for a hasty tasting session. There’s a dire need for a dish without cheese on the NOPI menu: vegans are strongly attracted to Ottolenghi’s style, but he in turn is strongly attracted to pecorino and goat’s cheese. A union of figs, blackberries and caramelised walnuts with a dressing of red-wine vinegar, port, sugar, ginger and cayenne pepper is deemed “not savoury enough” by Yotam. “It could have come from the other side,” he declares, referring to the menu’s dessert section. “We could try a nut purée,” says an American chef, joining the group. “But not a disgusting one, like before.” “Or a vegetable mash, with some butter in it,” muses Yotam. “But then it’s not non-dairy,” says the American. So we move on to a yam cake, created by the head chef, Ramael Scully, with fried shallots and coriander. It’s sweet and dense and silky, with none of the dryness that the starchy yam can have, and we all agree that the firmer variant is the better one and no, it’s not too spicy.
Yotam is 1.90 metres tall and has the classy deportment and stomach muscles of someone who does Pilates three times a week. He started doing that ten years ago to cure the back pains brought on by kitchen life. “It got so bad that I couldn’t go to work,” he says. “And within three to four weeks, the pain – chronic pain – went.” Four years ago, he even completed a teaching course in the discipline, spurred on by his own teacher, fellow Israeli Amit Younger (“a real Pilates nazi” according to Yotam). “That’s Yotam,” says his boyfriend Karl Allen. “He’s competitive, but in a good way. He’ll take everything to its furthest point; everything is about being excellent.”
Yotam also has an advanced mastery of charm, enhanced with the sort of giggle that works really well on a man. “Absolutely enchanting,” says Ms. Rubinstein of her charge. “Everyone who meets him is smitten.” Though she doesn’t typically handle food writers – super-selling crime writers such as Mark Billingham are more her thing – she says, “I pursued Yotam, because I could see that what they were doing at Ottolenghi wasn’t difficult, but it was worth explaining. For anyone with half an interest in food, it was really worth having his recipes.” The resulting two cookbooks, first ‘Ottolenghi: The Cookbook’, followed by ‘Plenty’, have gone into multiple reprints, with the latter having sold a quarter of a million copies and now doing well in the US. The Germans and the Dutch are all over it, and it’s even been optioned in Russia. Perhaps it’s because just reading the words ‘roasted butternut squash with burnt aubergine and pomegranate molasses’ is satisfaction enough. The tangy cooking smells seem to rise from the pages.
Although he exudes the slightly anxious perfectionism of an eldest child, Yotam is the youngest of three, born in Jerusalem in 1968. His father is a chemistry professor, and his mother is a headmistress. Yotam studied philosophy and comparative literature in Tel Aviv. His MA dissertation was on “the realistic status of the photographic image compared to other arts,” he says. So it was a bit, well, surprising when he went off to become a chef. He’d grown up liking food, but not cooking. Mr. and Mrs. Ottolenghi senior didn’t exactly warm to the notion either. “They both come from quite respectable European families,” says the prodigal son. Their own parents left Germany and Italy on the last boats out in 1933, rightly sensing that the happier days of the European Jewry were just about done. “For my parents’ generation, cooks were people who cooked for you. It’s really going down quite a few steps in the social hierarchy.”
Le Cordon Bleu cookery school at 114 Marylebone Lane in London has trained students in the intricacies of French gastronomy for nearly 50 years. Even in 1997, when the 29-year-old Yotam walked through its doors for the first time, it was looking a little tired. “It’s a real relic,” says Yotam of the institution. “But you have to admire it because they do what they do really well. It’s thorough. You learn the basics. You can question the relevance, but the dishes that come out, no matter how fancy the process, with cucumber bits of garnish and all that, it’s still a way of cooking. Ninety per cent was irrelevant, but the relevant ten per cent is engrained.” The food for which Ottolenghi has become known, Levantine dishes that startle the palette with their fresh, zingy flavours, and the eye with the sort of intense multicoloured beauty more often associated with hand-painted French wallpaper or Japanese textiles, could hardly be further away from the thickened sauces and soft vegetables of cooking à la Cordon Bleu. “But it taught you how to cook in a group,” he concedes in an extremely gentlemanly way.
