Yotam Ottolenghi

Early life

Yotam Ottolenghi was born and raised in Jerusalem, Israel the son of Michael Ottolenghi, a chemistry professor at Hebrew University, and Ruth Ottolenghi, a high school principal.^[1] He is of Italian (Jewish) and German (Jewish) descent and often spent his childhood summers in Italy.^[2] He has an older sister, Tirza Florentin, and a younger brother, Yiftach (d. 1992). Ottolenghi is an Italian (Jewish) name, an Italianised form of Ottlingen (Bavaria), a town that Jews were expelled from in the 15th and 16th centuries; many settled in Northern Italy.^[3]

Ottolenghi was conscripted into the Israel Defence Forces in 1989, serving three years in IDF intelligence headquarters. In 1997, he completed a combined bachelor's and master's degree in comparative literature at Tel Aviv University; his thesis was on the philosophy of the photographic image.^[4] While working on his thesis, Ottolenghi served as a night copy editor for Haaretz.^[5] In 1997, Ottolenghi and his then-partner Noam Bar moved to Amsterdam, where he edited the Hebrew section of the Dutch-Jewish weekly NIW and considered getting his doctorate in comparative literature.^[6] Instead, he moved to London to study French cooking at Le Cordon Bleu.

Career

Ottolenghi served as a pastry chef at three London restaurants: the Michelin-starred Capital Restaurant, Kensington Place, and Launceston Place. In 1999, he became head pastry chef at the artisanal pastry shop Baker and Spice, where he met the Arab-Palestinian chef Sami Tamimi. Ottolenghi and Tamimi learned that they had grown up in Jerusalem a few miles apart—albeit on opposite sides of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict—and they became friends, bonding over a shared language and a joint "incomprehension of traditional English food".^[7]

In 2002, the duo (in collaboration with Noam Bar) founded the eponymous delicatessen Ottolenghi in the Notting Hill district of London. The deli quickly gained a cult following due to its inventive dishes, characterised by the foregrounding of vegetables, unorthodox flavour combinations, and the abundance of "noisy" Middle Eastern ingredients such as rose water, za'atar, and pomegranate molasses.^[5][8][9] When asked to explain his cooking philosophy, Ottolenghi said, "I want drama in the mouth."^[5] The Ottolenghi brand has since expanded to include two more delis (in Kensington and Belgravia), a formal restaurant in Islington, a brasserie named nopi in Soho, and a vegetable-centric restaurant named Rovi which is scheduled to open in Fitzrovia in June 2018.^[10]

In 2006, Ottolenghi began writing a weekly column for The Guardian titled "The New Vegetarian," though he himself is not a vegetarian and has sometimes noted where a vegetable-centric recipe would pair well with a particular cut of meat. Influenced by the straightforward, culturally-grounded food writing of Nigella Lawson and Claudia Roden,^[11] Ottolenghi's recipes rarely fit within traditional dietary or cultural categories.^[12] He explained that his mission is to "celebrat[e] vegetables or pulses without making them taste like meat, or as complements to meat, but to be what they are. It does no favor to vegetarians, making vegetables second best."^[6]

His debut cookbook Ottolenghi was published in 2008 and has sold over 100,000 copies.^[1] Five volumes have followed: the all-vegetable cookbooks Plenty (2010) and Plenty More (2014); Jerusalem (2012); Nopi (2015); and the dessert cookbook Sweet (2017). His seventh cookbook, Ottolenghi Simple, will be published on October 16, 2018.^[13] Ottolenghi's bestselling cookbooks have proven influential, with The New York Times noting that they are "widely knocked-off for their plain-spoken instructions, puffy covers, and photographs [that Ottolenghi] oversees himself, eschewing a food stylist".^[14] In 2014, the London Evening Standard remarked that Ottolenghi had "radically rewritten the way Londoners cook and eat", and Bon Appétit wrote that he had "made the world love vegetables".^[15][16]

Ottolenghi has hosted three television specials: Jerusalem on a Plate (BBC4, 2011); Ottolenghi's Mediterranean Feast (More4, 2012); and Ottolenghi's Mediterranean Island Feast (More4, 2013). In 2017, he served as a guest judge on the ninth season of the cooking game show Masterchef Australia. He had declined numerous guest-judge offers in the past and agreed to appear on Masterchef Australia "because it's quite humane and positive....It's about the personal development of the contestants more than the competition."^[17]

Personal life

Ottolenghi met his partner Karl Allen in 2000; they married in 2012 and live in Camden with their two sons, Max (b. 2013) and Flynn (b. 2015).^{[6][8][14][8]} In 2013, Ottolenghi "came out as a gay father" in a Guardian essay that detailed the lengthy process of conceiving Max via gestational surrogacy, an option that he believes should be more widely available to those who cannot conceive naturally.^[18]