A Chef Who Is Vegetarian in Fame if Not in Fact (Published 2011) (2024)

“VEGETARIANS in general don’t like me,” Yotam Ottolenghi said ruefully.

It seemed an improbable statement. Mr. Ottolenghi is no crusader for snout-to-tail eating, engraved with pig tattoos. In England, the 42-year-old chef is famous for making it chic to eat your vegetables.

The prepared-food shops that bear his name — equal parts deli, bakery and hip minimalist canteen — are daily plundered by London’s highbrows. They come for the vibrant vegetable dishes: a galette brimming over with sweet potatoes, perhaps, or blackened eggplant ladled with saffron yogurt and festooned with almonds, or a wild thing of a salad, practically growing off the plate.

In 2006, he was tapped by The Guardian to write a weekly column titled “The New Vegetarian.” That led to a vegetarian cookbook, “Plenty,” which did serious time on England’s best-seller lists last year, rubbing spines with Stieg Larsson’s thrillers. (“Plenty” has just been released in the United States by Chronicle Books.)

If anything, Mr. Ottolenghi — tall and dapper, with salt-and-pepper hair, half-rim glasses and a penchant for pink-striped button-downs and black sneakers — should be a vegetarian pinup.

But here’s the rub: he eats meat.

Apparently this is enough to discredit him in the eyes of the most devout abstainers.

As he prepared a few dishes on a recent afternoon in New York, he recounted a debate in a vegetarian magazine over whether it was appropriate to publish his recipes, since he was not a member of the tribe. (The recipes were ultimately approved.)

In an interview with a London reporter last month, Mr. Ottolenghi was quoted as saying, “You can be vegetarian and eat fish.” No, you can’t, the faithful raged. He later recanted via Twitter. (“To all, fish eaters are NOT vegetarians!”)

Still, the uproar baffles him.

“It feels so wrong, all these definitions,” he said. “I don’t see the point unless you want to create a club that excludes people.”

“I think I can win more people to vegetables” than strict vegetarians, he said. “I’m better for the cause.”

Political divisions are familiar territory for Mr. Ottolenghi. He was born in Jerusalem in 1968. His mother is of German descent, his father Italian. They raised their son to be cosmopolitan and omnivorous. As a child, he craved prawns, partly because they were difficult to find. “You had to go the Arab side,” he said.

Mr. Ottolenghi, the son of a chemistry professor (his father) and a high-school principal (his mother), was expected to pursue an academic career. Following his mandatory tour in the Israel Defense Forces, he earned a master’s degree in comparative literature at Tel Aviv University while he worked nights as a copy editor at the newspaper Haaretz.

Neither effort proved inspiring. In 1997, he moved to London, under the cover of pursuing a doctorate. Instead, he enrolled at Le Cordon Bleu.

His entrance into the professional culinary world, via a Michelin-starred restaurant, was traumatic.

“The kitchen is tough,” Mr. Ottolenghi said. “It’s one of the last bastions in civilized culture that sets out to crush the spirit.”

He was slotted into pastry, a happy accident for future fans of his meringues the size of birds’ nests and his polenta cake perfumed with orange-blossom water.

In 1999, he met Sami Tamimi, who would become his business partner (and co-author of his first cookbook, “Ottolenghi”), when they were working at Baker and Spice, an artisanal bakery.

They quickly discovered that they had grown up in Jerusalem at the same time, just a few miles apart. Mr. Tamimi, a Palestinian, had lived on the Arab side.

The Ottolenghi chain is their shared vision. The first outpost opened in Notting Hill in 2002. Now there are four, including one candlelight-by-night, reservations-recommended restaurant. A separate dining concept, Nopi, a high-end brasserie, opened in February.

At its core, Ottolenghi is a modern deli, with vegetables as the focus instead of meat.

This was partly an aesthetic choice (to evoke abundance with a riot of hothouse hues) but also a nod to the prominence of vegetables and legumes in Middle Eastern cuisine.

Each Ottolenghi is a luminous white box, with white walls, white shelves and long communal tables with gleaming Corian tops (in Glacier White, of course). Against this ascetic backdrop, the platters of vegetables appear super-saturated in color, sun-kissed and exuberant.

The palette of flavors is unapologetically loud — “noisy,” Mr. Ottolenghi would say. Garlic and lemon dominate.

“I want drama in the mouth,” he said.

Meat is on the menu. So when Mr. Ottolenghi was first approached by The Guardian to write a vegetarian column, he balked. But his agent, who had been trying unsuccessfully to get him a cookbook deal, told him, “Beggars can’t be choosers.”

“Meat should be a celebration, not everyday,” he said. “There is so much else out there.”

He is a champion of the underappreciated vegetable: kohlrabi, chard, sorrel. (The sorrel sauce paired with his chard cakes should be slathered on everything.) He’s known for sprawling and sometimes obscure ingredient lists.

He likes to turn herbs from a garnish to the centerpiece of a dish, as in a watercress salad tousled with tarragon, basil, dill and cilantro. He elevates alliums, typically supporting players, to stars in a tart studded with whole garlic cloves, and in a searing soup of young onions.

His culinary philosophy might be summed up as “Cook food less.” “I keep an ingredient very close to what it looks like naturally,”he said. “I take a vegetable and blanch it, leave it nearly raw. Or grill it and leave the color and the flavor at the center to enjoy.”

“In certain European cuisines, vegetables are cooked a long time,” he said. “I take the term al dente and use it for vegetables.”

His food, although undeniably Middle Eastern in influence — readers of “Plenty” should be prepared to stock up on za’atar (a blend of dried hyssop, sumac and sesame seeds), pomegranate molasses and rosewater — is not bound by geography. “Plenty” includes riffs on the Malaysian noodle dish mee goreng and the Vietnamese savory pancake banh xeo.

One pasta unites his grandmother’s Passover specialty, fried and pickled zucchini, with edamame.

Mr. Ottolenghi has little interest in culinary trends and is leery of anything that smacks of dogma, be it the insistence on eating exclusively organic or the fanatical parsing of an ingredient’s provenance. He just wants to do his thing.

It seems right, then, that a couple of months ago the title “The New Vegetarian” was quietly taken off his Guardian column. Now “I’m free to do what I like,” he said.

But he promised he won’t go whole hog, as it were. “I don’t want to alienate my fan base,” he said.