NYC NOW - Cooking Affordable NYC Inspired Meals with Chef Ham El-Waylly | NYC Now

Episode Date: October 2, 2026

Chef Ham El-Waylly grew up in Doha, Qatar, eating his mom's Egyptian and Bolivian cooking and dreaming about New York bagels while watching Seinfeld. Today, he's the co-owner and chef behind Strange Delight, a Creole restaurant in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.In this episode, Ham joins NYC Now host Janae Pierre to talk about the unexpected throughlines between Southern cooking and the food he grew up on, how the pandemic sent him back to his late mother's recipe book after years of avoiding his grief, and the empanadas that helped him finally process it. He also breaks down what actually separates fine dining from cooking for his own family, and how affordability shaped the recipes in his new cookbook, Hello Home Cooking. Get the cookbook: Hello Home Cooking, by Ham El-WayllyGot any questions, comments or story ideas? Send us a message at [e-mail] challenging NYC rent freeze releases Mamdani officials’ emails and text messagesHochul names NY AG James as special prosecutor on rape case at Cornell University Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

From WNYC, this is NYC Now. I'm Jene Pierre. I had nothing to distract me during the pandemic, so I started cooking out of my mom's recipe book. And now it's made me a much more complete cook. Ham El Whaley is head chef and culinary partner at Strange Delight in Brooklyn. On today's show, we visit the restaurant to talk about his background and his new cookbook, Hello Home Cooking.

But before we get into that, here's some news stories we're following. Attorney Randy Mastro has accused the Mumdani administration of meddling in the independent rent Guidelines Board's decision this year to freeze the rent. The former first deputy mayor under the Adams administration has released emails and text messages from Mammany officials in a lawsuit that's trying to overturn the city's rent freeze on stabilized apartments. There's so much more to this story, and we'll get to it next week on this podcast, so be on the lookout for the drop.

From one case to the next, Governor Kathy Hockel has named New York Attorney General Letitia James as special prosecutor to investigate a rape case at Cornell University. The accuser alleges several fraternity members gang raped her and pressured her to become intoxicated at a fret house. The appointment comes because Hockel says she has some serious questions about the initial investigation that happened back in 2024 that ultimately declined to file any charges. For more on these stories and others, visit our new site, Godfamist. I don't know about you, but I absolutely love the fall season. From the fashion to the foliage, it's the most beautiful time of year to me. Want to see that foliage upstate? I definitely recommend taking the train.

And now is the perfect time to do so because the Metro North Railroad's leafpeper trains return this weekend. There will be three additional morning trains going toward Beacon and and Poughkeepsky, as well as three afternoon trains returning to Grand Central Terminal every weekend through November 8th. Make it a day date and come back with some of those really tasty cider donuts from Glazed Dover. Man, I'm working up an appetite over here. All right, let's get on with the show. Here on the show, we've been talking to quite a few chefs and food influencers around the city this summer. And something that stood out from those conversations is just how many cuisines from around the world

meet here in New York City to create something unique. I consider the many restaurants in this city to be a huge perk of living here. But in this affordability crisis, I've been trying to do more home cooking. Well, today on the show, we headed to Fort Green Brooklyn to a restaurant called Strange Delight.

It's a former pizzeria, and now it's a Creole restaurant serving up all the flavors of New Orleans. Its co-owner and chef, Ham and Willie, isn't for you. from Louisiana. He grew up in Dohae, eating his mom's Egyptian and Bolivian cooking, and he had dreams about bagels long before he even set foot in New York City. I'll talk with Chef Ham today about how a kid from Dohae ended up cooking Creole food in Brooklyn, and in the video version of this episode,

you can see us make a recipe from his new cookbook, Hello Home Cooking. Hello, Ham. Hi. So nice to have you here. I'm really glad you're here as well. As I mentioned, Strange Delight is a New Orleans-inspired restaurant and you know I'm from New Orleans and I'm just curious how did southern food and Creole cuisine become such a big part of your life? Well it's something I've always enjoyed. It was my first experience with American food when I first moved here and there's a lot of similarities between New Orleans cuisine or just Southern food in general and the food I grew up eating. There's a lot of similar ingredients like catfish and there's a lot of long cooking like collard greens.

There's a lot of similar long-cooked greens in the Middle East that are like that, like Molheya. There's a love of okra. I think a lot of non-Okra lovers would call it slimy. I would just call it thickening. I have a very, very deep love of that texture because it's something I'm very used to growing up eating. So those kind of just really made a lot of connections in my brain to, like, comfort.

