Palestinian chef Fadi Kattan takes the fight against food appropriation to a London dining room

On 21 June 2026, in the dining room of his own London restaurant, the Bethlehem-born chef and author Fadi Kattan sat down with Middle East Eye presenter Mohamed Hashem and made a case that begins in the kitchen and ends in the archive. Palestinian food, he argued, has been steadily de-Palestinianised — stripped of its place names, its seasonal rituals, the names of the women who cooked it, and the fields and terraces it came from — and resold, often at a premium, as something blander and more marketable. The interview, published on Middle East Eye's Real Talk series, runs roughly 25 minutes and is built less around recipes than around a single accusation: that the erasure of a cuisine is one of the quieter instruments of a longer erasure.

The argument is not a new one, but it is being made with unusual directness at a moment when "Levantine" and "modern Middle Eastern" have become the preferred labels on tasting menus in London, Paris, New York and Dubai. Kattan's contention is that those labels are doing work — that they take dishes whose roots in Palestinian villages, olive groves and kitchen gardens are matters of record, and float them free of that record. The food tastes the same. The history does not.

A conversation staged on contested ground

The setting matters. Kattan chose to record the episode inside Akub, his Notting Hill restaurant, which he has run since relocating from Bethlehem. The choice of a London room is itself a statement: it places the argument in front of an audience for whom the dispute over Palestinian cultural ownership is usually mediated through news wires, NGO reports and the language of international law, not through a menu. Hashem, who has long framed Palestinian cultural coverage around the politics of recognition, presses Kattan on the everyday mechanics of the trade — what is being lost, who is doing the taking, and whether the chefs who appropriate the food understand what they are removing.

Kattan's answer is measured but pointed. He does not single out named restaurants or named chefs, and the interview does not produce a list of offenders. Instead, he describes a system in which a dish like musakhan — roast chicken baked on taboon bread with sumac, onions and olive oil, and identified in almost every Palestinian cookbook with the olive harvests of the West Bank — can appear on a menu labelled "Levantine" or "Eastern Mediterranean", with no indication of which Levantine, which sea. The omission, he suggests, is not innocent. It allows a customer to enjoy the food without ever encountering the political fact of the people who produced it.

The counter-narrative: cross-pollination or laundering?

The standard defence from the broader restaurant world is that cuisines have always mixed, that borders in the kitchen are porous by design, and that a dish that travels is a dish that lives. There is genuine force to that position. Sumac, za'atar, freekeh and other ingredients long associated with Palestinian and Levantine cooking have moved through the region and into Europe for centuries, often via trade routes that predate the modern state system by a thousand years. To police the genealogy of a recipe is to claim a purity that the historical record does not support.

Kattan's response, in the interview, is that he is not arguing for purity. He is arguing for credit. The dishes that travel, in his telling, travel with a paper trail — a Palestinian origin, a specific village, a season, a ceremony, often a name attached to the grandmother who cooked them. To remove the paper trail while keeping the food is to launder it, not to celebrate it. The distinction is the spine of the whole argument, and it is one the culinary press has so far been slow to engage with. Food media, like foreign reporting, tends to default to the language of the market — "trending", "hot", "the next big thing" — rather than the language of provenance.

A structural frame: culture as the second front

What is striking about the conversation is the frame Kattan puts around it. He does not treat food as a metaphor for the larger political dispute, or as a soft entry point to a hard topic. He treats it as a primary site of the dispute itself. The same logic that drives the documentation of Palestinian villages, the mapping of olive groves, the recording of place names in the village lexicons published over the last two decades, also drives the insistence that a dish called yakhneh, or maqluba, or musakhan should be named for the people who cooked it first. Erasure, on this reading, is a continuum: it runs from the bulldozed terrace to the rebranded menu, and the second is intelligible only once the first is in view.

This is the part of the argument that the wider food world tends to find uncomfortable, because it refuses the separation between culture and politics that the restaurant industry depends on. A chef can serve a dish without endorsing the state that governs the territory the dish comes from; a customer can eat it without signing on to a foreign-policy position. That separation is, in practice, what makes the global food economy work. Kattan is not asking for it to be abolished. He is asking that the bill of fare acknowledge the name on the tab.

The stakes: who gets to write the menu

The practical stakes are modest but real. Palestinian chefs, both inside the occupied territories and in the diaspora, have spent two decades building an infrastructure of restaurants, cookbooks, food festivals and TV programmes to put their cuisine on the global map in its own name. Kattan himself is part of that infrastructure: he has run kitchens in Bethlehem and now London, and he writes about Palestinian food as a cultural project, not a side hustle. The appropriation he describes is not a theoretical problem for that cohort. It is a question of who captures the value — financial and symbolic — of a cuisine that has been, until quite recently, marketed mostly by others.

There is also a counter-stake for the global food press, which has built much of its recent Levantine coverage on a handful of Tel Aviv, Beirut and Amman chefs, and has been slow to extend the same column-inches to Palestinian kitchens. If the Palestinian argument about provenance is taken seriously, the result is not a boycott of Israeli or Lebanese restaurants. It is a rebalancing of the credits, the bylines and the cookbook deals — and an honest acknowledgement, on the menu, of which olive grove a dish came from.

What remains contested

The sources for this piece do not name any specific restaurant, chef or cookbook accused of laundering Palestinian dishes, and Kattan himself does not name any in the interview. The argument, as aired, is structural rather than prosecutorial, and the line between a respectful cross-cultural borrowing and an act of appropriation is one the food world has not yet agreed a method for drawing. Kattan's intervention is best read as a request to start drawing it. The dinner is on the table. The name is the part still missing.

How Monexus framed this: the wire treatment of the same conversation would foreground a celebrity-chef-in-London angle and stop at the cookbook plug. Monexus read the interview as a cultural-sovereignty argument and reported the structure, not the recipe list.