Spotlight on Sami Tamimi

Sami Tamimi smiles at a guest sitting down and eating at the table at the NAFAS Supper Club. Other people sit around the table, drinking wine and eating too. Photograph: Alex Micu.

Words by Rushani Epa.

When I speak to celebrated chef and cookbook author Sami Tamimi, he’s in his second home in the lush green heart of Italy, in Umbria; his haven that shuts out the noise of the outside world. We meet over Google Meet, his smile slightly pixellated yet beaming through my screen, his resonant voice booming into my studio space from a little laptop speaker. We spoke for over an hour-and-a-half, my hand numb from holding the weight of my chin as I absorbed his story like a sponge.

As a Palestinian, he agonises over the plight of his homeland, family and people; as a prominent chef, he has to continue his work in the limelight. As someone who sits at the crux of the two, he carries the weight of the world on his shoulders.

He is widely known for formerly being Yotam Ottolenghi’s business partner and helping thrust Ottolenghi as a brand into the limelight. In 2002, Tamimi and Ottolenghi opened the first Ottolenghi deli out of Noam Bar in Notting Hill. Within a decade-and-a-half, they would go on to dominate London’s dining scene with five more delis and two restaurants: all-day brasserie spruiking a pan-Asian/Middle Eastern and Mediterranean menu, NOPI, and vegetarian-leaning diner promoting fermentation and cooking over coals, ROVI.

Tamimi handled the hospitality side of things and operated as executive chef across the portfolio, and alongside managing their venues, the two produced award-winning cookbooks, Ottolenghi and the iconic James Beard award-winning Jerusalem, a cookbook that made us think Palestine and Israel could break bread together, and all it would take was two gay friends to make it happen. Following this, Tamimi went on to co-author his critically acclaimed cookbook Falastin with Tara Wigley, a delicious symbol of Palestinian hope for everyone across the world.

In Umbria, he’s hunkered down to work on his fourth book. Another cookbook that pays homage to his beloved Palestine, but this time it will focus on vegetarian and vegan recipes along with a collection of personal and historical stories. He has plans to keep the book as light-hearted as possible, though the current situation in Palestine is anything but this. Instead, he takes to social media for his advocacy and preservation of Palestinian culture and food.

Where it all began

Tamimi was born in 1968, a year after the war, which lasted for six days: a war that saw Israel colonise and capture the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, growing to four times its original size and defeating neighbouring Arab nations Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. He was born in the then-freshly conquered East Jerusalem to Muslim Palestinian parents. It was a strange and frightening time of adjustment and change for his family, but his birth provided them with hope. “I was born one year after the war and there was this feeling that something was going to happen and it's going to be better in a way, but it actually went from bad to worse to now,” he says.

“There was no interaction between Jews and Palestinians on a daily basis, except for the few houses in the Jewish Quarter. The first Jewish person I met was an Israeli man who my older brother worked for who had a company for boilers and he spoke Arabic really well. There was no such thing as support between Palestinians and Israelis because we lived in a community in [East Jerusalem’s] Old City where the majority were Palestinians so obviously you would support each other.”

Tamimi grew up knowing he wanted to be an artist—not exactly a profession his father would approve of, but he knew he didn’t want to join the family business, Tamimi Travel and Transport Company. He left school at the tender age of 15 and, at 17, started working as a kitchen hand in a hotel’s restaurant in West Jerusalem. It was here that the head chef noticed and nurtured Tamimi’s passion and skill for cooking, and he would soon be promoted to ‘head breakfast chef’. 

Becoming a chef was a natural fit for him. It was a way for him to demonstrate his creativity and represent his beloved nation on a plate. It would take years for his family to wrap their heads around cheffing as a professional career a male could undertake, not something limited to the confines of the home and the matriarchy. 

“[As Palestinians], we're lucky to have memories, loyalty and a connection to the place and the food. I consider myself really lucky to be able to do something that I love doing, which is cooking and eating and feeding and writing.” For Tamimi, memories of food are what he carries with him to this day of his former life in Palestine. 

Memories of summers spent in Hebron, in Palestine’s southern West Bank, at his grandfather’s sprawling property. His grandfather was gifted with a green thumb and Tamimi and his six siblings and five step-siblings took full advantage of the fruits of his labour. Stonefruits and grapes resembled nature’s candy, while plush tomatoes and crisp cucumbers provided respite in the sun. “When we were little, my grandfather would say, ‘Eat whatever you want’. We were so happy. And there was nothing better than eating a fig in the summer when it was still warm and oozing with all the juices. These trips every summer to my grandfather’s were quite memorable.”