So it's like, oh, this food makes me feel good inside. So you naturally just want to keep eating it. want to keep making it. I love that. And we haven't established this yet. You actually grew up in Qatar, right? Yeah, that is correct. Talk a bit more about the types of food that you grew up eating. So living in Qatar, it's like this very international community because you have a lot of people from all over the world who go there to work. I'm half Egyptian, half Bolivian. So I'd spend summers in Egypt eating with my family out there. And then at home, my mom would cook Egyptian things, Bolivian things. Her way to meet new people and break the ice was to ask people what their

favorite recipe was, and then she would make that at home. So we had, and I had friends from all of the world, so I'd have Lebanese food, Filipino food, Somalian food. And it just kind of really defined how I like to cook and eat and how I think about food and how I like to combine things that I've eaten that kind of normally people wouldn't think to clip together. Yeah. You know, Doha is such an international place. Your home was an international place. What were holidays like? Ooh, holidays were really fun. So we celebrated. My mom was raised Catholic, my dad's Muslim, and neither converted when they got married. So we celebrated both. So it was a dual religious household. So we had we had Eid and we had Christmas. We had Easter. We had Ramadan. We did it all. We did it all. When you think about home today, what are the dishes that come to mind? Is it that fusion infanado or is it something else?

Well, it's really difficult to pinpoint like one specific thing just because it's, it really changes on my mood. So I would say the thing I miss the most is there's this shawarma spot that we'd go to after school. There's a Lebanese spot. So they would have fresh pita, the crispy chicken, a big, a whole bunch of tomb, which is this like garlic mayo-y spread. some pickles and then some fries and then you roll it up.

Sounds delicious. It is so, so, so good. That is, that's the food I miss the most because it's, for most things, living in New York City, you can get a version or an approximation or something, but there's no place that hits like back home, like the memory of the showroom as I grew up eating. Like there's something missing. So I've yet to find that to fully satisfy my memories. I'm making my way through your book, Hello Home Cooking, really fascinating,

recipes in there, by the way. Thank you. But I want to talk about the pandemic and how that impacted you. Of course, a lot of us were locked up in our homes, you know, restaurants were closed. As a chef, what did that, what did that time, you know, mean to you? It was tough. So a few years before the pandemic, my wife and I had opened and closed a restaurant. Then the next job I got after that, the restaurant suddenly closed as well.

So there were like two restaurants that closed back to back. So after that, I got a job as a corporate executive chef because I was just looking for job security. So I thought I was bulletproof. And then the pandemic hit and then all the restaurants closed. And then I was laid off again. So it was like it was a very, it was a moment where I had to reevaluate what I wanted my life to be or what direction I wanted to go in or like what what being a chef to me meant. Because it was also a moment of unknowing, right? Exactly.

I had no idea what was going on or what was going to happen. No one knew what was going down. It's like, what do you mean the world is shut down? And so that was a time where I was really in need of comfort. And that's when I turned to some home cooking that my mom made. Comfort food. Comfort food, exactly. And then I hadn't cooked that food in a really long time because I was just when I, my mom died pretty suddenly when I was younger.

And in my grief, I also locked that away. So I kind of buried myself in my work because I didn't want to deal with the grief or process it. So I kind of just locked it away. And working in restaurants, it's very easy to forget your outside problems because it's so all-consuming that it's really easy to just turn it into your life. So I had nothing to distract me during the pandemic. So I started cooking out of my mom's recipe book. And then cooking those things and eating those things brought me a lot of comfort. and also brought me back into the dishes that I grew up eating and those flavors and then folding that

into how I cook. And now it's made me a much more complete cook because I feel like when you draw from those personal experiences, the things that come out just have extra weight to it. And they have, they have like an extra, extra feeling that you can't really place your finger on. But just because there's so much history and soul behind it, that it just hits, it hits. differently. And that was the first time you actually opened your mom's cookbook. Yes, that was. That was. Do you remember the first thing you cooked? I do. It was the cheese empanadas out of there. So my mom would make those when she was feeling really homesick or wanted to connect us to her family back home and just kind of connect us all, unify us all through

food. So anytime I came home and I saw those on the table, I knew that my mom was feeling homesick and needed us to spend a little extra time with her and eat impanadas together. And so that, when I took a bite out of that, when I remade it, it immediately kind of took me back to that. I was going to ask that. I didn't want to be cheesy, no pun intended there, but like, what did that feel like? You know, because it seems like you unlocked that grief and was able to kind of move on a bit. Yeah, definitely after writing this book and putting it all out there, I feel like I can

