Sweet success: London brand Honey & Co and its food empire

From humble beginnings in a postage stamp-sized flat in Clapham North, Honey & Co has become a staple name for foodies across London. Julia Platt Leonard meets the duo behind it

Honey & Co owners Sarit Packer and Itamar Srulovich (Patricia Niven)

Less than 10 minutes into my interview with Itamar Srulovich and Sarit Packer – the couple behind the wildly successful Honey & Co food empire – I’m interrupted mid-question. “Are you hungry?” Srulovich blurts out.

He has a panicked look on his face. “Have you had anything to eat?” For them, these are the two questions that really matter, whether you’re dining in one of their restaurants or sitting around their table at home.

It’s the “at home” moments that are captured in their latest cookbook – their third – called simply: At Home: Middle Eastern recipes from our kitchen. Home for them is south London, five minutes from where they first lived when they moved to London 14 years ago.

“We’ve stayed in pretty much the same postcode,” Srulovich says.

They moved to London without jobs and poured all of their money into a deposit on a postage stamp-sized flat they rented in Clapham North. They’ve moved several times since and while the flats have gotten bigger, all of them met a common requirement: “A decent kitchen and a dining table, even if we had no place to sleep,” says Packer.

Entertaining – even eating – at home was a luxury once they opened Honey & Co six years ago in what was then the culinary wilderness of Fitzrovia in London. They raided their own kitchen for equipment and bought pots and pans on sale (“Le Creuset in the colours nobody wanted,” Srulovich laughs).


 Baked goat’s cheese wrapped in walnut pastry with fig relish from the new book 
 (Patricia Niven)

They even scoured their own dry stores for ingredients like tahini and za’atar. “Everything we had in the house that we thought is tasty and would sell, came to the restaurant,” Packer says.

Quickly, Honey & Co established a loyal following and became a highly sought after table (there are only 10) in London.

Honey & Spice, followed – a food shop boasting shelves lined with their own homemade jams, Ashura cereal (clusters of puffed wheat in honey, sweet spice, fruit and nuts made by their pastry team), bags of sumac and vanilla shortbread, whole babkas, as well as jars of date molasses and tahini – the same foods they pinched from their home kitchen when they were starting out.

The most recent of their children is Honey & Smoke, a much longed-for grill where foods are cooked over fire. For them, each one has a unique personality but they acknowledge that for their customers the line is blurred – it’s all Honey & Co.

Packer admits: “We think of them quite separately but we’ll eat them all happily at home.” Cookbooks have followed, a weekly newspaper column and now a popular series of food talks with chefs, food writers and producers that are turned into podcasts.

With all of this growth, it’s a wonder they ever make it home. But they say that life is settling down now that Honey & Smoke is up and running. They’re happily spending more time back in their home kitchen making their “anchors”: the fritters Srulovich makes for Packer, their favourite lentil meatballs or chicken with plums – all recipes that earned a place in their new cookbook.


 Also from the new book is this hedgehog meatballs recipe ( Patricia Niven)
 (Patricia Niven)

Entertaining is also an opportunity to get out of the professional kitchen and see firsthand what people think of both old and new recipes. “It’s quite important to sit with people and see how they react to something in a true way,” Packer says. “We miss that.”

Recipes they create for their column sometimes migrate to one of the restaurants and sometimes vice versa. “Sometimes we’ll cook something and say, ‘Why don’t we have this on the menu?’” Packer says, mentioning a fresh corn polenta dish they recently created.

So who cooks at home? It depends who you ask. “If it’s one of the seven days of the week then I’ll be in the kitchen and she’ll be on the sofa,” Srulovich says. “The reason we have an open kitchen is so Sarit knows we have a kitchen,” he jokes.

Packer counters, “Ignore him. Itamar cooks most of the meals that are for just us. Sometimes I cook if he’s needy,” she laughs. She’s also the one cooking on Sundays or when there’s a crowd.

Some of the recipes in At Home reflect the food they cook for friends or for special occasions that may take longer to create, while other dishes are simple, quick and of course tasty.

