Every day as a kid, I wanted to race home to see what my mum had cooked. In reality, I waited for school bus number 12, but the excitement was the same. She always cooked two dishes: a Lebanese one, and something "international" as backup, because you cannot be a Lebanese mum and risk your family not liking dinner.

I grew up, moved overseas to study, and that's where I really learned to cook. First for myself in a two-ring dorm kitchen, then for whoever happened to turn up at my door.

Cooking wasn't the career I chose, at least not at first. I spent nearly two decades working in marketing, travelling the world and tasting extraordinary food along the way. But I kept missing something no restaurant could give me: the intangible pull of a shared meal at home.

Eventually I left the keyboard behind and went back to the kitchen properly. What started as an attempt to recreate my mum's cooking became something else: an obsession with layering everything I'd picked up while travelling with the instinct she taught me, that a meal is really about the people around the table.

That same curiosity eventually led me to become a certified olive oil sommelier. Every dish I serve is finished with an olive oil I've chosen the way I'd choose a wine: for where it's from, how it was made, and how it complements the food on the plate.