Spice Odyssey

Cariema Isaacs is a South African food writer, chef and entrepreneur based in Dubai, where she attained her culinary diploma at the International Centre for Culinary Arts. A marketing graduate, Cariema had a 25-year career for a multinational company, and she maintains that it’s the ever-changing landscape of the oil industry and corporate world that fuelled her culinary creativity and her love for writing. An active blogger on social media, she has already published four very successful cookbooks. Her first cookbook, published in 2016, was a heartfelt tribute to her late father and inspired by her recollections of growing up in Bo-Kaap, the Cape Malay Quarter of Cape Town, South Africa. Cooking for My Father in my Cape Malay Kitchen was followed by Spice Odyssey (2019), and then Curried (2021) and Modern Cape Malay Cooking (2023).

Cariema teams up with her husband and ardent photographer, Turhaan Samodien, who she credits for bringing her cookbooks to life through his evocative photography. They reside in Dubai with their sons Tawfeeq and Tashreeq.