Anissa Helou, the author of award-winning cookbooks, has won the Foodics Icon Award from the Middle East & North Africa's 50 Best Restaurants organisation. In presenting this accolade, the 50 Best organisation honours outstanding figures in the food industry within the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and celebrates an individual who has used their platform to raise awareness and drive positive change.
Helou will receive the award at the 2nd MENA's 50 Best Restaurants award ceremony in Abu Dhabi on 30 January 2023.
Born and raised in Beirut to a Syrian father and a Lebanese mother, Helou has written a number of cookbooks. Her 1st book, Lebanese Cuisine, launched in 1994, was nominated for the André Simon Award. Mediterranean Street Food won the Gourmand World Cookbook Award 2002 as the best Mediterranean cuisine book in English.
William Drew, Director of Content for 50 Best, commented: "Anissa Helou's relentless efforts in documenting historical culinary traditions serve to both educate and highlight the cultural nuances as well as the shared connectivity of different customs in the age of food globalisation. With this award, we celebrate the impact her research and work has had on preserving food communities."
Helou said, "It wasn't until I started researching and writing my first cookbook, some 30 years ago, that I realised that food is culture, and that through cuisine and foodways, one can come to understand better a country or a region and its people."
More recently, Helou worked with the Culinary Arts Commission of KSA to standardise traditional and contemporary recipes collected from cooks across the kingdom in Saudi Feast, which was published in 2022.