He tried to shore up his knowledge in the kitchen at The Capital, a small and sedate hotel in Knightsbridge with a Michelin-rated restaurant. “But it was so hard that one day I just walked out in the middle of a shift,” says Yotam. So he went to work for the more funsome Kensington Place – a chic, busy restaurant – under chef Rowley Leigh, where he rose happily through the pastry-cheffing ranks. He moved to Maison Blanc, Raymond Blanc’s multishop food enterprise, but found himself on a production line in a huge hangar on an industrial park near Wembley. “I was on strawberry tarts, lining up the strawberries,” he remembers. “After a few weeks, one of the guys standing next to me on the strawberry line asked if I had a driver’s licence. When I said yes, he said, ‘Well why don’t you become a minicab driver? Why are you wasting your time here?’ That was it.”
Which is how he got to Baker & Spice, a food retailer that makes outstandingly good cakes and pastries and whose croissants have actually been called ‘iconic’. “When I walked in to apply, I went into the kitchen and saw a bunch of happy people making gorgeous little things. I thought this is where I want to work,” he smiles. There he not only learnt the real art of Viennoiserie – a talent which has underpinned Ottolenghi’s success – but he also met Sami Tamimi, a remarkably talented chef who became his business partner at Ottolenghi.
Tamimi was also born in Jerusalem in 1968, but on the Arab side. Much has been made of this Jewish-Palestinian pairing. Yotam, however, has always dismissed its significance. “I don’t like it being seen as a symbol of peace, love and harmony,” he says. “We’re very good friends and creative collaborators, but our relationship doesn’t reflect on the whole Middle East conflict. Yes, we both grew up in Jerusalem, though completely separately. And I do think it’s a great thing that we work together, because it shows that on a personal level everything can work. But I’m reluctant to make a lot of it, because I think there’s maybe something a little bit fake about it. I’m not truly, deeply Israeli, and he’s not a typical Palestinian.” Both are gay, and both have left the country – hardly poster children for the greater cause.
It was his agent, Ms. Rubinstein, who helped to launch Yotam’s newspaper career, suggesting that he secure himself a weekly cooking column in the weekend magazine of the ‘Guardian’ in 2006, under the slightly erroneous heading ‘The New Vegetarian’. “I thought he did amazing salads,” says the magazine’s editor, Merope Mills, a frequent visitor to Ottolenghi in Islington. But the title was doubtlessly also to please the paper’s meat-rejecting, politically correct readers. “Being vegetarian is a bottom, bottom, bottom position in the world of cheffing,” says Yotam. “And I’m not vegetarian! But Felicity said: ‘Beggars can’t be choosers.’ Anyway, it’s been a good thing, and it taught me how to write recipes properly. But I’m happy that it’s not called that anymore and that I’ve been unchained.” He has, nonetheless, secured his place in vegetarian hearts for his ability to elevate the vegetable to new heights. For adding honeyed sweet potatoes to chickpeas and spinach. For making French beans and mangetout marvellous with hazelnuts, roughly chopped chives and strips of orange zest. For the endless variations on rice salad (apparently, the secret is getting enough oil and juice in so the rice doesn’t go dry). For matching mushrooms with cinnamon (the mushrooms have to burn slightly and then absorb lots of lemon juice).
Yotam appeared on the ‘The Martha Stewart Show’ in the US earlier this year and forgot to put the onions in his couscous. “I watched it back, and it seemed okay,” he muses. “But the Americans don’t do humour, not on a cooking show. It’s all very serious.” When he was interviewed on PBS (the US equivalent of BBC’s Radio 4) recently, ‘Plenty’ topped the Amazon bestseller list the next day. Just after we meet, he is flying to Los Angeles and San Francisco to bring Californians to submission with his love of fennel, Jerusalem artichokes and pine nuts (his number-one favourite foods) and his winning smile.
