RIYADH: Riyadh’s La Petite Maison added something special to their Ramadan menu this year: Saudi chef Mona Mosly’s tasteful approach to Mediterranean cuisine.
The restaurant, LPM, joined forces with the “Top Chef Middle East” judge to curate a special iftar menu for the holy month, the first time the restaurant chain has collaborated with any chef regionally.
“It was a soul collaboration,” she told Arab News. “It came from my heart because, genuinely, this is my favorite restaurant. When I work, I don’t work — I share love and I give love.”
After the soup and dates are served, the sharing-style iftar menu, priced at SR275 ($73) per person, kicks off with a selection of Mediterranean mezze with a twist. Cauliflower hummus, warm prawns in olive oil and lemon juice, and a date and farro salad drizzled with a tahini vinaigrette. The cauliflower hummus was inspired by LPM’s Salade De Chou-Fleur, Mosly said during an intimate dinner, and the farro soup was an essential during Ramadan for her father.
“Even if we had (iftar) elsewhere, he would take the soup with us,” she said.
Guests are then served a selection of three mains: grilled Chilean bass with chilli and lemon confit, homemade rigatoni pasta with tomato and chilli, or shawarma-spiced ribeye steak with fried angel hair bread. On the side is a broad bean fatteh with yoghurt: “I guess this is my favorite because it’s really home cooked items,” she said.
Of course, no LPM meal is complete without their signature vanilla cheesecake, served with a berry compote. To sweeten the deal, the chef created a date cake with chocolate ganache and almond praline that is made to resemble a real date. “A date is more than just an ingredient in the GCC culture. It’s our hospitality; when you come to our house, you’ll be seeing everyone from the family serving dates. It’s the ingredients of this beautiful land, the land of making big dreams come true, the land of all the beautiful things that are happening,” she said.
“I took into consideration the Mediterranean vibes, and I used the ingredients as an ingredient, more than using the cuisine as a cuisine,” she explained. “For example, when I did the salad, it’s not Saudi, but it highlighted the ingredients from Saudi that I’m so proud of. And it’s highlighting the story with my dad and the soup that made me who I am today. It’s still Mediterranean, and I believe in a way or another, it goes with the overall vibes of LPM.”
The chef sees cooking as a form of storytelling, which is exactly the point of the carefully curated experience. From the soup-inspired salad to the sweet date ending, the menu brings local elements to new environments.
“What I wanted to do is just share some of the stories from my home. We all share stories that make us all connected,” she said. “This is the culture that I love because although we come from different houses, maybe we were raised differently, maybe we were born differently, but at the end of the day, we all have a culture, we all have families, and we all have beautiful stories to tell. And this is what I was trying to do with my food.”
Ibrahim “Bob” Kataya, assistant general manager of LPM, told Arab News that Mosly’s taste, infectious energy, and love aligned with the brand’s philosophy.
“All these branches, what we have, GCC people coming to us, so we said to ourselves, ‘what is the best gift that we can do to reward our guests during Ramadan?’ We found out with all our marketing directors and global directors, to do a collaboration with the Saudi chef, and we chose Chef Mona to be the one doing that.”
Dining and Cooking