In Conversation with Honey & Co.
Interview by JIMMY SANDISONPhotographs by PATRICIA NIVEN
Sarit and Itamar of the renowned Honey & Co. discuss the secrets to sourcing the best fruit and vegetables, what to expect from their new cookbook and the meal they’re most looking forward to cooking for friends.
Some Good Ideas: What aspect of normal (non-covid life) are you most looking forward to?
Sarit Packer, Honey & Co.: We can’t wait to welcome actual guests back into the restaurants, having empty locations has been the saddest and hardest thing for us, they are usually places of such joy and energy.
“The joy of eating in a group is getting messy, tasting loads of different things, making a whole evening out of it and keeping it casual and fun.”
SGI: What is the first thing you will cook for a dinner party of friends?
H&C: We will most likely have a wonderfully messy, finger food event. Either a messy falafel, sabich, a crispy chicken pitta party or, something completely different, a roll your own sushi extravaganza.
Image: Honey & Co. Instagram
SGI: Why those specific meals?
H&C: Because the joy of eating in a group is getting messy, tasting loads of different things, making a whole evening out of it and keeping it casual and fun.
SGI: Where do you usually source your ingredients?
H&C: To be honest, now that we have the restaurants we mostly shop via our restaurant food suppliers, but we also have some favourite weekend rituals, we go out to our local farmers market for some fresh veg and fish and we use a great butcher in our area for all our meat needs.
SGI: What do you look for when buying vegetables, any tips on taking home the best quality?
H&C: It is important to try and buy seasonal where possible, as the flavour is so much better. We will do everything possible with that vegetable in season, at the moment we are eating lots of fresh new season leeks and garlic leaves in many guises.
But we also choose our fruit and vegetables by their smell, good quality produce should have a strong fresh aroma of themselves, not clinical like plastic wrapping, and going back to a trusted vendor is the best way to know you will be getting good produce.
Image By: Patricia Niven
SGI: Your feast nights have been fantastic. Can you tell us a little about them?
H&C: We’ve been having so much fun with these menus! Somewhere in the middle of the first lockdown, we realised it is going to be a long time before we could travel again, and we felt really depressed. We had spent most of 2019 on monthly trips around the Middle East for our new cookbook about cooking over fire, and we had caught the travel bug badly, and now we weren’t allowed to go anywhere. So we thought the best thing we could do was to try and bring the regions to life through our supper clubs. We started with a few Israeli inspired feasts, as that is where we grew up, but since, through our feasts, we have “travelled” to Greece, Morocco, Turkey, Jordan and Persia. They have been a great weekend lift for both of us and the team, and hopefully to all the customers ordering these meals.
SGI: Your new cookbook, Chasing Smoke: Cooking Over Fire Around the Levant, sounds very exciting. Can you give us a sneak peek of what to expect? How did the idea for the book come together?
H&C: Our book is about all the trips we have done over a year, but is also the culmination of a whole life of being in love with the region and the food. It is also about cooking over a fire, not in an intimidating restaurant way, but in an ‘at home’, everyday cooking method. We have compiled our favourite recipes and our favourite stories from these trips and put them together in a kind of old-style magazine travel log, beautiful photography by Patricia Niven who came on most trips with us and some great little tricks and insights, we are very excited about this book.
SGI: What is it about cooking over a fire that makes it so special?
H&C: Cooking over fire imparts a flavour profile that simply enhances everything, it is almost primal, this idea of a few bits of wood and charcoal allowing you to transform something simple like a cabbage or a pear into something magnificent and complex. The book has many many vegetable dishes as well as how to treat your fish on a BBQ, how best to grill a chicken and quite a few other things, we can’t wait for publication day and for the spring, summer grilling season to be upon us!
Click on link below to pre-order Honey & Co’s new book.
