Majlis of Flavours: Chef Omar Sartawi revisits his grandma’s Maqloubeh recipe

Learning to make the Maqloubeh from his grandmother is one of Jordanian Chef Omar Sartawi’s most cherished food memories. Growing up in Amman, one evening Sartawi, an internationally acclaimed chef and food artist, recalls watching his grandma prepare the Maqloubeh, a popular Middle Eastern rice dish.

This comforting one-pot meal is layered with rice, meat and vegetables. In Arabic, Maqloubeh, literally means ‘upside down’, which is exactly what happens when the dish is cooked, the pot is flipped onto a large serving platter.

“My grandma makes the best Maqloubeh in the world. It’s a celebratory dish, usually made for large family gatherings. My first memory of recreating her Maqloubeh remains a deeply memorable incident and part of our family nostalgia. I was quite young then, and not a chef yet, when one night I decided to make the Maqloubeh,” Sartawi tells Middle East Masala.

“Strangely that day, I started cooking at 11 pm. All family members were curious to know what I was preparing in the kitchen. And it took me three hours to recreate the Maqloubeh, but they all stayed up to taste it and be part of this nostalgic feast,” he adds.

For his grandma’s version of the Maqloubeh, Sartawi shares, he fried aubergines, meat and chicken, then cooked them with the stock till they become tender and flavourful. The final step, post cooking, is to tap the bottom of the pot and flip it into a plate. “Everything comes beautifully together, we usually eat it with a salad or with laban,” he says.

The Maqloubeh recipe has distinct versions in every Palestinian and Jordanian home, make it a versatile and flexible dish. Chef Sartawi, renowned for his contemporary take on traditional recipes, says that he would fuse the Maqloubeh with the Spanish paella to give his version a crispier flavour. “If I cook the Maqloubeh, it would have socarrat, the crispy caramalized layer of rice at the bottom of the pan.”

Chef Sartawi rose to fame when he blended Jameed, Jordan’s iconic, hard-dried yogurt cheese with white chocolate truffles. He later conceived a unique ‘Jameed Concrete’ mixture to cast a full-scale, edible replica of the ancient, 8000 BC Ain Ghazal Neolithic statues for Amman Design Week. He has also championed food sustainability by using discarded vegetable peels to make luxury bags and furniture. Creator of immersive dining experiences across the Middle East, he has developed new edible flavours in Saudi Arabia, using traditional jareesh wheat to create jareesh ice cream, risottos, and crackers.