Ottolenghi, Big Flavor, and the Question I Always Ask: Is It Worth the Extra Bowl?
Yotam Ottolenghi made bold, vegetable-forward food feel mainstream. I admire the flavor logic—and I still want every extra step to justify itself.
Somewhere tonight a very good dinner is being followed by an unreasonable amount of dishes, and Yotam Ottolenghi is at least partly responsible. He has probably convinced more home cooks to buy sumac, tahini, za’atar, pomegranate molasses, and one additional bunch of herbs than almost anyone in modern food publishing.
I mean that as admiration, not evidence for the prosecution.
The flavor in his work is built in layers that make sense — acid against richness, herbs against roasted depth, texture against softness, bitterness against sweetness. Vegetables are not treated like the responsible part of dinner. They get to be the interesting part.
My one standing question is whether the complication pays rent. I like bold flavor and unusual ingredients, and I still want to know whether the extra sauce, the garnish, the infused oil, the toasted seed, and the final herb situation materially improve the dish. Sometimes the answer is absolutely yes. Sometimes one fewer component would still make a very good dinner and leave the sink less emotionally involved.
Ottolenghi appears to be asking the same thing. His 2026 project Simple Too revisits how to deliver the character of his cooking when time, ingredients, and patience are limited.
That is the tension I want Salty & Clever to keep. Do not flatten food in the name of ease; do not complicate it in the name of prestige. Keep the parts that create contrast, depth, and appetite, and cut the parts that mostly create dishes. It is a much harder editorial standard than “simple” or “impressive” — and it produces better decisions.
His site and recipe archive are the place to test the question, his bio page covers the current work, and he has written about revisiting simplicity for Simple Too himself. This site’s profile of him is Yotam Ottolenghi: From Jerusalem to a Notting Hill Shop Window; the method piece is The Ottolenghi Method Is Contrast, Not a Shopping List.
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