This is an audio transcript of the Life and Art from FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘Life as a chef in the West Bank right now’
Lilah Raptopoulos
This is Life and Art from FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos.
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Chef Fadi Kattan has been called the voice of modern Palestinian cuisine. He was born and grew up in Bethlehem. He studied in Paris, he lived in London, and in 2015 Fadi did something that really wasn’t done in the West Bank. He opened a locally sourced fine dining restaurant in Bethlehem that specialised in Palestinian food. It’s called Fawda. When Fawda opened, people called Fadi crazy because despite the restrictions that Israel had placed on the territory, he insisted on doing things right. He travelled through checkpoints to get the best salt from the Dead Sea. He brought tablecloths from abroad because he couldn’t get them in Palestine, and he did it because to him this mattered. For years now, Fadi has also been documenting the dishes that he grew up eating because he’s proud of the Palestinian cooking tradition and he wants it to have a future. Last year, Fadi opened a Palestinian restaurant in London, and this month he’s coming out with a beautiful new cookbook. It is called Bethlehem: A Celebration of Palestinian Food. He’s speaking with me today from Bethlehem, just 60 odd miles away from the closest entry to Gaza. Fadi, hi. Welcome to the show.
Fadi Kattan
Hi. Thank you for having me.
Lilah Raptopoulos
It’s such a pleasure to have you. I wonder, to start, if you could tell me a little bit about where you’re talking to me from. Are you at home?
Fadi Kattan
I’m at home in Bethlehem. I’m lucky to live in my great-grandfather’s home.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Wow.
Fadi Kattan
So basically, every stone around us is from 1886. I’m 1,500m away from the church of the Nativity and I am literally less than minutes walk from the market, from the souk. So I’m very grateful and feel very privileged to be where I am, despite what’s happening in Gaza, despite what’s happening in the West Bank.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Can I ask what things in Bethlehem have been like since the war on Gaza began in October? Just to give listeners a sense.
Fadi Kattan
It’s been insane. So when the war started, I’m not sure I actually use the word. I don’t even know how to call it that. The essence of it is, I don’t know how to call it. Is it a war? Is it an attack? Is it a genocide? But in Bethlehem, basically, we were put very quickly under lockdown so we couldn’t leave the city for the first few weeks. The Israeli army closed down all accesses to the city. Then they reopened so we can move in the West Bank. We can’t really move towards Jerusalem, for example. It’s tense. It’s extremely tense. It’s, you know, one of my nightmares. Every evening when I sit outside, I hear the planes flying over going into Gaza. And I wonder, are they gonna bomb somebody I know? The reality of Bethlehem right now is also Bethlehem’s a touristic city.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. I was gonna ask you.
Fadi Kattan
Since the Gaza attack, hotels have closed down so you have around 9,000 people that have lost their jobs for eight months now, and there’s a whole load of people who used to work inside Israel who are no more allowed back inside Israel by the Israeli authorities. So Bethlehem’s like very much on the edge of being impoverished. And then, of course, there’s the common fear which I have, which a lot of people have. Are we next? Is the West Bank coming next after Gaza?
Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. You know, Fadi, I only learned recently. Maybe I should have known, but that in Bethlehem, there’s a humongous wall going through it.
Fadi Kattan
Yeah, there’s a 12-metre-high wall.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.
Fadi Kattan
That wall is not even built on the internationally recognised border between Palestine and Israel. It is actually built inside Bethlehem.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.
Fadi Kattan
I’m not a fan of that wall being fetishised because it’s, sadly, it has become fetishised with a lot of artwork. I think it should be this just this ugly grey concrete structure that we all hope we get rid of because it’s not only walling Palestinians inside Palestine, it’s also making sure that every generation of new Israelis do not know what the Palestinians of the West Bank are.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.
Fadi Kattan
And it allows this total brainwashing of the other is the bogeyman. You know, I it’s true, I’m bearded or whatever, but I’m a cool guy. I don’t, I do use knives for work but I don’t stab human beings like come on. Really?
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.
Fadi Kattan
You know, and that whole voluntary lack of knowledge, that whole dehumanising, the wall is part of it.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Right, right, right. Well, on that note, I would, love to talk about your cookbook, which is brand new and stunning. It’s a very beautiful object as a cookbook to cook from. It’s a beautiful experience. But I wanted to ask first about the journey, because to me the book represents like this big project of yours, which is kind of to document and to communicate Palestinian culture using food. Can you tell me a little bit about how that project started, where that desire started from?
