RIYADH: As Saudi cuisine gains more attention at home and abroad, chefs are increasingly experimenting with fusing local dishes and ingredients with global techniques. The trend was a key talking point at La Liste’s roundtable and awards ceremony during the Saudi Feast Food Festival in Riyadh.
While fusion food has been a crowd favorite in the Kingdom for a few years, from Japan to Peru to South Africa, now the focus is on Saudi cuisine and how chefs around the world have been putting their own twist on these homegrown and beloved dishes.
French chef and author Cyril Rouquet-Prevost spoke to Arab News about his initial attraction to the culinary scene in the Kingdom.
Jacqueline Jackaman, journalist and cookbook author from Colombia and her book "Cooking Her Heritage: Saudi Arabia." (Supplied)
Watching Saudi Arabia become a “trendy” topic, he said, pushed him to explore local flavors. “If you are a chef, you have to be curious,” he said.
“So I wanted to discover the country and the food. I wanted to discover new products, new ways of cooking, new flavors. And I did,” Rouquet said.
His latest book, “1 date, 1 coffee,” features 60 sweet and savory date-based recipes inspired by “Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean.” He said discovering fresh Saudi dates changed how he thought about the fruit. “(Dates) are awful in France, really awful … the taste here is so beautiful,” he said.
Cookbooks showcased at La Liste 1000 2025 Awards ceremony in Riyadh. (Supplied)
According to the chef, dates are a versatile ingredient because there are three easy ways to cook them: as a fruit, as a paste, and as a syrup; after which you have the keys to make starters, main courses, and desserts.
“Everywhere in the world, even vegans, they love dates.”
To Saudis, they are ancient, he said. To him, they are the food of the future.
Rouquet said regional spices also stood out. “But the spices, the spices are magic,” he said, noting his appreciation for cardamom paired with rose essence. He also praised local rice varieties, calling bukhari rice his favorite.
Another ingredient drawing attention is the desert truffle that Saudi Arabia began exporting to Europe in late 2024. The Kingdom is also the world’s leading date exporter, reaching SR.1.695 billion ($451.7 million) in 2024.
Rouquet said such products are helping draw culinary interest to Saudi Arabia. Food is a bridge for peace and a vessel for soft power, he added. “At the table, you can speak about everything.”
Colombian journalist and cookbook author Jacqueline Jackaman is preparing to release her second Saudi-focused book, “Saudi Fusion Flavors,” co-authored with Saudi chef Yasser Jad, president of the Saudi Arabia Chefs Association. The book features fusion recipes from chefs across the Kingdom.
“It’s not about mixing ingredients, but about the real fusion of two dishes,” she said.
Recipes range from Saudi-French to Saudi-Colombian. The book follows Jackaman’s first Saudi project, “Cooking Her Heritage: Saudi Arabia,” created with Dr. Awatif Alkeneibit, Sahar Jamal, Begona Mateos, and Cristina Sanchez. The group gathered recipes from Saudi women across the country.
Jackaman said documenting the cuisine required extensive travel because many traditional recipes were not written down. What started as an effort to understand Saudi cuisine became a journey of discovery.
“We traveled around the country and we started meeting people, cooks, chefs, local women, housewives, grandmothers, great-grandmothers,” she said.
She said the intention was clear: although most restaurant chefs are men, it is women at home who preserve Saudi culinary traditions.
“We had papers and notebooks that were shown to us from great-grandmothers, where those recipes were saved, where rice didn’t even exist and how rice came into the country,” she added.
It is these Saudi women — the ones who cook tirelessly every day for their families and communities, whose names are not printed on restaurant doors or cookbooks — who carry the Kingdom’s culinary legacy one their backs and collectively build our taste palette.
Jackaman and her co-authors were received with “unimaginable” hospitality everywhere they went.
“(Those women) opened their doors to us. We ate with them, we sat with them. If it wasn’t for them, this book wouldn’t be possible,” she said.
At the event, La Liste also announced its 2025 Saudi award winners: Opening of the Year went to Cafe Boulud; Indulge Thyself won the Ethical and Sustainability award; Momo was named Talent of the Year; Najd Village received the Classical Revival award; Kuuru took home the Innovation Award; and AlUla was recognized as a Gastronomic Destination.
