KYLE WEEKS FOR "M THE MAGAZINE OF THE WORLD"
PortraitAt 51, he is a beloved chef, owner of six restaurants in London and author of culinary bestsellers. This success, the Anglo-Israeli owes its accessible recipes, innovative and full of scents of the Levant.
Yotam Ottolenghi still laughs. The cooking of the world had lasted a day. "Either a few hours to discuss the gastronomies of China, Italy, Greece, etc. " When, at the age of 29, the young Israeli, who had recently arrived in London, enrolled at Le Cordon Bleu, a prestigious French school, proud of his traditional teaching in the culinary arts, he thought that a world separated him from that bourgeois cuisine obsessed with sophistication to the extreme. He admires the excellence of the techniques and the pastry, which he considers to be unsurpassable, but "This crazy time lost cutting vegetables – in brunoise, julienne … I never understood this imperative to present the vegetables in a form that is not theirs".
This memory also makes Yotam Ottolenghi smile this morning in November, just weeks before his fifty-first birthday. More than twenty years have passed. He is no longer a young apprentice cook, landed in another world, but a multi-owner chef (six upscale establishments in London) and author of cookbooks sold to 7 million copies in twenty-four countries. A celebrity chef adulated across the Channel.
Generous cooking and without darling
The very upper-class Nigella Lawson had taught British housewives to feed their families, the volcanic Gordon Ramsay introduced them to the subtleties of the world's haute cuisine, the friendly Jamie Oliver relaxed them with his recipes in fifteen minutes and five ingredients. Ottolenghi, mixing Israeli, Iranian, Turkish, Italian and French influences, has become synonymous with vegetal cooking and open to the world – the exact opposite of what he was taught at Le Cordon Bleu.
He seems to have understood everything at the time. His (almost) vegetarian, non-Michelin-star, multicultural cuisine is perfectly in tune with a generation obsessed with the quest for health and meaning. Rovi, the most recent of its six addresses, opened in 2018 in the district of Fitzrovia, all that made the success of its generous cuisine and without daring: the visible stocks, happily ordered behind the tables (canned dough curry and miso, anchovies and peppers jars, flasks of olive oil and vinegar, autumn vegetable crates); the kitchen, open, animated by an international and diverse team, from where come these colorful plates, full of vegetables, seeds and spices, associations that have made its success: burrata, grilled radicchio, muscatel grapes, honey, verjuice; squash, pumpkin, red beet, black and white rice; roasted celery, apple miso, marinated celery, hazelnuts.