Summer would also indicate the time for his dad to pack the family into his little car and drive off to the countryside, seeking the shade and fresh air. His mother would prepare mujadarra, a hearty dish of spiced lentils, rice and caramelised onions. A watermelon would be acquired on the way and they would take their bounty under some trees, sometimes near a waterfall and a stream, and dig in. “It's a very wonderful thing. I have a couple of pictures of my mum, my aunty and me just sitting under the trees. There was always cardamom coffee roasting. There's always these kinds of aromas that somehow flash you back to a certain time or moment.”

Coffee was a consistent symbol of his youth. He would meet with his friend Nasser every Friday as a teenager in the Old City and share hummus or syrupy knafeh at a coffee shop along with a cup of coffee each. It became ritualistic for him, and he’s still in touch with Nasser to this day. 

Tamimi worked his way up through many restaurants to become head chef of Lilith, one of the most highly regarded restaurants in Tel Aviv. In the early ‘90s, Tel Aviv had the highest number of residents living there in all of Israel. This was a giant leap for a Palestinian from a Muslim household, suddenly in a heaving megalopolis full of people he barely knew.

A tale of two cities

“In a way, I grew up with two conflicts. One, as a Palestinian, but two, I was struggling with my sexuality—I mean, two things that are so difficult to deal with. With the conflict with Israel, I was able to talk to people about that [back at home with]... but moving into Tel Aviv made being gay a lot easier. I could actually talk to people about it, but not to my friends back in Jerusalem or my family. It's something that they don't do. I mean, to the day, they know, but we never talk [about it]. As a teenager, you are angry and frustrated, and you want to talk about it. But nowadays, we just want to enjoy the time that we have together, so it doesn't matter. My father and family have met Jeremy and I am comfortable with myself. Let it be.”                                

While working at Lilith, he was headhunted by a Londoner who offered him a job working at Baker and Spice in London. Soon enough, right before he turned 30, Tamimi was setting up the ready-to-go meals and touting an abundant rainbow of salads and pastries in Baker and Spice’s display. This was what stopped Ottolenghi in his tracks, inspired by the Meditteranean and Middle Eastern spread, which prompted him to run in asking for a job. Tamimi and Ottolenghi developed a connection straight away, and five years later, he had partnered with Noam Bar and Ottolenghi to set up the first-ever Ottolenghi deli in Notting Hill.

In a 2012 feature for the New York Times, a month after releasing their biggest-selling cookbook Jerusalem together, Tamimi was asked about not having his name included in Ottolenghi. He said “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.”

2012 was a different time, a year in which the news cycle wasn’t as rapidly consumed as it is now, thanks to social media and the advancement of technology. It was also the year that the UN General Assembly voted in favour of Palestinian statehood. Tamimi and Ottolenghi took on the conflict head-on via gastrodiplomacy, seeking and promoting common ground.

“A lot of people also thought that we were a couple and up to today, a lot of people still think we are,” says Tamimi and we both fail to contain our laughter. “We had this kind of peacemaker boys image. It gave a lot of people hope, more from the Israeli side than from the Arab side. But we were stupid. We approached it from the naive, nostalgic perspective of two people who lived in the same city but in different parts. We were born the same year. We grew up not far from each other. We have a lot of shared food memories without having known each other. After the publication [of Jerusalem] I said we should talk about all the problems that were happening [in Palestine and Israel], and we both kind of agreed on it, but it was too late,” he says.

He reflects on being approached by an Israeli publisher seeking Israeli book rights and translating it into Hebrew. “They asked if they could change some of the images and the names of the dishes, and one was [omitting the photo of] a Muslim guy praying on the floor, and not including the prawn dish because it's not Kosher. I said ‘over my dead body’. Basically what they wanted to do was just take out all the Palestinian elements from the book and publish it in Hebrew as a kosher cookbook.”

When East meets West

On Google, the ‘People also ask’ function surfaces common queries people type into Google that’s attached to the subject you’re searching. For Sami Tamimi, it’s “Are Ottolenghi and Tamimi still friends?” 

Their friendship is representative of the relationships between Palestinians or allies of Palestine and their Israeli Jewish friends. It’s a touchy subject, and one you need to broach with mutual respect and care.

“We are like brothers, in a way. We've been together working and socialising and we know each other’s private lives like family. What was good about it, but actually quite bad in a way, was that all these years we never actually confronted each other. We never talked about politics. I don't know; call it naive, call it whatever you want. I just kind of think that we avoided talking about stuff like that because, being a friend and also a business partner, and also getting politics into all of that, it makes no sense,” he says.

But food is inherently political for someone like Tamimi. It’s a part of his life’s tapestry as a Palestinian. It isn’t by choice, but something he was born into.

