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Meet the chef – Ferial K

Ferial K is one such chef, showcasing her North African inspired cuisine concept with her guest chef residency every Saturday at the iconic Pikes at Ibiza Rocks House. Upon biting into Ferial K’s delicious cuisine, you’ll instantly realise it’s full of passion and creativity. Having crossed the globe during her travels, she has amassed the very best spices, flavours, colours, textures and cooking styles known to gastronomy and has the ability to wow anyone who’s lucky enough to be a guest at her dinner table this summer.

Tell us a little about your experience? I haven’t always been a ‘chef’, but I’ve always loved to cook. Even when I was doing another job, I was always been the first one to cook for my friends, even 20 to 30 people, and I was never afraid of this. I love to travel, and from living in Africa and backpacking for pleasure I totally fell in love with local markets because of the colours, the food, the smells, the spices – it all inspires me and I am so curious. I completed some cooking courses, and I worked some internships, but the best cooking course I ever did was stay in the homes of local people where my hosts were cooking, so I could learn their style and their flavours. I’ve never been to school, but I’m self-taught from all over the world. Is it true you were a guest at Freddie Mercury’s famous birthday bash at Pikes? It was the best party ever! Oh la la, it was fantastic! By luck, we were invited, and there were around 200 guests at Pikes, and at the end of the party my friend and I were invited to stay for a drink so I got to meet Freddie away from all the crowds. He was so sweet and friendly, and as I was a teenager at the time, this was a big deal. What’s the story behind being invited back to guest chef so many years later? I was cooking a dinner for some guests and [owner] Dawn Hindle had been invited. After the dinner, she asked me to call her the next day, and she proposed I do Cous Cous Club at the restaurant at Pikes at Ibiza Rocks House.

What is the inspiration behind the cuisine concept? Cous cous is an iconic food where I am from, and I am proud to create this food coming from my North African origins. I get to play with my creativity and I always love to experiment in my cooking. I play with texture, taste and smell so I created this menu – it was originally for fun, but after certain people had sampled the food, I was asked to expand and return to the concept. Any special flavours or tastes that standout? Because I’ve always been curious about food and going to markets, being creative is so important to me. If a vegetable is talking to me, I will create something very interesting. You see, I am an artist – I draw with my food, I draw the texture and the taste because it is all an inspiration. You’ll experience the freshest vegetables served in a variety of ways, fragrant spices, the freshest herbs, different adaptions using coconut and sweet flavours like vanilla. It’s my imagination and it is my art.

How do you describe your style in the kitchen? First of all, I draw my food. I do creation by drawing, you will see this on my menus [The Cous Cous Club menu in showcases illustrations of the dishes by Ferial]. I’m a pleasant and passionate chef. It is all about professionalism, smiling and a positive attitude. Also, silence in the kitchen with no shouting, unless we receive or speak an order. I must give a special mention to the team at Pikes, it’s been a pleasure to work with them, everyone is always smiling and very talented. What is your signature dish? I don’t have a signature dish. I try to know my clients so well and understand what they want and cook according to this. I create an amazing menu that my clients will love – this is my signature. A menu that always fits them and that they will enjoy.

What do you love about working and living in Ibiza? Obviously because it is paradise. Yes we fall in love with the island, but more, we fall in love with the atmosphere and energy. This is why I’ve been here such a long time. I am so happy that my family brought me here when I was little because to grow up here, and now to work and live here, is a big, big privilege. I am also a private chef, so I work on yachts, in villas, and at big events. I love this because I get to meet such amazing people, and characters. Particularly, I have a group of clients who have supported me since the beginning, who have grown with me and supported my creativity as an artist and are always there when I create something new. This is so special for me. What is your favourite place to eat in Ibiza? Can Balafia! It is simple but always so amazing. I’ve been coming to this place for so many years. Everything is fresh from the garden, and the meat always perfectly cooked. It’s simple and Spanish, and this is why I love it. But of course… the island is full of places; it’s hard to choose just one!

Visit the White Ibiza restaurants guide to read more and reserve a table at Room 39 at Pikes
Ibiza goes to the movies

I love movies. I love movie stars (note: different to actors, though I also love them), I love cinematography, I love soundtracks, I love scores, I love movie posters, I love cleverly written scripts, I love surround sound, I love the big screen, I love red velveteen chairs with cup holders for your oversized Coca Cola, I love oversized Coca Cola, I love previews, I love reading the credits as they roll… It’s just magical. I’d often thought if I didn’t live in Ibiza and write a blog, perhaps I’d live in Hollywood and work (like everyone else) in the movies – but then one day I went to Hollywood and didn’t find the real thing quite as magical as a silver screen experience, so I came back to my life as a mild mannered anonymous blogger and continued to pine about the lack of cinematic experiences in my life on the white isle.

