Your Favourite Chef's Favourite Chef ft. Three Bros' Mohamed Orfali

Asking Mohamad Orfali to name his favourite chefs turns out to be a fairly unreasonable request. He has about 30 (give or take).

The Aleppian chef behind Orfali Bros — the Dubai restaurant that spent three consecutive years at No. 1 on MENA’s 50 Best — refuses to whittle the list down much further. These are the chefs whose books he bought and read, whose food and ideas he studied, and whose influence accumulated over the years as Orfali assembled an education that stretched considerably further than culinary school.

It is perhaps fitting for a cook whose own food resists a tidy genealogy. Orfali trained classically before turning his attention back towards Aleppo, studying the cuisine he had grown up with after famously discovering, when questioned by a journalist in Seville, that he couldn't adequately explain it. His cooking since has remained voracious: Syrian memory alongside techniques, ingredients and ideas gathered from considerably further afield.

Now Orfali is on Egypt’s North Coast with Three Bros, the restaurant he shares with his brothers Wassim and Omar, for the final WHEN WE EAT at Ramla by MARAKEZ residency, hosted at beachfront restaurant Moga.

For Your Favourite Chef’s Favourite Chefs, we asked Orfali to name the cooks who shaped him. He responded with something closer to a bibliography — and, having apparently read everybody, refused to leave anyone out.