Anissa Helou made a career as a food writer and cookery teacher after quitting a job in the art world.
Beirut-born and for many years resident in London, she has managed the difficult task of being one of the few Levantine chefs to have visibility in the West.
Helou is the daughter of a Syrian civil engineer and contractor, who died when she was 30, and a Lebanese mother, today aged 91. She left Lebanon in 1973, at the age of 21, to resettle in London. She quit design school after a few months, but after a one-year course at Sotheby’s auction house, she became one of the very few female art consultants of the time.
She worked in the art world for 20 years, first at Sotheby’s and later as an independent consultant.
