Sami Tamimi’s “Falastin” Is an Ode to the Complex Food and History of Palestine
SOURCE: MOTHER JONES
BY: TOM PHILPOTT
On the international stage, discussion of the Occupied Palestinian Territory (as the United Nations calls Palestine) is often reduced to its long territorial conflict with Israel. As the occupation grinds on, Palestinians “live a harsh reality, but it’s not stopping them from living their life,” says chef Sami Tamimi, who was born and raised on Jerusalem’s Arab east side. “They still fall in love and get married and [have] kids—and they eat a lot and they love to share food.”
Tamimi started his culinary career in Palestine before moving to London as a young chef in 1997, where he met a fellow food-obsessed Jerusalem native, Yotam Ottolenghi, a Jewish Israeli. Together, Ottolenghi and Tamimi launched the celebrated Ottolenghi group of restaurants and cookbooks—including the 2012 jewel Jerusalem, a valentine to their shared, divided home city. (Tamimi remains executive chef and partner in the Ottolenghi enterprise.) Jerusalem largely avoided the bitter politics of Palestinian dispossession and revolt, focusing on the ancient city’s culinary glories. Tamimi’s new cookbook Falastin, co-written with fellow Ottolenghi stalwart Tara Wigley, is his effort to reclaim his homeland as more than a totem of intractable conflict—and reveal it as a place where people live full (though tightly constrained) lives and eat absolutely delicious food, while also portraying the “pretty grim picture” of the occupation.
In the latest episode of Bite, I caught up with Tamimi at a flat in Rome, where he is spending the summer.