Sami Tamimi on Boustany and the fight to preserve Palestinian culinary traditions

“There’s a lot of vegan cheese out there, but they’re not good,” Sami Tamimi laughs as we rhapsodise about cheese – the reason I’m not quite vegan. “I have problems with bread and gluten, but I totally ignore it,” he adds. After all, what is cheese without bread? 

We’re speaking around the launch of Sami’s new vegetarian cookbook, Boustany: A celebration of vegetables from my Palestine.

Packed with fresh, zesty salads, roasted aubergines and cauliflowers, loaded sweet potatoes and spiced bakes, Boustany, which means 'My Garden' in Arabic, is a love letter to the joy of food and eating together, no meat or fish needed. 

The recipes and stories in Boustany, Sami’s first solo cookbook, reflect these roots and the way he grew up eating.

For Sami, growing up in Palestine, his garden was a vibrant, verdant space filled with a variety of produce that his grandfather meticulously tended to throughout the year. The combination of vegetables and herbs, and grains and pulses, was cleverly transformed into plentiful, flavourful dishes, bringing family and community together.

“The responsibility of writing these recipes and stories has weighed heavily on my shoulders. I hope and wish that many of you try the recipes, read the stories and want to know more about Palestine, the place, its people, culture and food, this wonderful place I call home," Sami said about Boustany. 

A love for food

As one half of the Ottolenghi empire, Sami has been feeding London, Oxfordshire and Geneva since 2002 alongside his business partner, and the brand’s namesake, Yotam Ottolenghi. The pair met after Sami moved to London in 1997 to run the kitchen at Baker & Spice, poached from Tel Aviv’s Lilith by a customer.

It’s here where Sami fell in love with food, feasting with family at weddings. “It would never be just one dish. I can taste it now – there would be something on a yoghurt base, something on a tomato base with bobby beans and finely chopped lamb or beef in a stew with ghee or olive oil and caramelised garlic,” he salivates.

Homes were open, and any passing neighbours were invited in for a plate. “You would cook more because you never knew who was going to show up. It took me many years to scale down quantities when I cooked for myself,” he laughs. 

But while a love for food was encouraged, an interest in cooking was not. “It was a female territory, requiring several pairs of hands to prepare the dishes – boys and men are not really allowed in, because [the women] want to gossip and talk about their husbands, neighbours, everything. I always tried to sneak in to see what they were doing – I wasn’t interested in what they were saying,” Sami tells The New Arab. 

It was Sami’s desire for a bike that kicked off his career in the kitchen. His father told him he would need to earn the money to buy a bike, so Sami worked as a kitchen porter at a West Jerusalem hotel during his school holidays.

“I was supposed to be cleaning, but I kept chasing the chefs to see what they were doing. They saw my curiosity and gave me small jobs. Three months later, I was running the breakfast section on my own, scrambling eggs for 100 people,” he says.

After this first job, Sami expanded his palette and repertoire by working in West Jerusalem with an Iraqi Jewish couple, at a Yemeni restaurant and a vegan Indian eatery.

“Every time I started, it was a new journey – I learned a lot,” he remembers. “I worked my last job in a Californian restaurant incorporating the flavours that I knew from home with their techniques of grilling and fermenting.”

Now, Sami’s focus is on vegetarian fare, which he says is “so relevant with everything that’s happening at the moment.”

A celebration of vegetables and Palestine 

Although a meat eater himself, Sami thinks people eat too much meat these days, ensuring his own diet is packed with vegetables – his favourite thing to eat. 

The spark was spending the second lockdown in Umbria, an Italian region bordering Tuscany, with his husband, where they began to miss the flavours of home.

“The climate there is very similar to Palestine, where we would pick all these weeds and herbs and cook them. My partner thought I was bonkers, but this connection to nature is very much part of the Palestinian culture. [Umbria] brought me home, in a way, because I could recognise the leaves and berries and greens.” 

This flora inspired Sami to start writing what he calls ‘titles’ of dishes, rather than recipes.

“There's quite a lot of similarity in a lot of these dishes: there’s a bit of garlic, a bit of chilli, a lot of lemon. You get a flatbread and eat it with a spoon of yoghurt or tahini,” he adds, saying Boustany is a chance to layer and build dishes.

It’s impossible to talk about food without talking about the decimation and starvation of Gaza amid Israel's ongoing genocide. 

Sami has faced criticism for his partnership with Yotam Ottolenghi, the namesake of their brand, and for being perceived as ‘apolitical.’

However, he says, October 7 pushed him to “speak up."

He explains, "For me personally, it started much before October 7. Every time I went back home, it was the same shitty treatment. I still get treated like a third-class citizen from the minute I arrive at the airport.”

Sami says he’s not a “shouty person,” but that he “started thinking about what the right thing to do was.” He started sharing his frustrations on social media, which earned him a lot of hate and threats on his life, which Sami says hurt him at the start.

“But then you almost build another layer of skin. I am a privileged person. I have a platform. I don't care what people think, I just want to say the right thing,” he says. 

Sami also sees his work as archiving a cuisine that “belongs to my culture but is relabelled and not given credit for its origins. They don't even bother to change the names of the dishes, which makes me angry – and I’m not an angry person.” 

Releasing Falastin, his first cookbook outside of the Ottolenghi name, in 2020, Sami says he had wanted to make the book for a long time, but “20 years ago it just wouldn’t have happened. After the release of Jerusalem [with Yotam Ottolenghi,] I felt like I needed to talk more about the Palestinian side of things. We can’t stop talking about this, because the minute we stop, we don’t exist. People are trying to eliminate us.”  

He says that the cookbook was also a chance to talk about and say thank you to Palestine as a country and a people, describing Palestinians as “hospitable, resilient and entrepreneurial. They take a situation and deal with it. They are a force of nature. They have always been, and I am one of them.”

Isabella Silvers is a multi-award-winning editor and journalist, having written for Cosmopolitan, Women's Health, Refinery 29 and more. She also writes a weekly newsletter on mixed-race identity, titled Mixed Messages

Follow her on Instagram: @izzymks