Q&A with Chef Omar Ben-Hammou

Q&A with Chef Omar Ben-Hammou We sat down with chef Omar Ben-Hammou of Her Name Was Carmen to celebrate the SoHo restaurant’s first anniversary. Ben-Hammou’s pan-Latin menu reflects his world travels and family culinary traditions. His supportive family has visited him from Peru everywhere he’s cooked from New York to Australia. Interview by Sarah Strong

The Chef’s Connection: How did you end up deciding that you wanted to go to culinary school and pursue cooking as a career?

Omar Ben-Hammou: Well I always liked cooking. In my family it’s a big thing, the way that we show affection is by cooking so my mother cooks, my grandmother cooks, my sister is an awesome baker, so I was always involved with that kind of environment. But I also come from a family that went to college and had degrees and stuff like that, so I always thought that was my path, which I followed in the beginning.

I went to law school, but then after a couple of years I realized that it wasn’t for me. I always kind of refused the idea of being a chef. My mother had a restaurant so I pretty much grew up in a restaurant ,and that was like my last you know choice, but then I made a trip. I met some people, older people than me, and they kind of shared their experiences with me about the importance of doing something that makes you happy instead of following different ideas from family or society. So after that trip I decided to come back to Lima and give it a shot. Obviously it was my second option because everybody told me, “you should cook, you should go to culinary school, you’re always cooking, you’re always eating.” I said, “no, no, no,” I have to be like my sister, I have to be like my dad. So then I came back and did one more semester and then after that I talked to my parents and I switched to culinary school, and my mother told me, “I told you so.”

TCC: What makes cooking here unique?

OBH: Everything is challenging, everything is too much, it’s very intense. I always thought that New York City was a city that I wanted to live in. When I first started my career, I always dreamed about being one day in a three Michelin star restaurant in New York, just to see what’s going on. I’m very lucky, I met the right people and I worked a lot to get to my goals.

TCC: What are you inspired by?

OBH: I love history, I love anthropology and I love traveling, so when I quit law school I always wanted to see the world and discover. I’m not a person that learns in a classroom; I learn by touching, by feeling, by smelling, by exploring my senses. Traveling allowed me to have a big picture of what’s going on. I spent my whole twenties traveling and living in different countries and learning different languages, too. I speak four: Portuguese, Spanish, English and French, it’s not very decent butI can make it happen. I think traveling was the key to where I wanted to go with my career, what I wanted to achieve, seeing different realities, working with different people with different tempers, with different languages and different ways to show the culture through the dishes. Eating is culture, so I every time I have a young cook and they don’t travel i kind of have a sit down with them, have some beers and say travel, just go.

TCC: Is there anything that you won’t cook with, that you hate?

OBH: Not really. I use a lot of stuff. I think I respect every single product for what it is. I am picky, I pick the best, but I don’t dislike things. I think that if I don’t like something it’s because I think I haven’t the capacity to see how good it is or how I can use it because I don’t know everything, I’m still discovering every day, even when I walk on the street. I love street food, everything comes from things that I like to eat in the street, and I try to recreate flavors in my kitchen. TCC: So when you came on to do this restaurant and you were creating the menu, what were some things you wanted to achieve?

OBH: I didn’t have any expectations. I was like, let’s do it! I wasn’t living in New York at the time, I was just traveling around. I came back to pick up my green card, and summer was over in South America. I was about to open up a restaurant, but the political situation in the country wasn’t the best, so I talked to my family and they were like, “We don’t want you here, go back.” They always say when I leave, you always have a house here and hot food, but you can go. So I came here and met the team and they talked to me about the project, and I said, let’s do it, but no expectations about anything. We didn’t know what was going to happen, to be honest.

TCC: What are some things you learned in the past year here?

OBH: A lot of things, I learned a lot of things.I learned a lot – how in a year my cooking evolved week by week because I change the menu a lot, actually I’m trying not to because my cooks always complain, but they love it anyways. So I learned a lot about managing. I learned a lot about purveyors and New York. I learned a lot about the city through working as a chef and being here every day, interacting with the customers. I think we develop certain flavor profiles on the menu that New Yorkers enjoy.

TCC: Do you have any tips from the kitchen that you’ve picked up that could be useful to home cooks?

OBH: I don’t know, to be honest. I think cooking is so free and I like to think that I do it because it reminds me that I’m a free person. So you have techniques, you have certain rules, but I love breaking rules. There are no rules.