14 Facts About Yotam Ottolenghi

Yotam Assaf Ottolenghi was born on 14 December 1968 and is an Israeli-born British chef, restaurateur, and food writer.

Yotam Ottolenghi is the co-owner of seven delis and restaurants in London and the author of several bestselling cookery books, including Ottolenghi: The Cookbook, Plenty, Jerusalem and Simple.

Yotam Ottolenghi was born to Jewish parents in Jerusalem and raised in Ramat Denya, Jerusalem, the son of Michael Ottolenghi, a chemistry professor at Hebrew University, and Ruth Ottolenghi, a high school principal.

Yotam Ottolenghi is of Italian Jewish and German Jewish descent, and often spent his childhood summers in Italy.

Yotam Ottolenghi was conscripted into the Israel Defence Forces in 1989, serving three years in IDF intelligence headquarters.

Yotam Ottolenghi then studied at the Adi Lautman Interdisciplinary Programme for Outstanding Students of Tel Aviv University, where in 1997, he completed a combined bachelor's and master's degree in comparative literature; his thesis being on the philosophy of the photographic image.

Yotam Ottolenghi later relocated to London to study French pastry cooking at Le Cordon Bleu.

Yotam Ottolenghi met his partner Karl Allen in 2000; they married in 2012 and live in Camden, London, with their two sons, born in 2013 and 2015.

In 2013, Yotam Ottolenghi "came out as a gay father" in a Guardian essay that detailed the lengthy process of conceiving their first son via gestational surrogacy, an option that he believes should be more widely available to those who cannot conceive naturally.

Yotam Ottolenghi served as a pastry chef at three London restaurants: the Michelin-starred Capital Restaurant, Kensington Place, and Launceston Place in Kensington New Town.

In 2006, Yotam Ottolenghi began writing a weekly column for The Guardian titled "The New Vegetarian," though he himself is not a vegetarian and has sometimes noted where a vegetable-centric recipe would pair well with a particular cut of meat.

Yotam Ottolenghi's bestselling cookery books have proven influential, with The New York Times noting that they are "widely knocked-off for their plain-spoken instructions, puffy covers, and photographs [that Yotam Ottolenghi] oversees himself, eschewing a food stylist".

In 2014, the London Evening Standard remarked that Yotam Ottolenghi had "radically rewritten the way Londoners cook and eat", and Bon Appetit wrote that he had "made the world love vegetables".

Yotam Ottolenghi served as a guest judge on the ninth, eleventh and thirteenth seasons of the cooking game show Masterchef Australia.