Yotam’s idea of a fun night out is to go to dinner with friends – most of his are in the restaurant business – but somewhere low-key. The night before we meet, he’d eaten at the Mangal 1 restaurant in Arcola Street, east London – a basic but delicious, traditional Turkish grill. (For the record, the artists Gilbert & George are famously regular Mangal customers, but they prefer the Mangal 2, round the corner on Stoke Newington Road). These days, he never cooks. “Only when I try out my recipes at home.”
Yotam doesn’t just keep his friends close; he works with them. While his ex-boyfriend Noam Bar now runs the business (Bar did an MBA in London in the late 1990s, but has also qualified as a homoeopathist since), his current boyfriend of eleven years, Karl Allen, manages the Kensington shop, at 1 Holland Street. The company’s architect, Alex Meitlis, is an old friend based between London and Tel Aviv who not only created the all-white interior identity of Ottolenghi but also swears he was the one who first proclaimed Yotam’s talents as a chef when he brought home the early results of his Cordon Bleu course. “I was like, ‘Alex, this is my first cake, it’s so standard,’” recalls Yotam. “‘You roll out the puff, you put the crème pâtissière in and a few berries on top and glaze it with some awful jam. Based on that you’re telling me to go professional?’ But he’s completely right. He did encourage me.”
At NOPI, Alex has ratcheted up the ritziness, with shiny white tiles and optically illusory, mirrored toilets. Brass lights were made by a metal smith in Jaffa, Israel, based on a vintage design he found. The doors had long been in service at Harvey Nichols: Karl bought them from an architectural salvage dealer in Essex Road, Islington. Indeed, it was Karl who helped dress the room. “It was Noam’s idea that I prop the restaurant,” says Karl, who was a British Airways flight attendant when the pair met, succumbing to the business in 2005. “But then Noam and I have always got on. If anything, it’s me and Noam who gang up on Yotam.”
It was Karl who furnished the couple’s flat, where a vast expanse of herringboned parquet floor is interrupted by minimal furniture. There is a bespoke white table that can comfortably accommodate eight, or ten. A road sign that’s been reappropriated into an art piece hangs above the fireplace, and there are Hebrew cookery books in abundance. It seems like a quiet, comfortable home, and Karl says it will that be once they’ve actually bought some comfortable chairs. The ambience is enhanced by an impressive Ottolenghi apple-and-olive-oil cake with maple icing that Yotam serves with tea. It’s the olive oil, he explains, that makes it so succulently, deliciously moist, and the muscovado sugar that gives the icing its warmth and depth.
The cake is the absolute best seller in Islington, a wealthy but politically left-leaning part of north London. It does scant business, however, in überrich, überconservative Notting Hill. Different customers in different boroughs act differently. Yotam recalls the story of a woman at the Islington Ottolenghi who suddenly stopped being a Yotam fan when she heard he also had premises in the Tory heartland. “She looked me in the eye and said: ‘Shame on you!’ Then she stormed out.” Yotam is mildly fascinated by this political division and its manifestation through food. It’s not quite the tortured politics of the Middle East, but still.
Would Yotam ever go back to Israel? “I’m asked to open an Ottolenghi in Tel Aviv every day,” he laughs. “But I like living here. Israel is intense and Israelis are very demanding. I wouldn’t want to live there or run a business there.” But it’s a wonderful place to visit, he concedes. Last year, Karl and he took Karl’s Northern-Irish parents there, and they were all blown away by the energy and the people. “The climate is great, the food is great. But there’s no sense of private space. There’s no politeness. Israelis are warm but overly direct,” says Yotam. The English, of course, tend to the other extreme. “Here people don’t say what they mean and then it takes so long to work it out. You need a gadget to work out what people really mean. Maybe someone should produce an app, to translate the real meaning of an English sentence,” he suggests.
Lately Ottolenghi and Tamimi have been spending more time in Jerusalem. They’re putting together a new book on Jerusalem’s food and making a documentary for the BBC’s Jerusalem season that’s screening this autumn. Indeed, television is looming for Yotam. Articulate, elegant and passionate, he is a natural fit for the small screen. “There’s an enormous amount of interest in him,” says Felicity Rubinstein, the agent. “Did you see the ‘MasterChef’ appearance?”