The Reporter's Kitchen

by Jane Kramer

  And he says of himself, “I’m the one who’s either solving problems or looking for the next new thing. The fact is that most restaurants fail. You have to stay one step ahead. We were fine in Notting Hill for a while, but the back room was always too small. Then there was Islington. We know how to fix things now, but in 2004, when we bought Islington, we didn’t know what we were doing with a restaurant. It’s been a big success, but at the beginning, I’d go for dinner, there would be eight people. Maybe. I’d want to slit my wrists. And Belgravia? We opened Belgravia in 2007, and it was another catchment. We’re still working on a hot breakfast there. Last year, the problem was NOPI, because Soho is definitely another catchment. You can’t do an Islington there.” He meant that a couple of North London literati looking to sample and share, in Islington, after the curtain falls across the street at the Almeida, is not the same as a couple of testy businessmen walking a few blocks from their offices to SoHo, looking to seal a deal. “We had to reinvent the wheel at every level, without making the mistake of surprising at every level.”

  Bar thrives on his intimations of disaster. “You have ten minutes of Noam, maximum,” their general manager and fourth partner, Cornelia Staeubli, says. “He gets bored, and he’s on another planet—or another problem that nobody else has seen. He loves change, and Yotam doesn’t. We will sometimes do Noam’s idea just to prove him wrong.” Bar says that their arguments are “loud but never personal. It was never difficult, working with Yotam on a new basis. We were always more than lovers. We had that deep trust; we broke up, I went to India, and a year later we had new lives, but we still had it. We’re very complementary. Yotam is measured. I’m forward-looking, always pushing. Yotam says, ‘Stop! Let’s wait and think.’ I say, ‘Let’s do it now!’ A restaurant is like a bicycle—if it stops moving, it has no life.”

  The partners call themselves a family. They eat at one another’s houses, take vacations together, and occasionally even rent a house in the country together for a weekend, to reconnect—or, as Meitlis puts it, “to celebrate their different obsessions.” “Three gay guys and a mother hen” is how their friends describe them, which isn’t entirely accurate, since the family now includes their lovers and spouses and parents and brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews, and the list goes on. Staeubli, a blue-eyed Swiss beauty of forty-four, is de facto the mother hen. Bar calls her “the foreman,” and says he can see her “moving armies around in World War Two, calm and energized in a crisis.” Ottolenghi says, “She makes everything work.” She shares his obsession with the “context of food,” with the balance of buzz and quiet in a restaurant, and especially with the way the mood and clarity of its spaces can anticipate and echo the look and taste of the food in front of you on the table. “She’s tough, too,” he told me. “She’ll spot the one speck of dirt on the floor—the way I’ll see the one tart that’s badly displayed—and stand there until it’s gone. But there’s the other side. I’ve seen her go out and buy a sleeping bag for a waitress who didn’t have a bed. She looks after a staff of two hundred people. She takes care of us all.”

  Staeubli comes from Goldau, a mountain town in the canton of Schwyz so remote that, when she left it at nineteen, for an au pair job in America, it had “maybe a thousand people, just like me.” She still talks about the thrill of landing at JFK: “The smells, the elbows out, I loved it all. I loved that there were so many nationalities in those visa lines, everyone with the same goal—to start their lives.” (In her best of all possible worlds, she would open a New York Ottolenghi, “big, like Eataly.”) Her job turned out to be in a New Jersey suburb. The family was rich, the children spoiled, and after three months she decided that she was “not an au pair person” and fled to the Lower East Side, where she waitressed happily until her visa expired and she had to go back to Switzerland. She stayed there for ten years, and at thirty-two, quit the last of a series of dull office jobs and set off to see the world. She flew to Southeast Asia, and eventually on to Sydney in the middle of a winter so cold that she got on a bus for Queensland. The trip took forty-eight hours, and at the end of it she fell in love with a backpacking Englishman who had boarded along the way. They spent a week together in the sun, on Airlie Beach. Three months later, she arrived at Heathrow to the same multicultural mix of people that had delighted her in New York, and she and the man from the bus—a journalist named Peter Lowe, who is now the managing editor at Sky News—got married.