You see, when I first moved to the island, movies were only screened in Spanish. Very occasionally there’d be a film shown in VO at the multiplex in town, but it would always be some old arthouse movie I had already seen years before, so the magic just wasn’t quite the same. The very first thing I did when I took a holiday to NYC in 2013, after living in Ibiza for seven years, was go to the cinema in Time Square (in case you’re wondering – I saw Frozen and have subsequently watched the DVD about once a week ever since. It was that special). I flew to Barcelona to go to a midnight screening of Star Wars: The Force Awakens on the opening day last December. Just to give you an idea of how much I love the movies. Anyway! Back to Ibiza, I was thrilled a few years ago when a company called Lime in the Coconut (rebranded this year as Cinema Paradiso Ibiza) started screening films in an open-air cinema setting in the magical setting of Dalt Vila. My hood. And then the year after that, Amante started hosting open-air cinema nights, and then during the winter just gone by, the retro-esque (it’s just authentically old, it wasn’t styled by a hipster) Cine Regio in San Antonio started screening movies in English twice a week. I was in heaven. (Note: Yes I know I could watch movies in Spanish if I wanted to, but the magic gets a little lost in translation, and the mismatched lip-syncing drives me crazy.)

Movies are finally creeping into expat Ibiza culture, and so when I was invited to attend the exclusive premiere of the new set-in-Ibiza flick called White Island, adapted from author Colin Butts’ book ‘A Bus Could Run You Over’ (adapted by the same author), I couldn’t have said RSVP’d ‘yes’ fast enough. It was a film about my favourite island, shown in my favourite place (on the pink tennis court at Pikes at Ibiza Rocks House) and set up by my favourite open air movie team (Cinema Paradiso Ibiza), which meant comfy beanbeds to replace the velveteen chairs and wine to replace my oversized Coke! Of course, like any Ibiza invitation, I was instantly set back by the dress code. WHITE. Obviously. You’d think by the nature of my job, I’d have a wardrobe full of the shade, but I have to admit, it’s just not my colour! And let’s be honest – white is a summer colour. I do have some little white shorts and some light white tops… but it’s May. It was late at night. It’s cold. And annoyingly, I couldn’t just ‘borrow’ from our fashion boutique, because it was a weekend and our office was locked! A few creative twists on the variation resulting in a look that was a cross between a toga party and a snowman meant I was finally dressed for the occasion. And so it was off to Pikes, the happiest place on earth!

We arrived to red carpet (I guess white just would have been impractical), a free-flowing bar (WAY better than an oversized coke) and free-popping popcorn, served up by the cutest chicas in vintage styled cigarette girl outfits, complete with pillbox hats. The pink tennis court was illuminated by the light of the full moon and awash with white (although of course there was ONE disrespectful – let’s call him a pop-hopper – who dressed head to toe in black), some very chic and stylish, some perhaps could have done with a stylist’s touch (remember, white does NOT hide a multitude of sins and pigtails and lace just don’t work on anyone over 40), but who am I to criticise? I looked like Olaf from Frozen! In typical Ibiza style, most of the guests were late and almost all refused to take their beanbed until the very last minute – the invite list was a veritable who’s who of Ibiza spanning about three decades, with around 40-percent of the attendees flying in from the UK for the occasion, so it seemed there was a lot of catching up to do. When Colin Butts took to the microphone to make a speech prior to the screening, there really wasn’t a dry eye in the house – it was a pretty special moment.

Then it was time. That magical minute as the production house logo comes up on the screen and the movie is about to start. I was on the edge of my beanbed in anticipation. Having never read the book, I had no idea what the film was going to be about (shame on me, yes – I’ve downloaded it for this weekend)… but as it had been shot in Ibiza, I knew quite a few people who made an appearance as an extra, which I figured would be worth looking out for if nothing else. Onto the movie itself. Beautiful production. Amazing shots of our beautiful island. Lots of fun guessing which venues had been transformed into make-believe beach bars and even more fun trying to guess if any of the characters were based on people we know. I was surprised to discover that I thought the soundtrack was fabulous (as I think often movies these days lean more towards poppy EDM but it wasn’t the case) and the actors, well, they weren’t all that bad either. Mostly unknowns. An East Ender here. A chubby Billy Zane there. A quick cameo by the back of Carl Cox’s head. A British girl faking a Spanish accent (why they didn’t hire a local girl I’ll never understand). And the aforementioned pop hopper holding a gun like it was the most unnatural thing in the world. OBVS. He’s not an OG hip hopper (nor, some would say, an actor).

I’m not a film critic by any means, so I’m not going to spoil the film for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but I’ll just say it’s yet another Ibiza movie that I’d prefer my mother didn’t see as it shows the darker, seedier side of the island that – while admittedly it does exist – tends to present the island in a bad light to those who don’t know and love it as we do. It sometimes makes me a bit sad that there doesn’t seem to be any movie or TV show about Ibiza that captures the true essence of the island, that magic so many of us feel (whether you live here or not) – and then other times, I’m kind of happy, because I think, if the rest of the world only KNEW how special it was, we’d be overrun! There’s a wonderful line at the end of the film spoken by the protagonist that sums up how I feel about movies and about Ibiza. “Everybody’s got to find their thing, the thing that makes them come alive for all the right reasons.” Hmmm. Ibiza in the movies. Who needs Hollywood? Maybe that’s my destiny, right there… Photography by James Alexander Chapman for Pikes at Ibiza Rocks House