My children don’t like my cooking, says Yotam Ottolenghi

Chef’s two sons prefer simpler French toast and omelettes to their father’s more elaborate dishes that use exotic spices and ingredients

Yotam Ottolenghi has said his children do not like his elaborate cooking.
The British-Israeli chef, renowned for complex recipes that use exotic spices and ingredients, has two sons with his husband Karl Allen.
But the boys, aged nine and 11, prefer French toast and omelettes and have told their father: “I don’t like Ottolenghi.”
The chef owns a series of eponymous delicatessens and restaurants in London and has written a series of recipe books which have sold more than 11 million copies worldwide.
His dishes include sesame-crusted feta with black lime honey syrup, or banh xeo – a Vietnamese pancake – and Indonesian soy sauce kecap manis, daikon radishes, snow peas and enoki mushrooms.
The tastes of Mr Ottolenghi’s children, however, are much simpler. They do not exclude vegetables – but only if they are prepared in a certain way.
“My children aren’t bothered by the colour as much as by the size,” the chef told Stern, a German magazine.
“They want to be able to grab what they eat. They would eat a whole green bean in an instant. But things that are tiny – like bits of parsley – they don’t eat them.
“They’ll eat a cucumber or a carrot. But if I chop them up and put them in a salad as a coleslaw, they won’t touch them any more.”
Ottolenghi started in 2003 as a delicatessen and bakery with eight chairs in Notting Hill, west London.
Its intricate recipes used little-known ingredients such as freekeh, black garlic and barberries.
But in a new book called Comfort, co-authored with Verena Lochmuller, the German chef, Mr Ottolenghi has promised a more “simpler” offering.
“There are a lot of restaurant cookbooks that are too ambitious, too technically difficult,” Mr Ottolenghi said.
“In Ottolenghi books there are a list of ingredients you have to buy but the recipes themselves are not especially demanding in technical terms.
“Over the years they have also become simpler – fewer ingredients, fewer processes, less washing-up.”
Ms Lochmuller added: “Every time we make a recipe, we think, how many steps is that, how much time does it take? How many pans do you need for it? Does the average household even have that many pans?”