Israeli chef and writer Yotam Ottolenghi was BOTD in 1968. Born in Jerusalem, he served in the Israeli armed forces before studying comparative literature at Tel Aviv University. In 1997, he and his then-partner moved to Amsterdam where he edited the Hebrew section of Dutch-Jewish weekly NIW. After studying at Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in London, he worked as a pastry chef, In 1999, while working at Baker & Spice bakery, he met Palestinian chef Sami Tamimi. Together, they opened Ottolenghi, a delicatessen in the rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood of Notting Hill in West London, developing a cult following with their Middle Eastern-inspired recipes and cakes. In 2006, he began writing a popular weekly column for The Guardian newspaper, focusing on vegetable-based Middle Eastern cuisine. His cookery books Ottolenghi, Plenty, Plenty More and Jerusalem became bestsellers, arousing Britain’s timid, spice-averse culinary palette with abundant use of rose water, za’atar and pomegranate molasses. Unlike his fellow celebrity chefs, he established he reputation without his own TV cooking show, apart from three one-off TV specials and a stint as guest judge on Masterchef Australia. Despite taking hours to make and requiring half the ingredients of a Turkish deli, his recipes became wildly successful, toppling the dominance of British comfort-food chefs Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson. In response to criticism that his recipes were too complicated, he published Simple in 2018, featuring “simpler” recipes (though still requiring a cast-iron griddle pan, an industrial-strength smoke extractor and a grove of lemon trees). Ottolenghi married to his long-term partner Karl Allen in 2012, with whom he is raising two children conceived via a surrogate mother. In 2013, he wrote an essay in The Guardian about his and Allen’s experience of becoming parents via gestational surrogacy. The article sparked significant backlash, particularly around Ottolenghi’s quips about “damp lesbian home[s] with two cats, the absolute nightmare of every urban gay”, prompting a debate about the ethics of commercialised surrogacy.