You can’t open the doors to your Grandmother…
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.
Saha w hana.
