The Diaspora
Fadi Kattan cooks Bethlehem in a Notting Hill dining room
Image credit: Musakhan — Wikimedia Commons · License
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This week the Palestinian Table crosses to London, to a narrow street off Notting Hill Gate where a chef from Bethlehem has spent three and a half years teaching a British dining room to read a Palestinian menu.
Akub sits at 27 Uxbridge Street, W8. Fadi Kattan opened it in December 2022 and it has been full ever since. Hours and bookings change; check them at the restaurant before you travel.
The name is a thistle#
Akub is a plant. Gundelia, a spiny flowering thistle that Palestinians have foraged from the hills for as long as there has been foraging, trimmed of its thorns and stewed with lamb or cooked with eggs. Its season is short and it arrives all at once.
Kattan chose it deliberately. A vegetable that appears for a few weeks and then is gone is a fair emblem for a cuisine defined by what a particular hillside gives in a particular fortnight — and for a country whose seasons keep being interrupted.
The cook#
Kattan was born in Bethlehem around 1977, into one of the city's oldest Christian families, documented there since 1738. His maternal grandmother, Julia Dabdoub, founded the Arab Women's Union in 1947; his grandfather Michel was a French-trained physician. His father's people had travelled from Bombay through India, Japan and Sudan before settling.
Before the Nakba the family held a hundred acres of orange groves in Jaffa. They were confiscated, and the loss sits somewhere underneath everything he cooks.
He studied in Jerusalem, took a business degree in Paris, then a master's and a hotel management qualification at the Institut Vatel. He came home to Bethlehem in 2000 to work at the InterContinental, which closed under the second intifada.
In 2016 he opened Fawda in Bethlehem. The name means chaos, and it is accurate: no fixed menu, the day's cooking decided by what the morning's producers brought. During the pandemic he filmed Teta's Kitchen — grandmother's kitchen — and recorded a podcast for Radio Alhara.
His cookbook, Bethlehem: A Celebration of Palestinian Food, was published by Hardie Grant in May 2024 with sixty recipes and illustrations by Nourie Flayhan, and won the Guild of Food Writers' award for best international or regional cookery book in 2025. He opened Louf in Toronto in 2025.
I had this idea of wanting to transform home-cooking into something we could serve at a restaurant.
Fadi Kattan on Akub, speaking to Middle East Eye
What is on the plate#
Where Fawda improvises, Akub is written down. The menu moves across the country by region — Kattan has described bright salads from the Gaza coast beside deep stews from the hills around Ramallah — and it turns over with the seasons.
The dishes the kitchen is known for include arak-cured monkfish, labaneh balls rolled in sumac, short rib fatteh, and a bukjet musakhan: the classic taken apart and rebuilt as a parcel. He has experimented, cheerfully, with a molokheya sandwich.
The sourcing is a stated position rather than a marketing line. Fish comes from British boats whose skippers he knows; Palestinian olive oil comes from Nasser Abu Farha, a producer he has worked with for a decade; vegetables come from UK farms. As he put it to Middle East Eye: he does not think you can work with products from massive unknown corporations.
He is equally direct about naming. Mediterranean, Middle Eastern and Levantine, he argues, are labels that describe nothing: a meal in northern Algeria has nothing to do with a meal in southern Turkey. The food at Akub is Palestinian, and it is allowed to say so.
Two recipes from the common table#
These are heritage dishes, cooked in Palestinian homes long before any restaurant put them on a card. They are written here in our own words, as the shared property they are.
Musakhan, the dish of the olive harvest. Rub a jointed chicken with olive oil, salt, allspice, cinnamon and a heavy hand of sumac, and roast it until the skin colours. Meanwhile soften four large onions, sliced thin, in a generous pool of good olive oil over low heat — twenty-five minutes, without browning — then stir in more sumac than feels reasonable, until the onions turn purple and slump.
Warm flatbreads, spoon the onions over them with their oil, set the chicken on top with its juices, and scatter over pine nuts toasted in butter. Eat with your hands. The measure of the dish is the oil: the year's harvest is the point of it, and a mean pour ruins it.
Shatta, the chilli paste of Gaza. Stem and roughly chop half a kilo of red chillies, salt them well — about two tablespoons — and leave them covered at room temperature for two or three days until they smell sour and alive.
Drain, then blend to a coarse paste with four cloves of garlic, the juice of a lemon and enough olive oil to loosen it. Pack into a jar, cover the surface with a film of oil, and keep it in the fridge.
Gazan cooks put it on everything: on fish, through salads, alongside rice. Made green, with unripe chillies and a bundle of dill, it is the version that goes with seafood.
Why it matters that this room is in London#
A Palestinian restaurant in W8 is not a novelty act, and Kattan has been firm that he did not open one to be a symbol. But a dining room where sumac, akub and Nabulsi cheese arrive under their own names, cooked by a man who can tell you which hillside they came from, does a specific piece of work.
It puts a cuisine into the present tense in a city that has spent two years arguing about the country it comes from. The Palestinian Table returns next Friday.
