About the Founder
Anissa Helou was born, the daughter of a Syrian father and a Lebanese mother, in Beirut and educated there at a French convent school. Aged 21, she moved to London to escape the rigid social convention of her country and began to study interior design at Inchbald School of Design, then at Sotheby’s training course, the history of art. She was soon appointed Sotheby’s representative for the Middle East.
For a while thereafter, she owned and ran an antique shop in Paris, dealing in furniture and objets d’art which reflected her own sophisticated and highly individual taste. From 1978 until 1986, she was based in Kuwait and was an adviser to several members of the Kuwaiti ruling family who were then forming collections of Islamic art. She also advised these and other collectors on the purchase of Victorian paintings, European silver, jewellery, and arts and crafts furniture.
During this period, she travelled extensively and she also started to build her own very personal collections. On her return to London in 1986, she housed her collections in her Victorian house, transforming it into an Aladdin’s cave of beautiful and often bizarre treasures.
In the spring of 1999, she decided to change the course of her life. There were no half measures. She sold her house and put her remarkable and idiosyncratic collections up for sale at Christie’s.
In the introduction to the catalogue, the celebrated art historian and jazz singer, George Melly, described his arrival at her house to dine and to inspect the objects for sale:? ‘when the taxi drew up she heard it and through the open door she stood in silhouette instantly recognised by her totally unique ‘coiffure’, an inadequately dainty word for this explosion with its dramatic white streak; the nearest equivalent is in fact that of Elsa Lanchester in ‘The Bride of Frankenstein’.
Nothing scary about Miss Helou, though. Her hair is more like the personification of her amazing energy. Her smile is as friendly as you can get. She is as lithe as an athlete.
An example of her acumen as a collector was the sale of a series of display panels of fishing tackle, one of which achieved a world record price. Having sold all but her books and most personal possessions, she bought with the proceeds of the sale a remarkable two-story warehouse loft in Shoreditch. This she decorated with her usual excellent taste, but this time as a severely functional, minimalist working space.
Anissa has always taken a strong interest in the food of the Levant. She has written several books about it. Lebanese Cuisine, the first comprehensive collection in the English language (1994), was her first. It was followed by Street Café Morocco, a fascinating introduction to the subtle flavours of the cuisine of that country. Both books achieved considerable acclaim. Mediterranean Street Food was published in 2002 and was equally well received.
The Fifth Quarter, a pioneering book on the uses and delights of offal, followed in 2004. It is already beginning to overcome the traditional squeamishness of the British cook. Her fifth book, Modern Mezze, was published in the UK in July 2007, and her sixth book, Savory Baking from the Mediterranean, was published in New York in August 2007.
Levant, Recipes and Memories from the Middle East, was published in the UK in 2011, and Sweet Middle East was published in the US in 2014. Her Latest book, Feast: Food of the Islamic World, was published to great acclaim in the US in May 2018.
She then wrote an essay on eighteenth-century literature.
Anissa is an experienced, accomplished, and photogenic broadcaster on radio and television and writes regularly for various publications, both in the UK and the US. She speaks 3 languages fluently: Arabic, French, and English, and now that she is spending more and more time in Sicily, where she plans to build a teaching kitchen on a beautiful piece of land overlooking the Mediterranean, she is pretty fluent in Italian.
Anissa continues with her unique style and her ferocious energy to demonstrate to the West the range of culinary delights offered by the East. Recently, she worked with a group of Egyptian entrepreneurs on launching an Egyptian street food concept, Koshari Street, but she is no longer involved with the concept.
In 2013, she was named one of the “100 Most Powerful Arab Women” by Arabian Business magazine, and she was also included in their “500 Most Influential Arabs.”