Fadi Kattan
It started when I was a kid in my grandmother’s kitchen. My grandmother, my maternal grandmother, my teta Julia is a woman who was one of the co-founders of something called the Arab Women’s Union, which is a cultural social centre in Bethlehem. She started the first museum in Bethlehem with her colleagues at the Arab Women’s Union. And so the whole idea of documenting, archiving, preserving and transmitting, because I was on the receiving end of translation. So it was that little kid who was being shown old pictures, old documents, old recipes. I remember one of my worst recipes ever that I totally burned with as a kid, being taken to her garden where she had what in my imagination today looks like a sorcerer’s cauldron. I mean, we were supposed to do fruit jam and I have this massive wooden spoon, that again in my imagination feels like it was 10 times my size, and I burned the jam. And the great thing was that adaptability because she just smiled at me and said, oh, we’re doing pâte de fruit, no more jam. And we poured that overcooked jam into trays, let it dry, cut it into cubes, and pretended for the rest of the family that we actually did fruit candy. But yeah, that is really where that desire to document, to share. But it’s document and share something that is still alive.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yes, it’s documenting the history, but also letting it adapt. That sounds like a common theme in everything you’re doing.
Fadi Kattan
You know, I don’t believe in dogma. So you mentioned earlier when I started Fawda, people said I was crazy. I enjoy being called crazy. I don’t have a problem with that. To, you know, when I showed up in Bethlehem with a so, I, where started . . .
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Tell me about that. Tell me what that was like opening the restaurant in Bethlehem. Can you give listeners a taste of what that’s like?
Fadi Kattan
I’ll give you a very simple example. Bethlehem and Palestine don’t have fine dining restaurants.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.
Fadi Kattan
And I wanted to do my fine dining obsession. Not only fine dining, but I was sourcing local. I was, I didn’t have a menu. So basically, every morning I’d go to the market wherever those fantastic artisans and farmers had would make up my menu of the day. The menu was very eclectic. I mean, I would go to Um Nabil and be like, oh, so what herbs do we have today? And she’d smile and be like, well, you know what? I don’t have much mint but I do have one bunch of mint, and I take a bunch of mint even if I knew we had 60 covers that night.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.
Fadi Kattan
And mint would end up being one leaf of mint in a plate somewhere.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. And this woman that you’re speaking about is in the book. She’s an incredible, she seem like an incredible woman that you grew up going to.
Fadi Kattan
She’s fantastic.
Lilah Raptopoulos
She sort of runs a stall at the market.
Fadi Kattan
Yeah, she runs a stall at the market. She’s been there for 45 years. She knows my great aunt, some grandmothers and grandfathers. And it’s, that’s the beauty of Bethlehem. It’s a village. I mean, it is a city, but it’s actually a big village. The other thing where people thought I was crazy is, you know, in a lot of countries that are away from the Eurocentric vision of food, replicating European food seems to be the mark of quality.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.
Fadi Kattan
But the same applies to wines.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.
Fadi Kattan
And I never had a foreign wine on my wine list in Bethlehem. I only had Palestinian wines. I think challenging people’s conceptions is very important.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.
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So OK, let’s talk about the book to decide what to cook, I was drawn to some of the recipes because they’re very similar to the recipes that I grew up with and cooked often. As I told you before we started, I’m Armenian and Greek, and my family’s from Anatolia originally. And so I saw your kofta wrapped in grape leaves, which is your mother’s recipe, and they looked a lot like Smyrna keftedakia. They looked like Armenian dolma. And so I decided to make it, and I decided to stick very closely to your recipe, like make the meatballs with allspice, cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, parsley, you know, tuck the balls into grape leaves, surround them with sliced tomato. And it was so delicious. And it had the same kind of warmth and soul that my family’s version of these dishes have. It’s sort of like reaches a place of longing in me a little bit, but it told a different story. It kind of was clearly your culture story. And I found that very moving that like, you had the small difference of adding cardamom and like, wrapping them around balls and not like ovals, and like just those small things can really bring you to a different place.
Fadi Kattan
You know, we were all ruled for 400 years by the Ottomans.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.
