In a New Yorker profile Ottolenghi remembers his time in the army fondly. It was during this period that he fell in love with Noam Bar, the future co-founder of his eponymous Notting Hill delicatessen, Ottolenghi. After the lengthy and expensive process, the couple welcomed their first son, Max. He has also forced our second coming out, this time as gay parents. Sydney Opera House is giving you and a friend the chance to travel and taste the trademark dishes of culinary legend, food writer, restaurateur and MasterChef guest judge, Yotam Ottolenghi.
We went for a quick lunch, just the three of us. When we got back home to London, we got the word that Melanie had approved us. We were delighted. The next challenge was finding an egg donor. The faces peering at us from the agency's computer database didn't tell us much.
How do you choose the mother of your child from a screen full of vital statistics? Were we looking at height, intelligence or skin colour? Did beauty, university degrees or ethnic background matter? The decision was the hardest and, at the same time, the easiest we had to make.
Easy because we somehow understood that, whoever we chose, we had no idea what effect that choice would have on our child: we just don't know how genes work.
It was like putting your hand into a box of lottery tickets, rummaging blindly and then choosing one. Three months later, Melanie and our donor began getting medical treatments, each in her own town, to co-ordinate their menstrual cycles. The donor was then flown to our clinic in LA, where eggs were retrieved and fertilised in a test tube using sperm we had donated: the standard IVF process. We will never forget the day we got a call from the clinic asking how many fertilised eggs we would like "inserted" into Melanie, who had also been flown to LA to be treated at the clinic.
Karl was in Northern Ireland and I was in Israel. Until then, we had always aimed to have one child in the first pregnancy. Inserting two or three eggs increases the likelihood of pregnancy, but also of a multiple birth. So we decided on just one. But then our previous failures made me panic. I phoned Karl and said, "Fuck it, we're putting in two. It was our first trial; if it didn't work, we could try two next time.
I reluctantly accepted, feeling sure I was right. How brilliant it is to be wrong! The familiar voice of the nurse at the fertility clinic was calling to let us know Melanie was pregnant.
We just looked at each other and smiled and smiled and smiled, like a pair of idiots. It was still early, but we couldn't resist telling our families and close friends. Finally, after four years of trying, I thought it was just possible I might be a father. There was pride and joy, some fear and a huge sense of relief.
Our next milestone was the week scan, after which we started making serious plans. We spoke to Melanie every couple of weeks to make sure she was fine, absorbing every symptom, every mood, as an indication of something, good or bad.
Karl planned to quit his job and look after the baby full-time. We started talking names, schools and buggies: all those conversations we had always found deadly dull in other parents. Our first visit to Boston, near Melanie's home, was around the time of the week scan.
We met her at the examining room, where the nurse showed us the little heartbeat and some very clear organs, including a tiny, pointy nose, the only human thing about the image. Everything looks good, the nurse said, and she pointed to a little white blotch: the indisputable sign that we were having a boy. A boy with a nose: that was all I could think of. The three of us hugged each other; we were on top of the world. Four months later, we were in Boston again, armed with baby paraphernalia, lots of theoretical knowledge and a bit of practical experience.
Karl had spent a few days with a friend who had just had a baby boy, changing nappies, washing him in the kitchen sink and getting a sense of the shape of things to come. We arrived more than three weeks before Melanie's due date; we couldn't risk missing the birth. We settled into our little apartment, got to know the area and sorted out Max's stuff we had decided on the name a few weeks earlier.
Then we just had to wait. It was a weird and wonderful time. Things were out of our hands. After years of working so hard to get to this point, we could just sit back and wait for the phone call. In the end, there was no phone call. We were with Melanie during a routine scan when the nurse told her that it was weird she wasn't having any contractions: the scan showed clear signs of labour. She sent us straight to the hospital. Melanie drove home to pack a bag, while we stopped for a burger at Wendy's.
That same year, he moved to Amsterdam, where he worked at a Dutch-Jewish weekly and considered getting his doctorate at Yale. Instead, and against the advice of his father, family and friends, he moved to London to study French cooking at Le Cordon Bleu. Soon, Ottolenghi found work as a pastry chef, and eventually met the Palestinian chef Sami Tamimi. Ottolenghi and Tamimi discovered they had grown up just a few miles apart on opposite sides of the Israeli—Palestinian conflict, in Jerusalem.
Eight more internationally bestselling volumes have followed: a collection of recipes exploring the flavors of his home-city, Jerusalem with Tamimi ; the vegetable cookbooks Plenty and Plenty More ; a cookbook from his acclaimed London restaurant, Nopi ; a dessert cookbook, Sweet ; Ottolenghi Simple ; and Ottolenghi Flavor co-written with Ixta Belfrage.
His books have sold over 1. Ottolenghi's cookbooks have proven influential, with The New York Times noting they are widely imitated for their plain-spoken instructions and enticing photographs overseen by Ottolenghi himself.
A documentary film, Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles , directed by Laura Gabbert, was released in theaters and on demand September 25, Yotam Ottolenghi is an instructor with Masterclass , the streaming platform. Yotam Ottolenghi grew up in Israel to parents of Italian and German descent, and spent childhood summers in Italy. Long-based in London, where he co-owns an eponymous group of deli shops and the fine dining restaurants NOPI and ROVI, Ottolenghi spends much of his time creating and testing recipes for his weekly column in the Guardian and monthly column in the New York Times.
When he is not cooking, he oversees the day-to-day running of his business and makes occasional television programs. In the beginning, because he joined us later, I was more like the boss — calling the shots, while he ran the kitchen. So we had to reach a new equilibrium on how to work together, which took us a few years. Our friendship is never separate from work now. When we used to go out to restaurants together, it was to taste food and discuss ideas.
There are small differences in what we like: I always look for a bit more complexity in a dish; a hint of spice or an extra herb, while Sami is always happy with one herb less. Though I'm more comfortable about being the front for Ottolenghi, there have been many times in the past where I have felt Sami has not been recognised creatively, as I would always do promotion.
But Sami is an equal creative partner. Should I have called it, say, Ottolenghi-Tamimi? I always feel guilty about it and seek to justify the name. I actually didn't want to call it Ottolenghi at first, but [my business partner] Noam thought it sounded mysterious and exotic, and I was happy to be in the limelight. Nowadays, I'm a more political person than Sami; he's more private.
So when I hear about Selfridges suspending an employee for refusing to serve a friend of the English Defence League leader, say, I get wound up.
I wouldn't have. Sami doesn't see the world like that — he has a different temperament.
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