How 'Of the Land' Is Rooting Saudi Cuisine Back in Its Soil

There’s a moment, just before the first dish lands on the table at a family-style dinner, when the room goes still. The scent of citrus and sage hangs in the air as handmade plates are passed around, still warm from the kitchen. That moment, intimate, expectant, and familiar, captures the essence of Of the Land, a supper club concept by Saudi chef Marya Kayyal that traces the roots of Saudi cuisine through generational recipes and traditional ingredients, while simultaneously fostering a third space that connects people through shared stories about food.

What began as a small experiment soon evolved into a reimagining of how Saudis eat and gather, what dining might look like if it were guided by the land itself, and our flavors we grew up with. At her gatherings in Jeddah, no menu is ever repeated. Ingredients are sourced from nearby farms and local markets, their growers now part of her extended family tree, and every course is a reflection to what the earth has to offer that week or time of month. “The land guides how you eat. It tells you what’s best for your body at the moment. You just have to pay attention,” Marya Kayyal tells SceneNowSaudi.

And so the way Kayyal sees Of the Land is as a “multi-dimensional nourishment experience”, an ecosystem of dinners, workshops, and collaborations that explore how food connects people to their roots, culture, upbringings. “Everything starts with the soil. If we forget that, we forget where we come from.”

She recalls that at one dinner she served sage pavlova with citrus and pomegranate, a nod to her father’s nightly sage tea, alongside crepes that her family calls dahur (which as a child, she used to roll into a cigarette and eat impatiently before it even cools). “I see food as a capsule for cherished memories we tend to forget growing up.”

But there was a time when Kayyal’s hands weren’t clasped around a whisk or a pastry piping bag, but around the glass of a scientific test-tube in a lab. “My background is actually science. I studied biology for my undergrad in Canada, and continued to study my Master’s in medical sciences but then I realised that I don’t really like research. It is so isolating," she recalls.

That realisation led her into a professional restaurant kitchen for the first time, during a pastry course at George Brown University. “The moment I entered the kitchen, a fire went off,” she shares, laughing. “Ironically, I loved being in that space. I realised I could actually do this professionally.”

Growing up, Kayyal has always had a penchant for cooking for her family. However, it wasn’t until her path took her from the sterile corridors of academia to the ruckus pastry kitchens of Le Cordon Blue in Paris, that she rediscovered her passion for culinary arts, and most importantly realising her family dinner traditions into a full-fledged experience. Eventually, she went back home to Jeddah, where she launched a small party business. “After two years, I found myself in the same position I was in the lab. I wasn’t talking to people and that’s not why I wanted to do food in the first place. The reason I chose this was for the human connections, interactions and the idea of helping nourish people it all brings.”

In 2024, she took the first step to lay the foundation of Of the Land, of which she doesn’t call herself its founder but rather its guardian. “We’re all caretakers of the land,” she says. “It exists with or without us. It’s just a matter of how you connect with it and what you give back.”

Her grounding in science and pastry gives her work a rare balance of structure and instinct. “When you have a grasp of technique, your intuition kicks in stronger,” she says. It’s that interplay she tries to teach in her workshops, learning to trust your senses while understanding the structure beneath them.

Then she expanded a little further beyond just intimate supper clubs or dinners, to host workshops like ‘A Makkawi Breakfast: Recipes from My Grandmother’, which focused on family recipes and shared heritage. At the workshop, participants were asked to cook a dish called arica, a porridge-like staple that varies from one household to another. “Food is how we remember. It’s how stories survive.” Those intimate exchanges are what set Of the Land apart from other culinary experiences in the Saudi market, as each meal becomes a conversation between memory, flavour and identity.

Kayyal’s work has also reached larger stages, such as the Diriyah Biennale to AlUla, where she’s led sensory experiences that weave together regional produce, prophetic foods, and art. Yet despite the growing recognition, she still favors the intimate gatherings her Off the Land brings, “The real reward is when someone tastes something that brings them back to a place, a moment, a person they’d forgotten.”