'Food is a language everyone understands': Yotam Ottolenghi on how cuisine connects people

The famed chef and author tells the BBC's Katty Kay that it was finding academia too “esoteric” that led him to seek out a simpler path: to help the world simplify its food.

Yotam Ottolenghi's singular style of cooking has been embraced across the globe. Focusing on simple ingredients and treating food as a way to bring friends and family together, he's become a renowned chef, a best-selling author and a touchstone for home cooks looking to incorporate global flavours into their everyday rotations.

The chef, father and former philosophy student explains to BBC special correspondent Katty Kay, in her interview series Influential, that having parents who cooked helped shape his path. However, he says that it was the sense of belonging that came with cooking – not family expectations – that truly drew him in.

"There was a quiet expectation that I would probably become an academic," he says. "I don't remember having a conversation, which must have happened. 'What do you want to be when you grow up?' I don't remember that."

His parents were both in education – his father, Michael, was a chemistry professor at Jerusalem's Hebrew University – but Ottolenghi notes that his folks both had experience in the kitchen.

"Food was very important. We had good ingredients, good cooking. Both my parents were good cooks," he says. "My father used to cook a lot because he worked more flexible hours. My mother was a head teacher at school [...] She also cooked but he cooked even more."

The 56-year-old chef – who has authored 11 cookbooks – tells Kay that rather than having an epiphany about his future path, he saw the kitchen as a space for curiosity and play, something that he's now passed onto his own children.

"My kids – I've got a 9 year old [and an] 11 year old – they play, you know?" he says. "They go in the kitchen and they make an omelette and this and that. I call it cooking as play. So, I used to do a bit of that but I wasn't obsessive about cooking."

Before making his name in the culinary world, Ottolenghi dabbled in philosophy but found the subject matter too isolating and "esoteric".

"The conversation was being held amongst a group of, like, four people, you know like groundbreaking stuff but actually nobody was participating," he said of his time in university, where he tackled topics like the meaning of photography and what images mean to their viewers. Instead of that very specialised field, he turned his focus to something simpler, literally.

In 2018, following the success of his eponymous Notting Hill café and shop, Ottolenghi published his fifth cookbook, Simple, distilling all the techniques and preparations that he'd become known for into something accessible and approachable.

"Food is a language that everybody understands," he says. What surprised him about that, however, was that the books started to eclipse the food. "Rather than just being a book to sell and share, the publishing arm of Ottolenghi became the dog wagging the tail in this respect. The books became the main thing, almost."

The books were a way for fans of the restaurant and of Ottolenghi's pared-down, flavour-forward recipes to access that world at home. He tells Kay that he hopes to be part of a movement to take cooking from being a chore into something healing and restorative.

"Home-style cooking and family-style serving are way more popular now than they used to be. I really put that down to, first of all, cost of living, but also Covid. In that moment, we understood that actually food should be healing rather than just one of all other activities that we do all day long that push us."

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Fans soon saw the changes in his books, shifting from the exact recipes served at his restaurants to something less haute cuisine and more streamlined, boasting titles like Simple, Plenty and his latest, Comfort.

"I think since Simple, I have been spending more of my time thinking, 'What does it actually mean to cook this recipe?' You know, 'When do I cook – when does one cook it? How much effort goes into it?'" he says. "Funnily, from a grand old age talking to younger chefs, I say to them, 'Is someone actually going to cook this?' I want people to cook my food."

That pared-down approach has even turned "Ottolenghi" into an adjective – used to describe food that offers high impact with few ingredients and straightforward techniques. He remains humble, brushing off the distinction and putting the focus back on his desire to make cooking comforting.

"Food really is one of those activities that shouldn't induce anxiety. It's as simple as that," he says.

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