Fadi Kattan’s new Toronto restaurant offers a welcome to Palestine

https://mondoweiss.net/2025/01/fadi-kattans-new-toronto-restaurant-offers-a-welcome-to-palestine/

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.
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