Cookbook author and TV star Sohla El-Waylly didn’t grow up dreaming of culinary fame. El-Waylly was born in Los Angeles to Bengali parents. “I come from a conservative Asian family where they wanted me to be a doctor, lawyer, or engineer,” El-Waylly shared. She studied economics at UC Irvine and then went to the Culinary Institute of America, where she met her husband Hisham “Ham” El-Waylly. “I really hated college,” El-Waylly reflects. “Also, it was 2008 and economics was just not going to happen.”
Working in restaurants during university changed everything for El-Waylly. “I loved being part of one big organism working towards one big thing,” she remembered. She discovered the power of “exciting people with food and bringing people together with food.” She was hooked.
Since then, El-Waylly has cooked her way to the top of the food media world. With a new bestselling cookbook, multiple TV shows, and a buzzy newsletter called Hot Dish with Sohla, she’s the culinary it girl of the moment. But for her, “the moment” is ever evolving.
Restaurants, and Restaurant Adjacent
“Del Posto was my first fancy restaurant where I took it seriously,” says El-Waylly, who went on to cook at a lineup of acclaimed New York City restaurants, like Atera and Battersby in Brooklyn. In 2016, she and her husband opened Hail Mary, a swanky diner in Greenpoint, which offered playful dishes like koshari with roasted duck breast, grilled cocktail chicken hearts, and sky-high Funfetti layer cake. When the spot closed about a year later, El-Waylly needed space to recover; “I didn’t want to work in a restaurant again, but I wanted to be food adjacent.”
Which is how El-Waylly found herself in food media, working for Serious Eats, Bon Appétit, and Food52. Since then, she’s had a string of big deal career successes, like winning a James Beard Foundation Book Award and New York Times-bestseller status for her first cookbook, Start Here: Instructions for Becoming a Better Cook, which came out at the end of last year. “It’s a teaching book,” she says, “Each chapter focuses on a technique, and the idea is that you learn them so well you won’t need a cookbook anymore.”
In addition to promoting her book, El-Waylly has been busy contributing recipes to The New York Times, plus hosting The Big Brunch, a cooking competition on MAX, and Ancient Recipes with Sohla on The History Channel, where she traces the origins of dishes like apple pie and mochi. Plus, she’s a new mom.
Motherhood and Ambition
If juggling multiple high-profile jobs and the relentless demands of an almost toddler sounds like a lot, it is. El-Waylly’s baby girl is nearing her first birthday. When I asked her how she was coping, El-Waylly replied: “I’m just doing a bad job,” which is hard to believe, although the struggle is real. “I return all my emails late. I cannot do any real work until after 8 p.m.”
El-Waylly’s baby is “at the cute age where there is a line of people who want to take care of her while I’m doing a shoot,” she explains, and yet needs more attention and stimulation every day. El-Waylly reflects, “it was easier when she was smaller.”
Mom life has also shifted El-Waylly’s approach in the kitchen. “My relationship to food has changed, and my priorities are different,” she says. “Before, if it made a dish taste better, I wouldn’t hesitate to use five pots. Now, I don’t want to wash dishes; I will streamline.” At the age of 39, El-Waylly has a newfound focus on health. She explains, “I try to eat my veggies, eat my fiber, and eat the rainbow.”
People are the Best (and the Worst)
When it comes to what keeps El-Waylly inspired — and challenged — it’s “interacting with people online and in person.” The satisfaction of having “a recipe of mine become, maybe, a family favorite, and maybe they’ve made it every holiday — I’m part of their family, I’m in their home, and that’s amazing,” El-Waylly shares.
On the flip side, people are the hardest part of the work El-Waylly does. “It’s just like in a restaurant,” she explains. “The good customers are the best, and then there are the customers who make you question it all. Only it’s worse online because there is an overwhelming amount of feedback.”
When I asked El-Waylly if she had an approach to handling all that noise — maybe a system, or a philosophy — she answered, “I just fall into a depression and then crawl out of it in a few days.”
Yet she crawls out, again and again, and returns to writing recipes, hosting TV shows, giving interviews, and now starting work on a second cookbook. She says it will be a more classic cookbook than her first — a collection of dishes that she loves to make again and again. “I get culinary inspiration everywhere, but my best ideas happen when I’m not working on stuff,” says El-Waylly. “Maybe I’ll see something on TV, or try something a restaurant is doing, or look at nature and see a color I want to put in a dish.”
Looking ahead, El-Waylly’s goal is to keep at it. “The industry is so saturated, there are so many new faces that blow up,” she says. “I want to keep working. Longevity is the most impressive thing. I want to be like Melissa Clark,” who has written more than three dozen books.
El-Waylly sees growth and learning as the keys to this plan, rather than “relying on the same old techniques or style,” she says. “Your audience is growing and changing with you, so you have to be constantly evolving.” It will be thrilling to see how El-Waylly evolves next.
