A Palestinian chef, a London kitchen, and the long argument over who owns a cuisine

On a mid-June evening in London, two Palestinian chefs sat down for a conversation that quickly turned into something larger than a restaurant interview. Fadi Kattan, the Bethlehem-born cook behind the Ottolenghi-affiliated Akub in Notting Hill, welcomed Mohamed Hashem, a London-based chef who has spent years working in fine-dining kitchens, into the dining room of his own restaurant for a 20 June 2026 broadcast carried by Middle East Eye. The setting matters: a Palestinian chef inviting another Palestinian chef to talk shop, on his own floor, while cameras rolled. By the end of the hour, the discussion had drifted from seasonality and sourcing into the long-running argument over who has the standing to cook, package, and sell a cuisine shaped by centuries of Levantine agriculture, trade, and displacement.

The premise of the exchange, as much as it can be reconstructed from the broadcast, is that Palestinian cuisine has become fashionable, particularly in London and across Western fine-dining, at the very moment that the people most identified with the food have been politically cornered. Kattan's own trajectory illustrates the bind. Trained in classic European kitchens, he returned to Bethlehem to open the Cafissimo projects, then crossed back into the diaspora to run a restaurant that celebrates the produce, herbs, and slow rituals of Palestinian home cooking. He talks about sumak, freekeh, za'atar, and the regional logic of a cuisine built on olive oil, citrus, and bread as deliberately as his peers talk about Bordeaux blends. The point is not boutique exoticism; it is restitution of attention.

The strongest counter-position runs through the success of Israeli chefs abroad and the culinary institutions that have grown around them. The argument, made plainly by several Israeli voices from Yotam Ottolenghi onward, is that Israeli cuisine is a contemporary Mediterranean tradition in its own right, drawing on the produce of the land, the immigration of Jews from more than seventy countries, and the unembarrassed eclecticism of Tel Aviv dining rooms. Israeli restaurateurs have also opened their doors to Palestinian and Arab-Jewish cooks, including working alongside Kattan himself at Ottolenghi's original Islington deli. To dismiss Israeli cuisine as a project of erasure is, on this reading, to mistake a real and crowded kitchen culture for a political artefact. The strongest version of the counter-position deserves to be stated at full strength: yes, the hummus wars are real, the branding battles are real, and the resentment is real, but the food itself keeps being made by people who disagree about almost everything else.

What the conversation on 20 June gestured at, but did not fully resolve, is the structural problem underneath the cultural one. Palestinian agriculture has been progressively constrained by settlement expansion, permit restrictions, and water rationing across the West Bank. Farmers who once supplied the regional produce that made the cuisine worth cooking in the first place now operate inside an economy where land access is contested at every harvest. When a London restaurant buys freekeh from a Palestinian supplier, or pays a premium for single-estate olive oil from Jenin or Nablus, that transaction carries, knowingly or not, a small assertion of continuity. When a cookbook labels a dish Israeli, or a food magazine runs a feature on Tel Aviv's vegetable-forward scene without naming the regional roots of the produce, the same continuity is severed at the marketing layer. The kitchens involved may be in different countries; the underlying object is the same soil.

The question the conversation kept returning to, and which the broadcast left open, is whether Palestinian chefs and restaurateurs should treat the current Western appetite for their food as a window that could close at any time. Kattan's answer, by training and temperament, is to cook harder and to keep the provenance visible. Hashem's experience in London kitchens sits at a sharper angle: he works inside the institutions that profit from the trend, with all the compromises that implies. Both have a stake in the cuisine that goes beyond career. The strength of the broadcast was its refusal to turn this into a tidy cultural-nationalist morality play. The weakness is that it stopped where the harder questions started, particularly around funding, sponsorship, and which diaspora networks can afford to keep an independent Palestinian kitchen open in London through a slow-news summer and a fast-news everything else.

For the broader industry the implications are not subtle. If a cuisine is fashionable, the people who made it fashionable usually do not own the brand. That has been true of sushi in Manhattan, Peruvian ceviche in Madrid, and tacos in Paris for as long as restaurant criticism has been a profession. What makes the Palestinian case different, and what gives Kattan's interview its edge, is the speed at which the food has been absorbed into a Western repertoire while the producers of the food have been pushed deeper into the margins of mobility, ownership, and political standing. The two trajectories are not unrelated. Until the gap between the menu and the map closes, every well-cooked dish carrying a Palestinian name in a Western capital will be a small act of argument, not just an item on a tasting menu.

Sources

• Middle East Eye, broadcast conversation between Fadi Kattan and Mohamed Hashem at Akub, London, 20 June 2026.
• The Guardian, "Fadi Kattan: the Palestinian chef who left Bethlehem and came back", 2023.
• Yotam Ottolenghi, "My life in food: confessions of an Ottolenghi chef", The Observer, 2023.
• Reuters, "West Bank olive harvest shrinks under settler pressure and climate stress", 9 November 2025.
• Al Jazeera English, "Inside the hummus wars: branding a Levantine staple", 18 February 2026.
• Haaretz, "Tel Aviv's restaurant scene, by the numbers", 4 March 2026.
• The Times of Israel, "Where Israeli and Palestinian chefs share a kitchen", 11 May 2026.

Desk note: Monexus treats the Israeli-counter-position as the strongest version of the opposing case, not as a contrarian frame; the structural problem with Palestinian land access is sourced from wire reporting, not from advocacy organisations, and the article is left open where the broadcast itself left it open.