Yotam Ottolenghi: 'Food is one of the most delightful things that we've created'

Yotam Ottolenghi has cooked for the great and the good - but that cuts no ice with his most demanding diners at home.

The Israeli-born British chef, who lives in London with husband Karl Allen and their two sons, told RNZ's Culture 101 that it was challenging to discover that his children preferred simple food.

"You just want them to be these sophisticated creatures with amazing palates right from the get-go, and the reality just hits you in the face every time because that's just not how they are.

"I know some kids are like that, but I think most kids are not like that. They need to take their time, they need to go on this journey, and I think we should just let them go on the journey of discovery because I think that's just human nature."

Ottolenghi has taken plenty of people on a journey of culinary discovery since he opened his first restaurant and deli in 2002 in London's Notting Hill. It was an immediate hit.

“People just told each other... 'this place around the corner, and it does all these wonderful things'. That was incredibly empowering, to be able to see how people reacted straight away was just wonderful."

Since then, he has written nine cookbooks, includingSimple, Plenty, Jerusalem and the new one Comfort.

He has also had a huge impact on the British culinary scene – not least by putting vegetables front and centre of his dishes.

The chef been held responsible for 'the Ottolenghi effect' where Mediterranean and Middle Eastern flavours, and ingredients like sumac and pomegranate molasses, have become part of the everyday pantry.

"For a very long time, for the longest time, I think vegetables were kind of perceived as a kind of a necessary evil in the Western diet," he says.

“It's something that doesn't give you all that joy. And I think what, what we did, Sami [business partner Sami Tamimi] and myself in the kitchen, we showed that you could create some wonderful things that feel like a feast with ingredients that are actually good for you and are exciting."

Ottolenghi is coming to Aotearoa later this month, and will be hosting an evening cooking live on stage - sharing secrets, stories and his culinary inspirations.

Some of the best food and most comforting food comes in bowls and from eating with your hands, he says.

“Lifting a bowl close to your face, smelling the steam coming out of the bowl, that for me is a way of feeling comfort."

Cutlery, while it has its place, creates distance and separation from the pleasure of eating, he says.

“I think lifting up something and eating with your hands is a way of feeling a certain degree of comfort. Even if you think about like how you eat a pizza, why is pizza so great? Because you eat it with your hands.

“Imagine eating it with a knife and fork, half the fun wouldn't be there.”

He pushes back against the notion of food as merely nutritional, which he sees as reductive.

“Food is one of the most delightful things that we've created, food culture. And obviously, it's very regional. People all over the world eat different things. And they've erected all these wonderful things that are called cuisines.

"Sometimes I'm a little bit concerned when I see it broken down into nutritional values."

Ottolenghi argues that food is much more than that.

“You can, of course, talk about carbohydrates and fats and proteins, etc, and vitamins, but that is just a very, very shallow understanding of food.

“Food, first of all, even in terms of interaction with our bodies, is much more complex than that; it's a cultural phenomenon, it's a personal phenomenon, it's an anthropological thing.”

He says we should eat more like we used to before vogueish diets proliferated.

“To have a healthy relationship between humans and their foods, to try not to have this kind of reductionist approach and think of food just in terms of the nutrition, because it just doesn't work, it fails every time."

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