A Palestinian chef, a London kitchen, and the long argument over who owns a cuisine

On 20 June 2026, Palestinian chef and author Fadi Kattan sat down inside his own London restaurant with the Egyptian-British food writer Mohamed Hashem for a recorded conversation about Palestinian cuisine, cultural authorship, and what both men describe as the routine erasure of Palestinian identity from dishes widely marketed as Israeli. The encounter, distributed through Middle East Eye, runs long enough to leave room for the argument to breathe: it is a working chef, in his own room, naming the dish and naming the politics of the dish in the same breath.

The dispute is older than any one restaurant. Falafel, hummus, za'atar, msakhan — staples of the Levantine table — appear on menus across Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Nazareth, Amman, Beirut, Ramallah and Bethlehem with national labels attached to them that change depending on the passport of the cook. Kattan's contribution, across three cookbooks and a decade of television, has been to insist that the Palestinian pedigree of those dishes is not a footnote. Hashem's audience on social media is a generation of Arab-diaspora diners who have spent years watching the same ingredients rebranded. The London date is, on the evidence of the broadcast, less a debate than a documentation exercise — both men agree on the basic facts, and disagree mainly about how loudly to say them.

The setting, and why a London room matters

Kattan trained in Paris and worked in kitchens across the Levant before opening Akub in Notting Hill, a neighbourhood whose Palestinian and wider Arab diaspora is large enough to support a specialist restaurant but small enough that the menu carries a marketing burden. A Palestinian restaurant in London is, in 2026, a small institution: it must justify the food to diners who have only ever eaten the regional version, and it must justify the politics of the food to diners who have heard the politics and decided they would rather not. Kattan's response, in his books and on screen, has been to refuse the second burden. The cuisine stands on its ingredients. The politics are not a garnish.

This is the choice that put him on Hashem's guest list. Hashem's platform has built an audience around the proposition that Levantine food has been quietly decoupled from its Arab and Palestinian origins in Western media, and that the decoupling is not accidental. The London conversation is one stop on a longer tour of Arab chefs in Western capitals making the same case — that the further a dish travels from its homeland, the more likely it is to arrive with a different flag on the menu.

The counter-narrative, in good faith

The opposing case deserves to be stated at full strength. Israeli food culture is, by any honest accounting, a serious and innovative tradition. Tel Aviv's restaurant scene is dense, technically accomplished, and willing to take risks. Israeli cookbook authors — Yotam Ottolenghi foremost among them, but also Ruth Sirkis, Einat Admony, and a generation of Mizrahi chefs working in Haifa and Jaffa — have done real work to introduce Levantine technique to a global audience. To argue that Israeli chefs have nothing to contribute would be both lazy and wrong.

The stronger objection runs the other way. There is a difference, the Israeli counter-argument goes, between acknowledging cross-pollination and erasing prior claim. A dish can be Israeli and Levantine and Palestinian and Jewish all at once — the modern Israeli kitchen is, in part, the kitchen of Jews who arrived from Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, Syria and Egypt, and brought their recipes with them. To require every Israeli chef to annotate their hummus with a Palestinian land acknowledgement is to treat Israeli Jewish cooks as permanent guests in someone else's kitchen. That framing has real force, and the strongest version of it concedes the Palestinian authorship of specific dishes while insisting on the right of Israeli cooks to cook them.

What the framing contest is actually about

None of this is, in the end, a quarrel about chickpeas. The question underneath the question is who gets to be the default voice of a place. Cuisine is one of the softest and most durable forms of national branding a country can build, and the Israeli state has invested in food exports, culinary diplomacy and cookbook publishing as part of a wider effort to project a normal, regional, rooted identity to Western audiences. The Palestinian equivalent effort is younger, less funded, and runs into the structural problem that a state marketing apparatus on one side of a contested territory can out-spend a diaspora marketing apparatus on the other by several orders of magnitude.

This is the imbalance Kattan and Hashem are pointing at, and it is the imbalance that makes the conversation more than a chef's quarrel. A Palestinian chef in a London restaurant is, in 2026, an unusual enough proposition that a long interview about it counts as a small media event. An Israeli chef in a London restaurant is unremarkable. That asymmetry — what the market treats as ordinary and what it treats as a story — is the real subject.

The stakes, plainly stated

If the trajectory continues, the global Levantine restaurant scene will be, by default, an Israeli scene with Palestinian footnotes. That is the prediction the broadcast implicitly makes, and the reason it is worth taking seriously. Diaspora food culture is upstream of a great deal of public sympathy: cuisines that travel well tend to be cuisines whose home countries are seen as worthy of attention. The converse is also true. A cuisine that can be marketed without its people is a cuisine that can be eaten without a politics — and a politics that can be eaten around is a politics that has lost a tool.

The honest uncertainty in all of this is whether the conversation moves the needle. Kattan and Hashem are speaking to a diaspora audience that is largely already converted. The harder audience — a Western diner who has never thought twice about the provenance of their hummus — is not in the room, and may not be reachable by a one-hour YouTube broadcast, however well-made. The argument will run in parallel with the actual restaurant trade for as long as the trade exists. That is the shape of the fight.

This article draws on a single primary source: a 20 June 2026 Middle East Eye broadcast of a conversation between Fadi Kattan and Mohamed Hashem in Kattan's London restaurant. The wider Israeli and Western culinary context is treated as a counter-position to be steelmanned rather than sourced verbatim, in line with this publication's habit of stating the opposing case at full strength before settling the framing.