Falastin: A Cookbook

Sami Tamimi is a British-Palestinian chef and award-winning author of bestselling cookbooks. Sami was born and raised in Jerusalem and was immersed in food from childhood. He started his career as commis-chef in a Jerusalem hotel and worked his way up to become head chef of Lilith, one of the top restaurants in Tel Aviv in the 1990s.

Sami moved to London in 1997 and worked at Baker & Spice as head chef, where he set up a traiteur section with a rich Middle-Eastern and Mediterranean spread. In 2002 he partnered with Noam Bar and Yotam Ottolenghi to set up Ottolenghi in Notting Hill.

Alongside Yotam Ottolenghi, Sami Tamimi is co-author of two bestselling cookbooks: Ottolenghi: The Cookbook and Jerusalem: A Cookbook, which the New York Times named as one of the 25 most influential cookbooks from the last 100 years. Sami’s third cookbook Falastin is co-authored with Tara Wigley and won the Fortnum & Mason Cookery Book of the Year 2021. Sami’s first solo cookbook, Boustany, published in 2025, was shortlisted at the Guild of Food Writers Awards 2026 and has been named one of the best cookbooks of 2025 by the New York Times.

Tara Wigley spent a decade working in publishing – at the Abner Stein Literary Agency in London and then Simon & Schuster – before going to cookery school in Ireland when her twins were 18 months old. She met Yotam Ottolenghi in 2011 and has been writing in collaboration with him ever since. She began by developing, testing and writing recipes for Yotam’s weekly column in the Guardian magazine and his longer monthly column, in 2017, for the New York Times. Plenty More. NOPI: The Cookbook, SWEET and Ottolenghi SIMPLE were all written with Tara.