Tabbouleh 4eva
September 2026
I’ve chopped a genuinely unreasonable volume of
parsley in my life…
There was never a question about whether tabbouleh would be in the cookbook. The only question was whether I could write about it without getting emotional.
Sadly so many people confuse tabbouleh with some bulgar salad situation that has nothing to do with the real version: it is not a bulgur salad with some herbs in it. It is a herb salad with some bulgur in it. The bulgur is a guest. It is not the host. This isn't a preference or a regional variation or my family being difficult — though my family is available for that too. If you can see the bulgur before you see the green, something has gone wrong, and it went wrong long before it reached the table.
I know this because I have chopped a genuinely unreasonable volume of parsley in my life.
Our tabbouleh recipe, from Sohaila: the cookbook
Parsley doesn't wash off your hands properly, and I'm glad. It's green and slightly bitter and completely specific, and it still ambushes me on an afternoon when I walk into the Sohaila kitchen, where I'm briefly returned to the interesting chopper I was.
Why this recipe, and not something more impressive? Every cookbook has one dish behind it that is quietly used to explain its real personality.
Tabbouleh cannot be rushed and cannot be faked. There's no technique to hide behind and no sauce to apologise with. Parsley, mint, tomato, a small amount of fine bulgur, lemon, oil, salt — six ingredients, and one of them is salt, which barely counts. Everything depends on what you bought and how carefully you cut it, which is another way of saying everything depends on whether you were paying attention.
That's the whole philosophy of the restaurant, honestly. We have genuinely ambitious things on the menu, like Ellie's Mardi Gras poussin. But if you want to know whether a kitchen loves you, order the simplest thing on it.
I've been trying to work out why this dish, of all of them, means safety to me. I think it's because it was always there. Tabbouleh is not the centrepiece; nothing is dimmed for its arrival. It's on the table before you sit down and still on the table when everyone's slumped and talking too loudly, being picked at, going softer as the lemon gets on with its work. It's not the event. It's the room the event happens in.
It also means people are coming. Nobody makes tabbouleh for one — you cannot buy a small enough amount of parsley; the maths simply refuses. So it's a signal: there will be more of us than planned, it will go on longer than promised, and somebody is about to be handed a knife.
Tabbouleh, served at Sohaila
The recipe as we make it at Sohaila is my beloved aunt's. Fine bulgur, barely soaked — just the tomato juice and the lemon, ten minutes, no negotiating. It should be a texture in the salad, not a foundation for it. We're heavy-handed with the mint in a way that some people will write to us about. And we salt at the last possible second, because tabbouleh salted early isn't tabbouleh, it's soup with ambitions.
We've given it in weights, because that's what a cookbook has to do. Consider this my formal note of protest. Nobody I learned it from has weighed a single component of this dish in their life, and the correct measurement for parsley remains "keep going — more — that's still not enough."
Make it for a lot of people. Give someone a knife.
Five hundred cookbooks, four weeks and a social enterprise
August 2026
The beginning of our life with a book in it, raising life-changing funds for the Fat Macy’s programme.
Five hundred books to sell. Five hundred copies of this wild and beautiful project, where Fat Macy’s and Sohaila have reached their hummus-laden crescendo as we try to simultaneously teach everyone we know how to make tabbouleh, while raising funds for young, brilliant people who need homes.
Except it’s not the crescendo: it’s the beginning. These next four weeks mark the end of what was, and the start of what is new. I’ll be honest with you, because you've eaten our food and that means we are family: this is a newsletter imploring you to buy our beautiful Sohaila cookbook. And here’s the reasons why you should:
Royalties go straight to Fat Macy’s
If you're new here: Fat Macy's is the reason any of this exists. It's the social enterprise behind the restaurant, and it works with people living in temporary accommodation: hostels, hotels, rooms that were meant to be for two months and turned into two years, and moves them into real hospitality careers. Training. Wages. A kitchen that's a job rather than a favour. And, at the end of it, a set of keys. That's the actual mechanism. Not awareness. Not exposure. Keys.
Four years of brilliant, hard work from so many of us. Four years ago we opened a restaurant and named it after my grandmother. In hindsight, that was a great deal of pressure to put on a person who had never once written down a recipe.
A bit of this. A touch of that. Until it looks right. You'll know. Very helpful, teta. Thank you.
So we spent four years working it out. Weighing the things she never weighed. Arguing about how much lemon is too much lemon, which is a trick question, because there is no such thing. Pouring the wines we love next to the food they were made for. Writing down the stories that fall out of a kitchen whether anyone asks for them or not.
All of it is now a book.
It's four years of the restaurant, 10 years of our catering company and foundation and a lifetime of hers. The recipes you've asked us for. The ones we quietly tried to keep to ourselves. The ones that changed six times before they were right, and one that changed eight, which I won't be naming here.
