Lebanese Anissa Helou wins Foodics Icon Award 2023

Lebanese-Syrian chef and author of many award-winning cookbooks, Anissa Helou, has been named the winner of the Middle East & North Africa's 50 Best Restaurants' Foodics Icon Award 2023. 

Growing up between Lebanon and Syria, Anissa learned to cook in a family that cooked traditional food from scratch. At age 21, she left Beirut to study art history and interior design in London, where she worked for the city's most renowned fine arts company, Sotheby's. Helou also ran her antique shop in Paris and later became an art adviser to the Kuwaiti ruling family.  

At 42 years of age, she published her first cookbook, Lebanese Cuisine, to give the Lebanese diaspora a chance to create Lebanese food. The book was also shortlisted for the André Simon Book Awards.  

Realizing that Lebanese Cuisine had remarkable success, Anissa went on to write a wide array of books to date, including Feast: The Food of the Islamic World, which won the James Beard Foundation award in the international category and was chosen by the New Yorker as one of the ten best cookbooks of the century so far.  

In appreciation of her exciting work, Middle East & North Africa's 50 Best Restaurants expressed that through her career, Helou introduced the world to the Middle East's rich Cuisine.  

"If hummus, tahini, and za'atar are now available in supermarkets across the world, it is in part thanks to Helou's tireless efforts, which are more than worthy of the Foodics Icon Award 2023," the platform revealed.