A sampling of dishes at Louf (Photo: Jack Dodson/©Louf restaurant)
The Palestinians of Toronto and their friends have enthusiastically welcomed Louf, the newest venture of globe-trotting, Palestinian celebrity chef Fadi Kattan. Situated in a cute house on the edge of downtown Toronto, the restaurant offers creative haute cuisine from Palestine, and nurses ambitions that go far beyond serving food. Beyond Kattan’s culinary brilliance lies the hope that the restaurant can gently open people’s hearts to glimpse Palestine as expressed through its deep culture of hospitality.
Intent on striking a mighty blow for his homeland and his people, Kattan’s strategy is to reach diners in the intimate, nonverbal realm of pleasure and well-being, taking them to a cosmopolitan place, where they enjoy authentic Palestinian fare, with the Fadi Kattan touch. That touch imparts new accents and flavor notes into classic dishes and classic notes into his new creations.
A fundamental aspect of Kattan’s food philosophy is his fusing of an intense identification with Palestine, past, present, and future, with an irrepressible openness to others’ identities the world over – an openness that reflects his merchant family’s history of living in many cultures, including Sudan, Japan, and France – the last being where Fadi went to broaden and refine the home-cooking skills he learned from his mother and grandmothers in Bethlehem, where he still resides.
From its inception, the Louf restaurant project has been “about everybody,” Kattan and Toronto-based co-owner Nicole Mankinen say, because a healthy identity is one that invites everyone to celebrate their cultures with each other. Kattan has, in fact, long been something of a global evangelist for the food cultures of Palestine. After establishing his first restaurant, Fawda, in Bethlehem, he opened one called Akub in London’s Notting Hill neighborhood – and he frequently does “pop up” talks and cooking demos in various countries.
It is Palestine’s mothers and grandmothers (tetas), Kattan respectfully notes, who developed his homeland’s traditional dishes in their kitchens, and it is they who preserve that tradition today. In his own kitchens, he takes an expansive, “evolutionary” approach. His way of celebrating his food heritage is to give it currency and new life in other places and cultures. In 2024, he published a large, lavishly illustrated, and annotated cookbook titled Bethlehem: A Celebration of Palestinian Food.
Nicole Mankinen and Fadi Kattan sitting in front of the “cute house” that became Louf (Photo: Jack Dodson/©Louf restaurant)
Chef Kattan loves to describe the three (or some say four) main “terroirs” of Palestine’s land and its foodways. He introduces people to what he calls the “Palestinian umami” (laban jameed, “a fermented dried yoghurt from the Bedouin [terroir], where yoghurt is preserved and dried with sun and salt.” He sprinkles it liberally on all sorts of dishes. And there’s freekeh, a green wheat that Palestinians roast and rub to bring out smoky, nutty flavors. Along with small-hold Ontario and French wines, Louf proudly serves wines produced by small Palestinian vineyards in the Galilee, something Kattan considers particularly delightful, since humans first cultivated grapes in Jericho, almost 12,000 years ago.
Louf’s staff in immigrant-friendly Toronto is cosmopolitan to say the least, including 18 different nationalities, with chefs who are Palestinian, Lebanese, Indian, and French. The manager is of Bangladeshi origin. A Somali Canadian chef, and scholar of communal food cultures, serves as Louf’s community liaison. Kattan has trained the chefs in how to “combine local, indigenous, and Palestinian ingredients,” using centuries-old, and modern techniques of cooking.
Teaching other chefs how to master Palestinian cuisine is itself an important step in spreading the riches of his native culture far and wide. Louf servers are schooled to explain the elements and flavors of Palestinian dishes, as well as trained to meet exacting standards of French cuisine and service that Kattan learned at the prestigious Insitut Vatel in Paris.
Kattan revels in the diversity and in Louf’s local and First Nations sourcing of ingredients. His team has even found a local producer of laban jameed. As for drinks, the menu features creative non-alcoholic and alcoholic cocktails, including some made with Arak, which Kattan points out was the first hard alcohol in beverage history when it was distilled in Baghdad in the 9th century.
A Louf Sampler
Labaneh bil humeid: Creamy, tangy, Palestinian-style yoghurt, fresh-made in Ontario, complimented with locally sourced sorrel leaves and micro sorrel, and sprinkled with sumac from Palestine.
Bukjet freekeh bil khodra: A phyllo dough parcel made of smoky freekeh and stuffed with vegetables. Inspired by his grandmother’s bukjet basela, a parcel filled with meat, peas and rice.
Mushroom salad with maramiya and mardakoush: Fresh-foraged mushrooms, using Palestinian pickling techniques for the cremini mushrooms, and sauteed black oyster mushrooms that highlight anise, sweet, and nutty flavors, infused with sage and marjoram.
Hummus bil lahmeh: The chickpeas and tahinia in hummus may be prepared in many ways. Here, Kattan leaves a bit of coarseness to the hummus, as a reminder they are of the essence. Louf sources its chickpeas in Saskatchewan; the tahinia comes from Palestine. A generous layer of sauteed meat, pine nuts and a silky, piquant olive oil provide a decadent celebration of hummus.
The post-October 7 war on Gaza almost derailed the Louf project. Kattan was shaken to his core. “I could not cook at all,” he has written. “I asked myself, ‘Why am I cooking?’ People are being forcibly starved.” Eventually, he resumed his mission to share Palestine’s food culture with the world – his way of combating Israel’s U.S.-backed efforts to erase his people. He and Mankinen named their restaurant Louf, after a medicinal plant that grows wild in Palestine. It’s lightly toxic when raw, but a delicacy when cooked slowly with lots of olive oil, chickpeas, sumac, and bulgur.
Louf opened at a moment when millions are realizing that the drive to annihilate Palestine is the cutting edge of an unprecedented, worldwide assault on “everybody” through the collateral destruction of international law and any semblance of international commitment to a moral code. Thus, Palestine has become every people’s front line of defense of their right to exist. However, even as that realization has won many people to Palestine’s side, the unspeakable violence unleashed on the Palestinians has also made them seem more doomed and to be pitied than ever.
Baked goods at Louf, including Ka’ak, with Fadi Kattan’s cookbook, Bethlehem: A Celebration of Palestinian Food, in the background. (Photo: Jack Dodson/©Louf restaurant)
The restaurant serves as a foil to the moment, giving pleasure, not pain; an ambiance of clinking glasses, forks, and knives, and the burble of conversations – not the shouts of anguished protest and brutal repression; all enhanced by Palestinian artists, floral arrangements, and handmade crockery from Jaffa ceramicist Nur Minawi, and all presented by smartly clad restaurant workers moving graciously about. Louf introduces a people you want to be with; a people that you want not just to survive but to flourish.
In the end, of course, Louf’s success depends on pleasing diners simply out for a tasty meal, as well as those who already have a taste for Palestinian cuisine – and who are willing to pay what Kattan terms “casual plus” prices (about 80 to 100 Canadian dollars a person). One key part of the package is ambiance. Stepping inside, one finds a warm, elegant, daylight-filled, two-story interior decorated in a stylish, modern Palestinian way.
Consciousness itself is also part of the package, which may explain a certain light in the eyes of the staff, as though maybe they are going to share a little secret with you. The secret, in fact, is shared, not in words but through the food and hospitality of a people that U.S.-backed Israel is starving and making homeless.
Of course, Louf can’t free Palestine by itself. But by offering a new venue for diners to have memorable personal experiences of Palestine in a harmony of the ancient and the modern, the local and the international, Louf may bring a deeper awareness of a great and pleasant people and of the universal solidarity that underlies true human flourishing.