There's a chapter on hummus, because everything starts there. There's wine, because Lebanese wine is the beginning of wine. There’s some fantastic trainees with their recipes that are purely beautiful. And there's a sense of teta on almost every page, mildly disapproving of the seasoning.
So here’s the thing. Our goal is pre-sell five hundred copies.
And by 28th August, so that works out at roughly 28 of you a day. So if you're reading this today: statistically, it's your turn.
I could dress this up. Publishers, print runs, order thresholds, the machinery of getting a book from a kitchen table into a shop. But the honest version is shorter. We need five hundred people to pre-order the cookbook. And actually do it, rather than think warmly about doing it so that we can increase the impact of the work we do on The Fat Macy's programme.
So if you’ve loved watching us grow and you love our food, and you want to spend a little on something worthwhile today, give us a pre-order.
You can’t open the doors to your Grandmother
July 2026
Why we've spent four years turning a woman into a restaurant (and now into a book).
In December 2021, we opened the doors to Sohaila for the first time. Which is strange, when you think about it, because you can't open the doors to your Grandmother.
My teta is also not a cookbook. And on 10th September 2026, we're launching one of those for the first time too. But in a way, teta is a restaurant. And a cookbook. A whole lifetime of flavour and funny and everything you could ever need to guide a business. Sohaila means something akin to guiding light, so honestly, the name chose itself. Obviously we needed a guiding light. Obviously we needed a Grandmother who inspires joy in the absolute best way possible.
Nathalie’s Teta, opening our forthcoming cookbook
If you've never been cooked for by a Lebanese grandmother, I need you to understand that it is not a meal. It is an event with no clear end point and no exit. Saying you’re not hungry in a Lebanese household is treated as a medical emergency. Likewise if you say you are. Plates will appear, not in courses, because courses are an invention from another part of the world designed to slow people down, but all at once, edge to edge, until the table stops being a table and becomes a surface with no visible wood. You eat. You say you're full. The host will look at you with the specific pity reserved for people who are lying. More food arrives. At some point you stop resisting and something in you goes quiet, and that quiet is the whole point.
That's what we are trying to build in Shoreditch. Not a tribute act, not a museum of a Lebanese home — a room where you're fed abundantly with true hospitality by people who are glad you came.
I'll be honest about something: for the first year or so, perhaps we thought the hard part of running a restaurant was the food. It isn't. The food is the joyful part. The hard part is the ninety small decisions before service that nobody will ever notice if you get them right. It's a fridge dying in August. It's a menu that reads beautifully and costs too much to make. It's learning slowly, expensively, that hospitality is not a feeling you have about people, it's a system you build so that the feeling survives a Friday night.
And underneath all of it: Sohaila exists because of Fat Macy's, the social enterprise founded by the deeply excellent Meg Doherty in 2016 followed by myself a little while later, in absolute awe, to build hospitality careers for people living in temporary accommodation. The restaurant isn't a side project or a fundraising arm. It's the kitchen where that actually happens. Where somebody's first shift becomes their first section which can lead to their first job with a contract and a payslip and a reason to grab life and hold on to it tightly…
That's the bit we really care about. Not the reviews. Who's eating, and who's cooking, and whether both of them get to leave better than they arrived. So why did we decide to write a book? Well, because recipes leave, I guess.
That's the thing nobody warns you about. A dish lives in one chef's hands, and then that chef moves to China or has a baby or just fancies a change, and their beautiful mind goes with them. We'd built four years of food, Ellie’s cooking which has ruined me for most restaurants, Katie's Hummus Harr with its chilli and chard, a hundred things that started as a mistake at 4pm on a Tuesday and became the thing people book a table for, and none of it was written down anywhere that would outlive us.
Recipes plated, photographed for our Sohaila: the cookbook
And more than that: my family’s recipes. They lived in our hands, in "until it looks right," in a fistful of parsley that turns out to be an exact measurement if you've watched it enough times. Some of them I got in time. Some of them I've reverse-engineered from memory and stubbornness and a lot of text messages across the globe, to patient cousins and the very best aunt…
So the book is four years of the restaurant, and a lifetime of love, and the two of those things are honestly hard to separate now.
It's got the food we're known for and the food we cook for ourselves after close. It's got the mezze that makes no sense in portion sizes for two, because they weren't designed for two. It's got wine, because we take it seriously and refuse to be boring about it. And it's got the stories, too many to know where to start here.
Four years ago we opened the doors to a restaurant named after a woman who probably finds the whole thing hilarious — the menus, the spreadsheets, the idea that any of this needed explaining. You cook, people eat. Why is there a business plan?
Fair. But here we are, about to hand a lifetime of food made in her name by the most inspiring of people to anyone who wants it, still guided by this ever-present Sohaila.