BysairaFOOD & DRINKSFebruary, 2023

BOOK AN UNCONVENTIONAL PRIVATE CHEF IN DUBAI

Bethany Kehdy is a private chef available for hire in Dubai.

If you are looking to hire a private chef for any occasion then we recommend Bethany Kehdy. A celebrated chef, two-time bestselling cookbook author (The Jewelled Table and The Jewelled Kitchen), presenter and founder of culinary experience, Taste Lebanon. Bethany cooks savoury and sweet with a focus on the cuisine of the Mediterranean, West Asia and North Africa (WANA). Her food and cooking style is rooted in historical context and is both pioneering and authentic in its outlook and flavour.

Bethany’s chef services range from corporate and private events, supper clubs, pop-up residencies and at-home chef-for-hire, through to cooking classes, brand ambassadorship, concept/ menu development, and charitable causes.

What is WANA?

Coined over a century ago, by colonial powers, the term ‘Middle East’ is geographically ambiguous as it considers the region ‘east’ from the perspective of Europe rather than being factually presented as West Asia.

The cuisine of WANA encompasses the territories of the Armenian highlands, parts of the Caucasus, Anatolia, Cyprus, the Levant, the Sinai Peninsula, the Arabian Peninsula, Iran, Mesopotamia (Iraq) and North Africa.

Situated at the cross-roads of Europe and Asia, the WANA cuisine is a veritable melting-pot of empires past – Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Byzantine, Arab – and to a very minuscule extent, European.

It is a cuisine that predates the modern nation-state construct, one which arbitrarily lays claim to national dishes and distinctive culinary identities as a way of legitimising national identities and colonial independence, despite the profoundly obvious shared lineage outside of these colonially imposed national boundaries. As such, it would be reductionist and flawed to discuss the cuisine as a set of distinct national gastronomic legacies belonging to a specific nation-state rather than through the lens of its shared ancestry.

The WANA cuisine is deeply regional with interdependent culinary lineages that permeate nationalistic borders that hide important micro-distinctions and nuances influenced by rural life, terroir, and micro-localised ingredients, dialects, and traditions. One example is maftoul. Widely considered a Palestinian dish, it is, in fact, also prepared in southern parts of Lebanon which today shares a border with Palestine but no less importantly, a close historical trading relationship.

Bethany’s dishes will tickle the mind and tastebuds with a veritable feast of West Asian and North African favourites generously sprinkled with morsels covering history, geography and more.