Yotam Ottolenghi & Sami Tamimi

Yotam Ottolenghi is an Israeli-British chef and food writer whose Plenty, Jerusalem, and Ottolenghi Simple transformed the way British and American home cooks approached vegetables and Middle Eastern flavours.

Yotam Ottolenghi was born in Jerusalem and trained in London, where he and his business partner Sami Tamimi opened a series of delis and eventually the Nopi and Rovi restaurants. His first major cookbook, Ottolenghi (2008), introduced London to a style of cooking that drew on Middle Eastern, North African, and Mediterranean traditions — abundant vegetables, bold spicing, fresh herbs, and generous portions of pomegranate molasses, tahini, and preserved lemon. But it was Plenty (2010), an entirely vegetable-focused book, that established him as a genuinely transformative figure in food writing.

Plenty demonstrated that vegetables could be the unambiguous stars of a meal without apology or compromise — not because they were lower in calories or animal products, but because they were genuinely delicious when treated with the same technical and flavour attention as meat. The recipes are ambitious, the ingredient lists can be long, and the results reliably justify the effort. Jerusalem (2012), co-authored with Sami Tamimi, deepened the culinary exploration with a book about the food of a city that is itself a site of radical cultural complexity, written with great care for the nuance of that complexity.

Ottolenghi Simple (2018) was a deliberate recalibration: recipes designed for home cooks who love the flavour profile but don’t always have time for the elaborate preparations. It is arguably his most practically useful book and an excellent starting point for new readers. His subsequent books — Flavour, Extra Good Things — continue to develop and refine the approach. Ottolenghi has been the single most influential figure in British food writing of the past fifteen years, and his influence on restaurant menus, food magazines, and home cooking worldwide has been remarkable.