Middle Eastern Feasting

We’ve always known how tasty Israeli cuisine can be. Now, thanks to chefs like Yotam Ottolenghi and a host of fashionable restaurants, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean food is on trend in the mainstream market and even more in demand for simchas. “It’s happy food,” says Falafel Feast owner, Simi Goldberg, a London-based Israeli, who started catering her native cuisine ten years ago. “It’s what I grew up on, so it made sense for me to build my menus on it.”

Simone Krieger, of Krieger’s Kitchen, has been featuring Middle Eastern dishes for years: “I’ve always included foods like hummus, pitta and falafel on my menus because of my family background,” she says. Her Israeli father prepared plenty of Sabra-style feasts at home when she was growing up and she ate out at Lebanese restaurants frequently as a child. 

“What’s changed” says kosher caterer Arieh Wagner, “is the menu. In the past we’d serve falafel, pitta and shawarma but that was it. Restaurants like The Good Egg and Ottolenghi have influenced what people like. You want to supply what the customer wants, and we’ve been serving Israeli-style big salads using ingredients like cauliflower, figs and tahini for some time. It’s good unpretentious, tasty food — real food.”

“If you asked my clients, more than half would say they want ‘Ottolenghi-style’ dishes” says caterer Adam Nathan. “They’re good for kosher menus, as many of the recipes don’t use dairy. Even if they do, you can easily replace ingredients like yoghurt with vegan versions.” 

Ben Tenenblat agrees, but believes his clients are also taking inspiration directly from functions they’ve been to in the Holy Land. “We’ve been doing this food for years — all our clients are trying to replicate what they’ve seen in Israel. Out there you get a lot of open kitchens with open coals, with food being cooked in front of the guests.” 

There is a limit to how closely that can be replicated here: “It’s not so easy to get an upmarket London hotel to let you have an open fire in their ballroom.” He does serve up plenty of huge, colourful salads and dishes with plenty of Israeli influence. “We do dishes like cured salmon in Middle Eastern spices with smoky aubergine purée, a za’atar tuile and a parev mint and cucumber yoghurt. And halva mousse with sesame spiced crumb, poached plum and cinnamon ice cream.” 

Celia Clyne is also well-used to producing Middle Eastern-style food. “Our Israeli chef, Jacov Natan, has been with us for 27 years. I think it’s popular because it’s so full of flavour and people love tasty food. It’s also great for vegetarians and makes a good starter.” She can offer a number of new dishes in this style. “There are so many ways of serving it. We do it as a mezze on individual slate or glass plates as a more formal starter, or on huge sharing plates for bar and batmitzvahs. “We make our own falafel with load of fresh herbs, so they are a gorgeous green inside and serve spiced pargiyot (chicken thighs) on a bed of mejadara (rice, onions and lentils) with baby aubergines and a tahina sauce with a tiny touch of harissa and pomegranate seeds. It’s packed with flavour and looks stunning.”

Clyne’s chefs have also reworked Israeli fare into canapés, serving shot glasses filled with hummus, Israeli salad and a tiny piece of chicken shawarma on the top. “For an end-of-evening snack, we’ve been serving  baby pittas filled with falafel, hummus and salad.” Pitta and falafel are essentially street food, so this cuisine is also well suited to the less formal style of simchah. Goldberg created her Falafel Feast trailer to give guests the authentic experience. For a more street food style, she created a customised trailer which has a festival vibe.

The challenge is how to keep what could be a too-familiar menu fresh. “I’m trying to be inventive with a style of food that’s not new, but it still popular,” says Krieger. “People don’t want what they could cook at home from an Ottolenghi or Honey & Co cookbook — they could do that themselves. So my personal challenge is for it not to look and taste the same. I want all those lovely fresh flavours to gel.”

While her menu still includes the piled-up platters of salad, she hesitates before showering everything with the ubiquitous pomegranate seeds. 
“Instead, I’ve started to also include other Middle Eastern dishes, like malfouf, which is a Lebanese cabbage-based salad with cherry tomatoes, cucumber, onion and loads of fresh herbs, dressed with lemon juice, za’atar and sumac. And radishes are becoming more popular — they make a wonderful, fresh, peppery ingredient. For meat dishes, I marinate with my own spice mix, based on ras el hanout, which includes dried rose petals that make it lovely and fragrant.” 

Ed Shaerf and Yaakov Bruck of Feast by Ed Shaerf have seen the trend growing, reporting that they have noticed a greater awareness by their clients of Middle Eastern ingredients: “If clients read ‘braised lamb with pickled lemons and sumac onions’, they get more excited by them than they may have done in the past, as they know about these flavours. When we use ingredients like sumac and barberries now, people know them. There’s immediate buy-in.

“The Middle East and Mediterranean is so vast and there is so much happening. Middle Eastern covers food from countries as diverse as Lebanon or North African from which the food is very different. The Israeli menu borrows from everywhere, which is why it’s so popular — it redefines the various dishes,” explains Bruck, who spent time working in Ottolenghi’s kitchen. Like their fellow caterers, they have taken the core flavours a step further. “We take the key elements and break them down, then reinvent them,” says Shaerf. 

The flavours have been translated into a fine-dining format. “When people think of Israel, they think of pitta and shawarma — huge flavours, but greasy and messy to eat. We’ve elevated that experience to fine dining and made it clean to eat. We do a Jerusalem mix, for example, which has the same flavours as the traditional Jerusalem grill, but done in a clean, refined way; sous vide lamb sausages, chargrilled trompette mushrooms, fried chicken and foie gras instead of chicken livers.” At a recent dinner, the pair’s menu included a 48-hour cooked lamb shoulder, with hawaij (a turmeric-based Yemeni spice mix) and a take on an Arab fattoush salad, with sorrel, apple and a citrussy, sumac dressing. 

The trend shows no signs of going away but Nathan suspects it may be past its peak. “It wouldn’t surprise me if it’s in the autumn of the trend.” For now though, it continues to be a popular choice.  c