  Nine years ago, Staeubli sold her half of a small Internet café-cum-restaurant that she and a friend had opened in Putney a year earlier, and went out looking for a job closer to the Notting Hill apartment where she and Lowe then lived. She passed a SALES ASSISTANT WANTED sign in the window of the Notting Hill deli, met Ottolenghi, and started working the next day. “I came home that night crying,” she told me late one afternoon, over tea at their apartment. “I said to Peter, ‘I can’t do it, it’s too chaotic there.’ He said, ‘Try till Christmas.’” By April, she was managing the store. A year later, she was managing managers, and doing it so efficiently and agreeably that she was invited into the business. “I know I’m the mother hen,” she said. “I don’t have children of my own, so I like that. But I don’t mother them. I love them. I do the hiring, the staff, the managers, and the chefs. I fill in when someone on the staff’s away. My job is to make everything okay.” She spends her days whizzing around London, from deli to restaurant to the next deli, and knows before anyone else when something’s wrong.

  I asked her what exactly the problem had been at NOPI, which opened in February last year and is now arguably one of the city’s hottest restaurants, and she said, “At first it was all sharing plates, like Islington. I told Yotam, ‘We haven’t got the right customers here yet. We’ve got your most boring fans, the food bloggers and the ladies over fifty who sit with a glass of water and talk about your beautiful salads, and then order a single plate to share.’ Sharing is fine at night, but the rich guys we need for lunch in Soho, the ones with offices in the neighborhood, don’t want to be disturbed or distracted by the food. They don’t want a cluttered table. They want a main dish, fish or meat, and if they get that they’ll order a nice expensive wine to wash it down. Yotam got that wrong.” (She meant he was nervous about diluting the Ottolenghi signature.) “But Noam and I fixed it. It didn’t take long. You can share tastes or you can dig into your own big steak. We’re very popular now.”

  On my last night in London, a Friday, Ottolenghi and I cooked from Jerusalem in the Notting Hill apartment that he shares with Karl Allen, a quirky and quietly impressive Northern Irishman whom he met at the gym twelve years ago—and married in September in Massachusetts, where gay marriage has been legal for eight years. Allen, who is a law graduate, a former British Airways flight attendant, and a keen-eyed collector of vintage fifties antiques—he found the outsize cabbage-leaf chandelier that hangs like a flashy hat above the receptionist’s stand at NOPI—has been managing the company’s Kensington deli since it opened, in 2005. (“You function at 80 percent when you fly,” he says. “You don’t realize it until you’ve spent a week in one time zone. I met Yotam and I wanted that.”) His plan is to quit Kensington “when the first baby arrives” and become a house parent, eventually selling antiques or designing interiors from home. With family in mind, they have bought a large house on a quiet street in Camden—a short walk from Ottolenghi’s test kitchen, in an old building under the Camden railway arches, and the adjoining prep kitchen, where the bread for his restaurants and delis is now baked and the pastry is prepared for on-site finishing. “Pretty, respectable, and bourgeois” is how Ottolenghi happily describes the house. It has five bedrooms, a deep garden, and a proper kitchen to replace the one he cooks in now, which is minuscule, or as he put it when I walked in, “a case of the cobbler goes barefoot.” Every inch was taken.

  Ottolenghi cleared some space for us on a serving counter above a shelf of tottering pots and bowls and unpacked the fixings, which in keeping with his �
�any decent supermarket” home-recipe rule, he had just picked up at the local Waitrose. He tweeted a picture of the radishes he’d bought, glistening in the sink, “because they look so fresh,” and then a message to say that regrettably they were tasteless—after which we took a break, opened some white wine, and stepped onto a narrow balcony off the kitchen for a clandestine cigarette. Ottolenghi rarely smokes. His real vice is drugstore candy, which he keeps stashed in the glove compartment of an eight-year-old Prius, and dips into on his daily rounds. He is almost preternaturally energetic, perhaps because of the sugar but more likely because of the Pilates classes he takes twice a week and never misses. He started Pilates twelve years ago, with a terrible “bending-over-the-stove” backache. Eight years later, he qualified as an instructor—something he hopes will come in handy on the off chance that London ever stops eating Ottolenghi.

