In conversation with Reem Kassis

A chef, writer, video producer, and community advocate, Sohla El-Waylly hosts Mystery Menu for The New York Times Cooking YouTube channel and The History Channel’s Ancient Recipes with Sohla, and serves as a judge on HBO Max’s The Big Brunch. She formerly worked as an assistant food editor at Bon Appétit, where she frequently appeared in the magazine’s cooking videos, and she has also been featured on Food52, Serious Eats, and on the popular Babish Culinary Universe YouTube channel. A graduate of the prestigious Culinary Institute of America, El-Waylly trained at various New York City restaurants, including Del Posto, Atera, and Battersby, before opening a restaurant in Brooklyn with her husband. In Start Here, the recipe developer serves up a transformative guide to the fundamentals of good cooking alongside a mix-and-match batch of recipe variations.

Reem Kassis is a Palestinian writer and author of the award winning cookbooks The Palestinian Table (2017) and The Arabesque Table (2021) and the children’s book We Are Palestinian (2023). Her writing regularly appears in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. She grew up in Jerusalem, then obtained her undergraduate and MBA degrees from UPenn and Wharton and her MSc in social psychology from the London School of Economics. She now lives in Philadelphia with her husband and three daughters.

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