As any great restaurateur will tell you, storytelling is a part of the culinary art. Imad Alarnab has a story that unfurls across centuries, making his shakshuka the debut choice for the Nerve’s regular weekend recipe slot. 

It’s not that shakshuka is unique, he insists. On the contrary, he has chosen it because it is a humble dish, devised as a way of using up leftovers. “This is our way of recycling things,” he explains. “It became a recipe with only onion, tomatoes, spices, and cracked eggs on top”. The eggs were originally added because there would not otherwise be enough for the whole family.

The first clue to understanding the importance of shakshuka for the Syrian chef-entrepreneur is the name of his new restaurant, in London’s Somerset House: Aram. Thousands of years ago (early enough to be mentioned in the Bible), Aram was the name for a vast region encompassing Iraq, Syria, Jordan, parts of Iran and beyond. All of these countries claim shakshuka as their own. “Iraqis keep saying it's Iraqi, the Palestinians do the same. And so on. And the nice thing about it is it’s not just Syrian cuisine. Today we are so divided by immigrants and locals. Shakshuka represents the whole region.”

Part of the glory of any commonplace dish, however, is the freedom it gives good cooks to make it their own. Alarnab’s signature flourish is aubergine and his unique combination of herbs. The aubergine, he says, is the king of Syrian cuisine. And don’t be misled into thinking that it is only the big shiny fruits that you find in western supermarkets: “In Syria, the baby aubergine is the only aubergine.” Different colours and sizes are named after particular cities; they are baked, stuffed, salted, pickled and even made into jam.

One of Alarnab’s favourite childhood memories is of his grandmother squatting on the roof for hours, drying peppers, tomatoes and aubergines. Even today, he says, if you were to fly a drone over the rooftops of Damascus you would see a cascade of colours. His grandmother died a few months before the unsuccessful Arab Spring revolution against Bashar al-Assad’s regime in 2011. Alarnab was in his mid-30s at the time, in the prime of his career, with three restaurants as well as juice bars and coffee shops to his name. Two years later, everything had been destroyed. 

The dates are etched in his memory. In 2012 he couldn’t reach his restaurants any more, he says. Over the course of six days in March 2013, he lost everything, including the house where he had lived with his wife and three daughters. “But, lucky me,” he says, in what becomes a recurrent optimist’s refrain, “I was able to go to my sister’s house.” Their neighbour was not so lucky: he lost his wife and son, leaving him alone with a two-year-old daughter.

Between 2013 and 2015 the family moved home six times, before the secret police caught up with him and he realised he would have to leave the country. He travelled on foot, by bicycle, bus and dinghy, through Lebanon, Turkey, Greece, Macedonia and Germany before arriving in Calais, where he camped for 64 days on the steps of a church, making a name for himself by improvising meals for fellow refugees. At first it was sandwiches, he says, then boiled eggs. Then neighbours and local shops started donating things – a picnic stool, a chopping board, unsold foodstuffs – until he was catering for as many as 400 people each day.

He arrived in the UK in 2015 with £12 to his name and started to pick up casual jobs, including in restaurants. “But when I work in a kitchen, it has to be good enough for my daughters,” he says – and it was not. He started running pop-up restaurants to raise money for the refugee charity Choose Love, and his fame quickly spread. Since arriving in the UK he has raised hundreds of thousands of pounds for the  charity, which helped him to reunite with his family and establish himself.

During the pandemic he opened his first permanent restaurant, off Carnaby Street in London, going in when others were fleeing the trade. “Lucky me,” he says: when else would he have been able to afford to do so? In February this year, King Charles honoured Alarnab’s achievements with a visit to Imad’s Syrian Kitchen. The king, he says, “is a humble man” who likes aubergines and would appreciate the historical importance of shakshuka as a dish that belongs to everyone. There could be no higher compliment.

Interview by Claire Armitstead

Serves 4