  My first job that night was to help assemble a “one-pot Sephardic hybrid” inspired by a dish called plov—a barberry, cardamom, onion, chicken, and rice concoction, originally hours in preparation, that Bukharan Jews introduced to Jerusalem and still serve in one form or another at celebrations. “You have to remember that for Jews, Jerusalem was never an affluent town,” Ottolenghi told me. “It was different for Palestinians. The Arab middle class was affluent. But for most Jews it was a poor immigrant town. They cooked with what they had. There is no one recipe. In fact, we never replicate recipes. We replicate the idea of a dish. We replicated the idea of plov.” The barberries—a sour dried berry from Iran—went into an infusion of water and sugar to plump and sweeten. The chicken thighs went into a marinade of olive oil, green cardamom pods, cinnamon sticks, and cloves, along with salt and pepper. Sliced onions slowly caramelized in a frying pan, and we began chopping herbs and tearing lettuces for a raw cauliflower salad. I looked at my watch: we’d been back in the kitchen less than twenty minutes, and talking all the time. Ottolenghi had been so carefree and relaxed, juggling pots and pans in that ridiculous space, that it was impossible to imagine him as the panicked apprentice who had once fled on a moped from the cold starter station of a London restaurant.

  He consulted his list—he is a compulsive list maker—and announced that dessert was next, whereupon he opened two packages of phyllo pastry, melted a good third of a pound of butter, brushed some onto a baking tray, and began layering the tray with sheets of buttered phyllo. The name of the dish was mutabbaq. It was Palestinian, and was traditionally filled with “hard-core” goat or ewe cheese, which, Ottolenghi allowed, was an acquired taste. He and Tamimi had decided instead on the combination of ricotta and soft white goat cheese that he now mixed together with a fork and spread over half the phyllo sheets, leaving me to cover the mixture with the rest. It took me seven sheets, but the last one looked respectable. He checked it out. “Phyllo masks all mistakes,” he said, reaching around me for a small pot to hold the sugar, lemon juice, and water for a pastry syrup. While the syrup boiled, he tackled the bowl of chicken. Soon the spicy smell of the thighs, browned with the cloves and cardamom pods of the marinade sticking to their skin, was mingling with the sour-sweet smell of barberries and caramelized onions in a pot of simmering basmati rice. We opened another bottle of wine, filled a dish with some olives left over from the cauliflower salad, and crashed.

  It had been what his friends call “a Yotam week.” He had worked mornings at the test kitchen with his assistant, Sarah Stephens, a young Tasmanian chef of surpassing patience whose job, at the moment, was to produce a large number of interesting, attractive dishes for the British food photographer Jonathan Lovekin, who had taken the pictures for Plenty and whom I met that Monday, waiting in a patch of light by the front door, to start taking them for Jerusalem. (We ate the morning’s offerings for lunch.) He had visited the prep bakeries next door, where the pastry chef (Lebanese-Brazilian) taught me how to work the dough laminator (think of an old-fashioned clothes wringer, only horizontal and sleek steel) and to hand-roll croissants (so addictive it was hard to stop), and a staff of sous-chefs from Australia, Poland, and Brazil fed me leftover crackers, smothered in salt caramel and chocolate, which they called “brittle.” He had played the fall guy in an interview routine at a cabaret in Soho, appearing between a campy stand-up comedy act and a famous cross-dressing singer; agreed to four more television hours, this time for Channel 4, which would take him from Morocco to Tunisia, Turkey, and back to Israel by the end of the summer (and be ready to air this month); met for a long Islington breakfast with a group of American women (chefs, food writers, and their friends) on an eating spree in London and Paris; hosted a butchery demonstration at NOPI; endured a humorless session with a group of Dutch students, who were horrified to learn that he ate meat, shopped occasionally at a supermarket, and stretched his carbon footprint by importing his pomegranate molasses from Beirut; prepared for the class that he and Tamimi teach on alternate Saturdays at Leiths cookery school, in West London; written three columns; and made time for countless hours eating and talking with me.

