Like all the best things, Logma in Haggerston is a product of love: love for cooking, love for Iranian and Iraqi cuisine, and Ziad Halub and Farsin Rabiee’s love for one another.
Food has been central to the couple’s relationship from the beginning. “One of the things that really bonded us was our love for cooking,” Rabiee says. “Early on, I took Ziad to one of the few Middle Eastern supermarkets in Hackney to look for produce.”
“It was the best first date ever,” says Halub.
The idea for the pair’s Iranian Iraqi cafe-bistro came about by accident. “When Farsin and I became serious, we started inviting people over to the house to introduce friends,” Halub says. But the dinners gathered momentum. “Other friends would be like, ‘Why are we not invited?’” Soon, there was an informal waitlist of friends waiting to eat at their eight-seat dinner table.
Later, at a party, a stranger approached them and asked for an invite. Initially, the couple laughed it off. “We’re like, no, it’s just our dinner parties,” says Rabiee. “We’re not chefs.” Then, a friend nudged them towards hosting something more formal at E5 Bakehouse. The first supper club was largely friends, the second sold out within a day, and the third got even busier. “It just became a thing. It took over our lives.”
The pair toyed with stopping the events to focus on their day jobs, but then, on a walk home one day, they spotted a small unit for rent a few doors down from their flat. They went to view it “for fun”. Now, it’s Logma.
The name, Rabiee explains, is “used a lot in Persian, in Iran, in Iraq and all over the Middle East, and means ‘the perfect bite’ or ‘the perfect morsel of food’”.
They pride themselves on having different cooking styles, which ultimately complement one another. Rabiee describes his as largely influenced by his family’s home cooking – “I cook what I was taught growing up by my mother, my aunts and my grandmother” – whereas Halub is “a lot more experimental”.
“My parents left Iraq in the ’70s,” Halub adds. “My mum lived in Yemen, then Syria, before coming here.” His mother’s cooking was shaped by a mixture of places. “There was no such thing as hyper-traditional. My mother had no fear in just changing an ingredient or a cooking technique, which really inspired me.”
Logma’s early months have been dominated by queues, caused by an unexpected hit. “The [kofta and aubergine] sandwich has kind of gone viral,” says Rabiee. “We never imagined [we’d] be a sandwich spot … we just thought we’d do a sandwich to begin with because we had no plates.”
The sandwich was invented by accident. The generously filled sourdough pita combines kashke bademjan – a Persian aubergine dish enriched with fermented whey and mint oil – and muhammara, the Levantine roasted red pepper and walnut sauce. “I was making koftas for Ziad, and we had some eggplant left over and some bread, and we just combined them to make this incredible marriage of flavours.”
Beyond the sandwich, it’s “whatever we want for lunch, whatever we’re craving”, says Halub. “We love doing the different types of stews.” The weekly changing menu, announced on Instagram on Tuesdays and Fridays, sometimes features lamb and okra stew; saffron chicken with barberry rice (a classic Persian dish of basmati rice mixed with red barberries); and aush, a thick Persian soup dense with herbs and beans.
Both chefs are wary of the word “traditional”. “We don’t want to be cancelled by all the Middle Eastern aunties,” says Rabiee, laughing. “There’s already been so many who’ve come and been like ‘This is not Iranian cuisine, this is not Iraqi’, but it’s our interpretation of the food.”
For Halub, “Rather than trying to bring Iran and Iraq to Hackney”, Logma is about “seeing how the food can be translated using seasonal produce, how different things from the place we live can influence the cuisine”.
Still, both Halub and Rabiee do relish cooking “very regional cuisine … oddball dishes that may exist in a tiny town”. They’re also fascinated by the commonalities between different Middle Eastern cuisines – a recent example from the menu being the mung bean and turnip soup from Basra in southern Iraq that the pair later discovered shares roots with a Persian recipe.
So far, Logma has been daytime-only, but evening service is around the corner. “We’re going to start off with once a week,” says Halub, and by around Persian New Year “it’ll be a midweek situation”.
For now, though, they’re keen not to bite off more than they can chew. “We’re only two people and we make everything from scratch … even the meat we mince ourselves,” says Rabiee. “My mum was here this weekend and she helped me pick all the herbs for the sandwiches. Nothing is prepacked or pre-bought.”
It’s all part of the pair’s distinctive, homely charm. “The kitchen is very open,” Rabiee continues. “It’s like stepping into our living room. You see every tiny minor stress point or bits of joy … bickering … or giving each other kisses on the cheek”. The point, he says, is that “Everyone gets treated with a conversation, with a smile. No one is rushed out, and that’s the whole point of the place, we want it to feel like a community.”
Logma
81 Goldsmiths Row, E2 8QR
Hours:
Wed to Fri 8.30am–3.30pm
Sat & Sun 10am–4pm