Fadi Kattan
And cuisine travelled like it travels of any empire. But each terroir, and when I say terroir it englobes all elements of the terroir, whether it’s the land, the produce, but also the people of the tradition. All terroirs do overcome and give their own identity. You know, the Armenian community is very present in Palestine, in Jerusalem, in Bethlehem because when they fled the genocide, they came to seek refuge here.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yes.
Fadi Kattan
I’m very close to the community. I have friends in the community. I have family members in the community, and we always tease each other about that difference that you felt.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.
Fadi Kattan
And where in the Armenian community in Jerusalem, it would be more nostalgic longing for what their grandparents and great-grandparents have lost.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.
Fadi Kattan
Well for us it’s a celebration of something that’s still alive, that’s being threatened to disappear.
Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s so interesting. Fadi, because there are so many similarities with other cuisines in this region, can you tell us what Palestinian food is exactly like? What makes it distinct?
Fadi Kattan
Palestinian food, to make it very easy, is the food that is inspired by the terroirs of Palestine. The terroirs of Palestine, to simplify it, are the coast, Mediterranean coast. And that’s where in Gaza you’ll have a lot of fish, you‘ll have a lot of dill, you’ll have chilli in Gaza. You know why we have chilli Gaza? It’s because historically, chilli came from India. Gaza was one of the largest ports in the Mediterranean. So it came to Gaza and was shipped on boats to Europe. It wasn’t shipped out of Jaffa or Haifa which were the other two ports. That’s why more north of the coast you don’t have a chilli tradition.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yes.
Fadi Kattan
Then you have the inland of Palestine, which is the other thing, Olive tree landscape. And then you have the desert which is the Bedouin nomadic traditions. Give you an example. We do a dish called fattah or mansaf depending on what region you are in the country.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. That’s a lamb shank dish.
Fadi Kattan
If you’re in Bethlehem you will use that dried yoghurt that is from the Bedouin tradition called laban jameed. You rehydrate it and you soak the rice and bread with it, and you cook your lamb in it. If you’re in Gaza, you don’t use laban jameed because Gaza, the coast, did not have sheep grazing in the desert. And if you go up north towards Nablus and further up to Nazareth, where they had, they have green pastures, they never preserve the yoghurt. So you were cooking them with a fresh goat yoghurt.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. That’s so interesting.
Fadi Kattan
They’re the same dish but they’re three different dishes. That is Palestine. Because if I can go into the generalities of saying Palestinian cuisine is za’atar, sumac, olive oil, the laban jameed. And that is that is where people make the mistake of saying, well, it’s similar to Lebanese, Syrian and Jordanian cuisine. We also have commonalities. Definitely.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.
Fadi Kattan
But we have that very distinct kitchen.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yes, very specific to the land.
Fadi Kattan
So those were the things people don’t know. The other thing that people don’t know, and that’s where the drink side of things, but also in the book there’s a pork recipe, for example.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yes. I was going to ask you the roasted pork leg.
Fadi Kattan
People don’t know that we’re a very diverse people.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.
Fadi Kattan
What we have to remind people is prior to 1948 and from the Roman period — so the first time this bit of the world was called Palestina was under the Roman rule for 2,000 whatever, 50 years ago, 2,000, a hundred years ago — the inhabitants of this land were Palestinians. It’s just you live in the region called Palestine. You’re Palestinian. Whatever your faith was. And that is what people don’t know. So the book will challenge this, of course. But I love the fact that my mother is blonde for example. It’s just like she is a blonde. And I think it’ll like unsettle half of the people that don’t know much about Palestine because of their preconception. Lilah, you look more like what they would expect a Palestinian to look like.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.
Fadi Kattan
Because your hair is a bit darker than my mother’s. And I think that’s important because again, it comes back to what we were saying about humanity.
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Lilah Raptopoulos
So Fadi, as we get towards the end of our conversation, I really wanna place us again in the current moment. Since Hamas’s October 7th attacks on Israel and Israel’s invasion of Gaza, it’s just been a nightmare. The Gazan authorities estimate that nearly 35,000 people have been killed. People in Gaza have very limited access to food. There’s threat of famine. And I think, you know, some people might say, why talk about Palestinian food and culture right now while people are starving? But it makes sense to me that this is actually extremely important to do now. And I’m curious what you hope people take away from your book that could help them contextualise what’s going on.
