“I specialised in fish and meat and could break down any whole animal,” says Zineb ‘Zizi’ Hattab. This isn’t perhaps what you’d expect to hear from the chef behind Switzerland’s first Michelin-starred vegan restaurant, but Hattab is full of surprises.
For many chefs launching their debut restaurant, their first menu can be months, even years, in the making. Not for Hattab. At the start of 2020, three weeks before opening KLE in Zurich, the Moroccan-Spanish chef decided that she, and the restaurant, were to become vegan.
“I got cold feet,” explains Hattab. “I looked at what impact the restaurant was going to have in the community and with the producers I had chosen, and it was crystal clear that the first step was to avoid animal products. There is no scale of gray, it’s black