“We have these grandiose ideas of this huge project. But when it comes down to it, we’d rather have a snooze and wake up and whip up whatever is around,” Packer says.

No matter what, food is a way to mark moments of life, both good and bad. “It’s everything that you go through in life. Food is the byproduct of it, the marker of it, it’s not the big deal. It’s the offshoot of the good things, the fun things, the funny things and the horrible things,” says Srulovich.

“The reasons are that people are born, they get married, they move house, they die, they get sick and we cook.”

(Patricia Niven)

Fig and feta pide

Autumn is when we like to go away. The hectic holiday season is over; beaches and restaurants all around the Med are empty of us sun-crazed northerners; the sun, who has mostly exhausted her heat in the summer, is now kinder, more gentle.

This is when everyone without kids in school goes away, so we board a plane to a Mediterranean shore with the very young, the retired and the gay. And so it is that our holidays are always flavoured with figs – late season, still warm from the summer sun.

We have strong memories of a tree on a rural road on a Greek island. It was laden with the most amazingly sweet figs, as many as you could stomach. We would drive there especially.

We remember tearing ourselves from work after an exhausting summer to head to the Balearic Islands. We were greeted in a hotel car park by a huge fig tree. We parked our little rental car in its shade and took our first bite of the summer – it was then and there that our holiday started.

We all have our little milestones in the year, those recurring events that make us pause and think, ‘This time last year…’ or ‘This time next year…’. The Proms, the first magnolia tree blooming, fireworks on Guy Fawkes’ night.

For us it’s always autumn, and it is always flavoured with figs. It is when the Jewish year starts; it is when the Day of Atonement falls; it is when we got married.

All those sweet and serious life moments are connected by the honeyed sweetness, the resiny undertone, the giving flesh and the crunch of seeds in a fig.

Makes 6

For the dough

300g flour
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp salt
½ tsp freshly ground black pepper
1 tbsp nigella seeds
Pinch of cayenne pepper
15g fresh yeast or 1 sachet dried active yeast
1 tsp honey
150g yoghurt

For the filling

100g feta
50g yoghurt
½ tsp dried oregano
½ tsp sumac (you could substitute with zest of 1 lemon)

For the toppings

1 green chilli
3 tbsp olive oil
6-8 figs (depending on size)
1 small bag of washed baby spinach
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
A few sprigs of fresh thyme or a pinch of dried oregano

Place the flour, sugar, salt, black pepper, nigella seeds and cayenne pepper in a large mixing bowl. Dissolve the yeast in 100ml of water and stir in the honey, then add this, along with the yoghurt, to the dry ingredients.

Knead together to form a nice, supple dough (you can use a mixer with a dough hook if you wish, but it is really easy to mix by hand). Cover the bowl with a cloth or cling film, set in a warm place and allow the dough to double in size. It will take about 1 hour in a warm room, slightly longer if it’s cold.

Make the filling by crumbling the feta into a small bowl and mixing with the yoghurt, oregano and sumac to create a paste.

For the topping, slice the green chilli into rounds, place in a small dish and cover with the olive oil. Cut the figs into 4-5 slices.

Once the dough has proved, divide it into 6 evenly sized lumps. Roughly stretch each piece into an oval boat shape measuring around 20cm long and 8cm wide.

Put a tablespoon of the feta filling on each, spreading it over the centre. Add a handful of baby spinach, then slices of fig. Top with the chilli slices and the oil, using it all up.

Season with salt and pepper, and sprinkle with some leaves from the sprigs of thyme or dried oregano.

Pinch the sides of the dough up around the edges, then pinch each end of the oval into a point to create a pide boat.

Leave to prove again and, while you are waiting, heat your oven to 220C/200C fan/gas mark 7.

By the time the oven is up to temperature, the boats will be ready to pop in. Bake for 10-12 minutes until beautifully golden. Serve warm.

‘Honey & Co. at home: Middle Eastern Recipes from our Kitchen’ by Sarit Packer and Itamar Srulovich, out now in hardback (£26, Pavilion Books). Photography by Patricia Niven