Fadi Kattan
So it’s 2mn Palestinians being starved. They’re not starving. They’re being starved. They’re being starved. We all heard it on our news channels just after the 7th of October where the Israeli government officials clearly said, we will not allow food, water and energy into Gaza. That should scare all of us because that sends you back to the Middle Ages where people lay siege to fortresses. I couldn’t cook for the first two weeks after the 7th of October. I couldn’t bring myself to, you know, actually exercise cooking while I had family and friends in Gaza. And then I realised that we made a grave mistake in 1948 when our lands were dispossessed. We concentrated on trying to rebuild our lives. And I’m not a refugee, but you know, I’m talking collectively, as Palestinians, we were dealing with the consequences of having 52 per cent of our land being dispossessed and we did not focus on things like food. What it leads to is what we’re seeing today, which is a total appropriation of our cuisine by Israeli chefs, who label it and claim it’s Israeli. I think it’s very important, whatever cuisine it is, to celebrate its origin. So I started writing the book two and a half years ago. It went to print before the 7th of October. So it’s not, you know, it’s not coming out now because of what’s happening.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.
Fadi Kattan
But it’s true that it’s very confusing having this book come out now. But in reality, I think it’s important to, you know, have people take that journey with the book and actually find out more about who are those Palestinians or what is the cuisine of those Palestinians. My dream would be that one day, diners wherever they are in the world will — when they’re asking themselves should we go have Italian or Sichuanese cuisine tonight — also be like, oh, should we go have Palestinian food tonight?
Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.
Fadi Kattan
Because that means our culture is still alive.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Right, right. My last question for you, Fadi, and thank you so much for your time, is just for the next months, I’m curious what your sort of hopes and plans are for yourself and for the restaurant and for Palestine?
Fadi Kattan
I’ll start from myself. For myself, I’ve embarked on a few different projects for the restaurant in London, and I just hope it goes on being, for Palestine . . .
Lilah Raptopoulos
Before you start this . . .
Fadi Kattan
Yeah, that’s a good point.
Lilah Raptopoulos
I, we have behind us, is that the call to prayer behind you?
Fadi Kattan
Oh, yeah. It is.
Lilah Raptopoulos
OK. Just for listeners to know, that’s the call to prayer.
Fadi Kattan
Exactly. This is Bethlehem. For Palestine, I hope that first that things stop immediately. Because you mentioned 35,000 people have been killed by the Israeli occupation. That has to stop because the years it will take to just deal with the fact that 80 per cent of Gaza’s homes have been just demolished. The fact that there’s hundreds of thousands of injured people, that by itself is just a drama beyond any capacity of some international aid agency that will clap their fingers and can get it sorted. It’ll be years and years and years to try.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.
Fadi Kattan
And get livelihood in Gaza bac. Just to start livelihood. But my real hope is . . . I used to believe in two states. Maybe it was the time where I was trying to be pragmatic and abandon my utopian side, because I’m back to utopian side of why can’t we just live based on justice? So repairing the wrongs that have been done. Ie giving me back my orange grove in Jaffa, ie allowing the millions of Palestinian refugees back home, but also living side by side together as citizens of one state where we’re equal, just like in the United States. You are American regardless of your ethnic or religious background. Why can’t we aspire to that? My dream based on this is for people to be able to live free and equal. And every moment that this whole insanity goes forward, I’m scared that that dream will disappear. We work very hard. And when I say we, I englobe myself in some left philosophy of the world. We worked very hard to allow people to have free choice of abortion. We’ve worked very hard to allow farmers to choose going down the organic routes. And that’s what we should be doing for Palestine.
Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Yeah. Fadi, I’ll say to listeners, Bethlehem is published on May 14th in the US, and May 16th in the UK. I will remember this conversation for a long time. And thank you so much for being today.
Fadi Kattan
Thank you very much.
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Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show. Thank you for listening to Life and Art from FT weekend. We’ve put links to stories about Fadi’s cooking in the show notes along with places to find him on social media. Every link that brings you to the Financial Times gets you past the paywall. Also in the show notes are ways to stay in touch with me and with the show on email and on Instagram.
I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and here is my brilliant team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco, with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Have a lovely weekend and we’ll find each other again on Friday.