  Ottolenghi works hard, and the challenge for him is long-term: how to maintain the Ottolenghi signature and, at the same time, not exhaust its appeal in a notoriously trendy and capricious city. NOPI was an attempt at both. It tastes different—more Asian and exotic—and looks different, with a gleaming brass counter and brass tabletops and fixtures replacing the pristine Corian white of Islington and the delis. “We wanted a brasserie feel, something fresh,” Meitlis told me. “So we kept the white walls but made it as mellow and deep as possible, and let the brass shine.” Ottolenghi admits that it looks terrific. Whatever hesitations he had at first are long resolved. “We wanted to get everything right—right away,” he says. “It’s not easy to keep on reinventing.” He worries (or, more accurately, Bar and Staeubli worry for him) about the downside of so much success—about the gorgeous Ottolenghi-catered buffet becoming the ubiquitous Ottolenghi buffet. One writer recently grumbled about walking into an Ottolenghi dinner party and wondering what had happened to serious English food, served in the proper English dinner order. Another quoted his wife saying that 94 percent of the DNA in every Ottolenghi dish is identical—arguably a case more of expectation than of reality. Ottolenghi experiments all the time. Lately he has been incorporating tastes he discovered this year in Turkey into recipes at his test kitchen. Tamimi, who loves Japan—he says that “taste is a part of me, it’s why I travel”—has been working with Asian seaweeds and vinegars. As for me, I would be hard put to explain what, genomically speaking, the Malaysian-spiced gurnard I sampled at NOPI had in common with the Turkish-inspired zucchini fritters I also ate that night—beyond the fact that they were both good, in an unmistakable Ottolenghi way.

  At seven, Allen came home from the Kensington deli and took a Friday-night nap on the living room couch. When he and Ottolenghi met, Allen was in the habit of driving to Gloucestershire on Fridays, to work on an old cottage that he had bought to sell. “I grew up in the countryside,” he told me. “I can rough it in a sleeping bag. But Yotam? It would have killed him. Luckily, it was sold.” The phone woke him. Bar, who was coming to dinner with his boyfriend of four years, Garry Chang—a young Taiwanese doctor with the National Health Service—had called to say they were running late. We turned off the pot, and I peeked in. The plov was as beautiful as it smelled. “The senses are not so separate,” Ottolenghi had said one day in Camden, en route to a High Street diner for a quick lunch. “They’re synesthetic. They need to work together.” He called this his aesthetic. The word at work is “smiling.” Staeubli, who coined the expression, says, “Sami can make food smile,” and Allen swears that he has seen Yotam walk into one of his delis or restaurants and take away half the food on display or the salad about to be served “because it’s not smiling.” The smiliest dish I’d seen that week was shakshuka—a North African breakfast from Plenty, cooked and served in little cast-iron skillets. It wasn’t fancy: a couple of eggs poached in a spicy saffron, onion, tomato, and bell-pepper sauce, flecked with fres
h herbs and dappled with drops of yogurt. But it was irresistible. I could taste it before I raised my fork.

  Bar and Chang arrived at the apartment toward nine. Allen and I set the table. Ottolenghi put the mutabbaq in the oven, turned the plov back on, and chopped some parsley, coriander, and dill, for sprinkling. A few minutes later, we sat down and ate serious Jerusalem food served in the proper English dinner order. The plov was delicious, if you didn’t count the undercooked rice and the pinkish chicken near the bone. Ottolenghi, who is known to be very precise at work—“He’s always asking, ‘How much of that? A teaspoon? A half teaspoon?’” Allen says—tends to get lost in thought or conversation when he cooks at home. He had doubled the number of chicken thighs in his recipe and added some extra rice, but not the extra water with which to cover and cook it all. (“The big secret at Yotam’s house is that the food is much better when Karl cooks it,” Meitlis, who stays in their spare bedroom when he comes to London, says.) It didn’t matter. We chewed the rice, avoided the pink, and asked for seconds.

  The pastry was a sweet success. We ate it slowly and talked till midnight. Ottolenghi was leaving for Israel in a few weeks, to be with his parents on the twentieth anniversary of his brother’s death. He has been flying to Israel two or three times a year since he left for Amsterdam. He says that “the sense of a network there, the security in that, is what gives me the cohesion that I don’t have here.” He calls it “the feeling that, when I’m at my parents’ house, anything wrong or difficult can be fixed.” The Ottolenghis have both retired. His father gardens; his mother volunteers with the women of Checkpoint Watch, documenting the trauma of border crossings for Palestinians. Once a year they spend a week in England with Ottolenghi and Allen. His father has become a fan. Three years ago, at Yotam’s fortieth birthday party (three days and thirty guests in a rented Dorset mansion), Professor Ottolenghi stood up, raised his glass, and said, “My wish for Yotam today is that he keep not listening to my advice.”