As a media personality and chef who is in the public eye and one of the few globally-recognised Palestinians in the culinary field, he carries the weight of doing so in a Western nation. His goal is to share stories and the history of Palestinian people via his platform to preserve his culture.

As a Palestinian, it’s impossible to do this without mentioning Israel and its foodwashing and appropriation tactics. In Divine Food: Israeli and Palestinian Food Culture and Recipes, author David Haliva writes, “Arab dishes like hummus with tahini and falafel were adopted by Jews, turning them into ‘national’ Israeli dishes, much to the dissatisfaction of the Palestinians who saw this cultural appropriation as a mirror of the occupation, a symbol of the continuing Arab–Israeli conflict. For many years, local Arab restaurants were referred to in Hebrew as ‘Oriental,’ a vague term that avoided engaging in a definition of Palestinian identity through its cuisine.”

“Everything you touch in this context is political and food is a part of it,” says Tamimi. He also notes the technological advancements in Israel, which mean food machinery and factories can churn out commercial quantities of foods that Palestinians cannot keep up with. “I go to the markets, and they are already producing the same items [as in Palestine] in Israel at competitive prices. And this affects the balance of things where there's two different brands and they look the same, but the one made in Israel is 50 percent cheaper so people go for the cheaper option.”

Tamimi was in Jerusalem the night of the October 7 attack and he was immediately locked down in his hotel for three days. “It felt quite unsafe for an Arab Palestinian to be in my hometown of Jerusalem. I managed to book a flight to get out of there, as I knew I had a supper club to host in London. It didn’t hit me until I went to London about what had happened and the seriousness. I didn’t get to see my family and I was in real fear of what was going to happen to them as they were locked down too,” he says.      

Arriving back in Israel or Palestine is no easy feat for Tamimi or any Palestinian for that matter. There once used to be airports in Palestine that were utilised by citizens, but these were taken over by the Israeli Defence Force following the Al-Aqsa Intifada, or Second Intifada. Nowadays, to enter Palestine, one must either fly to an Israeli airport or that of a neighbouring country (such as Jordan) before entering via an Israeli checkpoint. 

One critical issue is that the majority of Palestinians don’t have an identification card that allows them to enter from any area that’s considered to be Israel. “We are not treated equally,” says Tamimi, whose sisters used to live a five-minute drive away from each other, but are now forced to go through a military checkpoint in their area to visit one another. Sometimes they wait for 30 minutes in traffic, and when it’s bad, up to an hour. 

“This whole attitude of the checkpoints where they look at you like you're a criminal, like you've done something, and I struggle even with an Israeli passport,” he says. Tamimi went through hell and high water to obtain an Israeli passport. Living in London greatly helped him do so. “They look at you like, OK, so you live in London, and you have an Israeli passport, and you are Palestinian?’... It's like, ‘You're highly risky now’, so they always take me to the side and ask me a lot more questions and it's very humiliating. You just have to stay strong. A lot of Palestinians from Jerusalem that I know have had their identification cards taken away from them when they’ve gotten angry about this.”

Food as a form of resistance 

While he works on his book, Tamimi continues to promote Palestinian food and culture. Since October 7, there has been an increase in life threatening letters and hate comments that the chef receives via social media. 

Having gone through open heart surgery a few years ago, it was important that he looked after his health. This is why he speaks to me from his sanctuary in Umbria, away from the media and even his partner, so that he can predominantly focus on his writing.

“As Palestinians, we like foraging and eating a lot of greens. This is what I love about Palestinian food, because they make such amazing dishes from humble ingredients, like dandelion for example,” he says. Hindbeh is an example of this, which sees blanched dandelion greens squeezed free of water and cooked down in Palestinian olive oil.

“I always think that to do simple food, and to do it, well, it's harder than you know, when you kind of pile on different layers and flavours. I love that, and also our obsession with seasonality where it’s a total celebration. We are actually very happy when something comes into season, and we celebrate it by eating it as much as we can, while also doing different dishes with it and preserving it. There's also quite a lot of elaborate dishes in the Palestinian repertoire that take ages to make. I just think about rolling little vine leaves and stuffing zucchinis and you put it in the middle of the table and it disappears in minutes.”

With the division of his homeland, he notes the loss of regionality and the homogenisation of Palestinian cuisine. With that comes the loss of knowledge from generation to generation and even access to ingredients. Tamimi wants to restore this knowledge and empower people to cook Palestinian food at home. To bring a little piece of Palestine into kitchens across the world so that it continues to provide hope and fight against the frightening threat of extinction. It’s his new way of attempting gastrodiplomacy in the best way he knows how.