Time Out apologises for snubbing Israeli cuisine in 20 Best Middle Eastern restaurants list
Website apologises for "unfortunate oversight", as it emerges the original writer described Israeli food as "culinary theft"
Time Out magazine has apologised for the exclusion of Israeli restaurants from its compilation of London’s 20 Best Middle Eastern restaurants and added some to its list, after Jewish News reported that the contributor of the piece appeared to deliberately omit them.
As noted by Jewish News yesterday, the original list, which was compiled by Suzie Bakos, a supper-club influencer, began by describing “Syrian breakfasts, Kurdish brunches, Palestinian dinner parties and late-night Lebanese bites” – with not a single Israeli restaurant making the cut, despite a plethora of high quality Israeli culinary offerings in the capital.
The piece has now been changed, to include “Israeli feasts” in the introduction and includes three Israeli restaurants – Bubala in Spitalfields, The Palomar in Soho and Ottolenghi’s Rovi in Fitzrovia – among the twenty.
The magazine told Jewish News it had “updated our list of the Best Middle Eastern Restaurants in London to include Israeli restaurants. The initial omission was a very unfortunate oversight and the result of a human error; for this we do apologise. Our website contains recommendations and reviews of many of the outstanding Israeli and Jewish-owned restaurants across London, and we are looking forward to continuing to represent the breadth of Middle Eastern cuisine as we always have.
“We will always champion the many communities that make up our wonderfully diverse city. As a result of the oversight, we are undertaking a review of our commissioning and editing process.”
It transpired that in July, Bakos had written a piece for The New Arab in which she said Palestinian food was “a symbol of resistance in the face of erasure” and described Israeli food as “culinary theft… when its people are oppressed and their oppressors profit both financially and culturally from this appropriation.”
Bakos went on to say: “Traditional dishes that have a historical connection to Palestinians, Levantine Arabs and North Africans, such as hummus and falafel, have been subject to Israeli appropriation…Colonial powers have long taken indigenous dishes, food and ingredients, and renamed them to suit European languages and palates. Where Israel differs is its desire to present as indigenous.”
The author appeared not to know or care that more than half of Israel’s population is descended from Middle Eastern and North African Jews, who have lived in the area for millennia, and have the same traditions of cooking as their Arab neighbours.
Chief content editor Dave Calhoun told Jewish News: “We have taken this very seriously and reacted quickly, I was personally disappointed to see that we had put this piece out without covering the full breadth of the city, which is completely ingrained in what we do, whatever we’re covering.
“I know that we’ve quite rightly covered Israeli restaurants and Jewish restaurants in the past because they are a key part of the city and a key part of our culture.
Calhoun concurred that he needs to look at Time Out’s editorial processes for editors and get to the bottom of why there has been an oversight without leaping to any conclusions.
“We haven’t published what we would want to publish – a piece which fully meets our guidelines. There’s definitely been an error in our editorial oversight, because it’s our responsibility, ultimately, to make sure that our restaurant guides reflect everything that we say. I’ve spoken to our London editor and our content director for Europe we are all agreed that there’s no debate to be had.”
You can read the updated Time Out list here.
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