The Home of Authentic Middle Eastern cooking
Middle Eats is where Middle Eastern cooking is taught the way it’s actually done in Middle Eastern homes.
Founded by husband-and-wife team Obi and Salma, we’ve spent years documenting the recipes, techniques, and flavours of the region we love, from Egyptian comfort food to Levantine classics to the slow cooked dishes of North Africa. Our goal has always been to transport our readers to the region, with the help of their tastebuds.
Today, our work has reached over 35,000,000 viewers and 450,000 subscribers on YouTube, it’s been shortlisted for a Fortnum & Mason Food Award, and has taken us into private kitchens, supper clubs, and collaborations with Netflix. Our first cookbook, published by W. W. Norton & Company, is out in 2027.
Our Story
Middle Eats began long before it had a name. Salma and I met at university, both of us obsessed over food in the way only people from foodie households can. We’d grown up watching our families prepare elaborate feasts and cook lovingly home made Egyptian dishes with the kind of care you can only witness in person. From the moment we started cooking together, the kitchen was where we spent most of our time.
When we moved to London, something quickly became obvious. The Middle Eastern recipes we could find online didn’t taste like the food we were used to. Sometimes they were close but the flavours had been smoothed out, adjusted for a Western palate, or written as family recipes with modifications that strayed from the authentic flavours. Whenever we asked family for their recipes, we’d get oral instructions: “a handful of this, a small tea cup of that, cook it until it looks right, you’ll know”. Recipes without measurements, passed down the way they always have been. But as food nerds, that was never enough, we wanted them perfect.
So we started working them out ourselves. We’d cook a dish over and over, adjusting amounts and techniques, until it tasted the way it was meant to in our minds, with that grandma-quality flavour you can’t fake. We began with the Egyptian comfort food we’d grown up on, then branched into the Levantine and North African dishes we loved and learnt at our friends houses. Slowly, we built a repertoire.
And we fed people with it. We’d invite our close group of Egyptian friends for a home cooked meal, sometimes twenty of them crammed into our one-bedroom flat and we realised quickly that what we loved almost as much as cooking was the act of hosting and feeding them. The gap we kept seeing online never went away. Middle Eastern food in English was being taught by everyone except the people who’d actually grown up with it. We kept thinking: someone should make this properly. We had the recipes. We had the standards. We just needed the time.
When the world stopped in 2020, we suddenly did. We started filming the recipes we’d been refining for years, and the response was immediate. Messages came in from people all over the world saying our food tasted like the dishes their grandmothers used to make, or the meals they remembered from a trip years ago. That was the moment Middle Eats stopped being a project and became a mission.
What We Do Today
Middle Eats has grown into the leading English-language home for authentic Middle Eastern cooking, but the principle hasn’t changed: every recipe has to taste the way it would taste in its origin country. Salma leads recipe development, researching, developing and testing each dish meticulously until it’s something we’d be proud to serve to our friends’ parents. Obi hosts the channel, dissecting the recipes into accessible and approachable steps, he runs the brand, bringing the recipes and the context behind them to the world.
Our work spans the whole Middle East or SWANA region. From the Western coasts of North Africa, to the fertile Levant, the vast Gulf, and historical Turkish and Persian cuisines, with recipes ranging from everyday home cooking to the special occasion celebratory dishes families pull out for Ramadan, Eid, and weddings. We’re equally interested in teaching the foundational techniques behind Middle Eastern cooking: how to make labneh, how to bake your own pita, how to wield sumac like a pro. If you understand the building blocks of any subject, you can quickly become an expert, especially with cooking.
Beyond the channel, we host supper clubs in London, including a Ramadan supper club for Netflix at their UK office. We write about Middle Eastern food culture, history, and the politics of how it’s represented. And our first cookbook, with W. W. Norton & Company, brings the same standards and obsessions into print in 2027.
What ties it all together is the food education piece. There’s a generation of people, many with Middle Eastern heritage themselves, who want to experience this food properly and haven’t had a reliable place in English to learn it. That’s why we’re here. To bring our food’s story to the masses in a way it’s never been done before.
Meet the team
Obi Fahmy
Obi is the host and founder of Middle Eats. Born into an Egyptian-British-German family, he grew up between London and Cairo.
His love for food started at an early age, coupled with a curiosity about how things work and a strong engineering mindset. He worked as a software engineer for over a decade building highly complex systems used by millions of people on a daily basis.
He now leads the brand, hosts the channel, and is the voice behind the recipes. He believes that cooking just like any skill can be learnt by anyone… so long as they have good observational skills and approachable instructions to follow.
Salma El-Sahhar
Salma is the brains behind Middle Eats meticulously crafted recipes. Born into an Egyptian culinary family, she grew up in the Middle Eastern melting pot of Dubai where she was exposed to various Middle Eastern food cultures from a young age.
Her passion for baking and obsessive eye for detail served as a gateway to explore Middle Eastern cooking through a scientific lens. She completed a PhD in biomedical sciences, researching the link between the gut microbiome and Inflammatory bowel Disease.
She applies her years of scientific lab work skills to researching, developing and testing each recipe until its perfect.
