“If we’re going to sit down and eat something, we want to enjoy it. We want it to be fresh and vibrant and zesty and delicious, but we don’t have a lot of time to spend on it anymore,” she tells me, explaining that more so than their previous books, this one is all about accessibility. “It’s not about finding specialist ingredients,” she says, adding that most of the recipes come together in 30 minutes or less, with the most complicated taking no more than an hour from start to finish.
Discover Honey & Co’s recipes on The JC
Delicious moments (Photo: Patricia Niven)[Missing Credit]
The fact the couple are short of time is hardly surprising. Since opening their first restaurant in London’s Fitzrovia in 2012, they have barely stopped to draw breath. Today they have three central London dining sites (not including their original restaurant, which they closed in 2022): Honey & Co Lambs Conduit Street, which they describe as “a neighbourhood restaurant”; Honey & Co Great Portland, a deli by day, a dining room and wine bar by night; and Honey & Co Daily, a casual-dining deli, bakery and café in Bloomsbury, and the source of inspiration for the new book. In mid-2025 they also opened Honey & Co Studio, a creative events space just across the street from their flagship restaurant, which was in part inspired by their new-found love for pottery, which developed during the pandemic. On top of this, they have written five cookbooks, produced a podcast and write regular food and drinks columns for The Guardian and the Financial Times.
Their “secret to surviving the day”, Packer explains, is not getting up too early, and sharing coffee in bed whenever they can. “We love the chaos, we love the richness of our lives, we love the complexity of our days, we want to challenge ourselves and we want to be creative,” Srulovich says, “but we still want these moments in the day, like the coffee in bed together, or having just a little nibble after work together, even if it’s not a full dinner.”
Discover Honey & Co’s recipes on The JC
Broad bean and courgette shakshuka from Honey & Co. Daily (Photo: Patricia Niven)[Missing Credit]
This is where their latest cookbook – and current approach to food – comes in. As well as the opening chapter on eggs – which includes recipes such as chilli peas and goat’s cheese with fried egg on toast and broad bean and courgette shakshuka – other chapters include “Soups the Daily” way ie “hearty and rich, a meal in its own right, not just a warm-up act for something else”; “Sandwiches of Joy”, their kickback against the “triangles of sadness” you find in British supermarkets; and “The Salad is a Meal”, pitched as “filling and fresh, delicious yet virtuous, colourful and bright and happy-making”.
The mid-point of the book is “The Daily Nightly”, with recipes designed for the tricky mid-week dinner – which, since the pandemic, seems to have become the bane of everyone’s existence. Based on “strategies” they’ve developed for making “real food, real fast”, the recipes in this chapter are “quick, effortless and actually delicious.” Think chicken traybakes, one-pan pastas and four seasonal variations on “dirty rice”. From there, the book covers quick and easy cakes and cookies, “Daily” breads, bases and foundations (eg green tahini, preserved lemons and cabbage pickle) and, rather intriguingly, “In a Glass” – dedicated to “easy cocktails and even easier desserts”.
Alongside the recipes I can’t wait to make – including the quick-fix chickpea shakshuka with urfa chilli butter, which Packer says is “the most nourishing dinner in the fastest amount of time”, and the egg salad sandwich, which Srulovich describes as “a perfect, perfect moment of pure bliss” – I can’t help noticing the proliferation of treif. Have they ever observed kashrut, I wonder? “We wear our Jewishness very lightly, and always have,” Srulovich tells me, with Packer adding that her parents – who made aliyah from the UK in the 1970s – always told her that “they moved to Israel in order to be Jewish by definition and not by behaviour.”
Discover Honey & Co’s recipes on The JC
(Photo: Patricia Niven)[Missing Credit]
While we’re on the subject of Jewish and Israeli identity, I’m keen to know how they’re experiencing the current climate – conscious that just weeks before we spoke, fellow Israeli restaurateur Eyal Shani announced he was closing his Berlin outpost following a targeted campaign by pro-Palestinian activists. “From a distance, maybe it doesn’t look that great, but actually it is feeling very hopeful to me right now,” Srulovich says. “We’re getting a lot of support from the Jewish community, but also from a lot of other places that maybe you wouldn’t necessarily see.”
“I think you can only be true to who you are, and people will either accept you and love you, or not,” Packer says, matter-of-factly. “We don’t believe that your religion, colour, ethnicity etc is any way to define someone, and we don’t believe we should be defined by it either. So maybe we choose to put on, you know, pink shades and not face it in that way, but we have to believe in the inherent good of humanity. There are always going to be haters, it’s about how much you choose to take that on as a personal thing or not.”
Honey & Co. Daily by Itamar Srulovich & Sarit Packer (Quadrille) is out now