fully close my chapter on that and move on. on, which is nice. It's very, it's very healing. It's a very healing process. We've been hearing from chef Ham El Whaley about how he found his way from a childhood in Dohae to running a Creole restaurant in Brooklyn and how the pandemic sent him back to his late mother's recipes, cooking the affordable, comforting food he grew up on. After the break, Ham will discuss the difference between cooking in a fine dining kitchen and cooking for his own family, plus a very New York recipe from his book. We're at Strange Delight in Fort Green Brooklyn with chef Ham L. Whaley, talking about his path from Doha to New York City and how he found

his way back to his mother's recipes during the pandemic. Can you talk about some of the differences between fine dining and home cooking? Yeah, absolutely. So there's a very ingredient-specific that fuels a lot of fine dining. So sourcing is a big big, part of what you do in fine dining. You want to find the freshest fish. You want to find the fattiest chicken. You want to find the most in season asparagus that are really nice and fat.

You want to find the perfectly unripe green strawberries. So like it's all about finding these really special things. You want to show people the best of what you can do. You're like, this is what I can do. And home cooking, I feel like it's a lot more resourceful. It's like, what do I have in the fridge or in my pantry? so I don't need to leave my house that will be on the table in 20 minutes so my kids stop screaming. Like that's that that is your thought process between home cooking.

You want speed, you want efficiency, you want affordability, and you want it to be easy. Like you don't want to be like I will spend, I'll spend three hours on one component of one dish if it's in a restaurant. But at home, like I want it on the table in under an hour. And ideally it's 50 minutes of that cooking and just 10 minutes of me working. So it's like, it's a completely different mindset because you're under completely different pressures. Like, you don't have a sous chef at home. You don't have a dishwasher at home. It's just you. And there's a lot of things coming at you. You got dogs coming at you. You got children coming at you. So it's like, you got to get it done. Yeah, you mentioned to me that you have quite a few pets. We do. We got two dogs and a cat. That's a crazy kitchen right there. Two dogs, a cat and a three-year-old.

What's, that's just, is that something you imagined for yourself? No, it just kept happening. We just kept adding to the family. And then before you know, it's like, oh, this is a full house. There's a lot of things in this house. What's something that home cooking taught you that fine dining didn't? It's like your food at home can just be okay and it'll be fine. Because your toddler doesn't care.

Exactly, because your toddler doesn't care. And honestly, at the end of the night, I don't care. Like, I just wanted to be, I'm like, give me enough fiber so that I can have a nice morning. And that's like, that's pretty much it. And it's like, and it's okay. It's okay for your food at home to be okay, to just be okay. That's my biggest thing that I had to overcome. I want to talk now about your cookbook, Hello Home Cooking.

You know, it's no secret that we're going through an affordability crisis here in New York. So I feel like your book is very timely. It's out at the right moment when people are, you know, trying to cook for themselves. How do you think about balancing affordability when it comes to the recipes in your book? It was a big part of how I thought about the recipes in the book. So I tried to limit myself to things that you could find at a regular grocery store, not like a really fancy grocery store, nothing really high end, and then just turn into something delicious.

Like you've seen, I have a pot roast in the book, and I feel like the chuck roast has been forgotten in a lot of cooler cookbooks, just because it's not a very sexy cut. I was going to say it, yeah. You know, it just, it isn't. But it's affordable. It's like a big hunk of protein. And if you cook it right and treat it right, it will be delicious.

There we go. Chuck roast. Chuck roast is the next, next, it's going to go the way of the ox tail now. Like, ox tail used to be so cheap. And now it's $30 a pound. Same with short rib. Like back in the day, short rib was considered a, like, a cheap cut. And now it's like $30 a pound as well.

It's wild. Yeah. It's wild. So check roast is pretty inexpensive, but ham, I didn't mention this to you. I don't eat meat, and no, a lot of people don't. But what's something else in your cookbook that's faster, cheaper? Any suggestions? Well, yeah.

So I think of when I want something quick, my fast lunch or breakfast is this thing I call an everything pita. So when I was growing up in Doha, I was really obsessed with Seinfeld. It was one of my favorite shows. And it's a big reason why I love New York so much. And so my thing is I used to punch out petas with a circle cutter and turn them into bagels. And then I would pretend that I was in New York eating a bagel. So that was how I spent my childhood. And so now as an adult, I wanted to do a version of that in my book.

So I kind of did, went the other way. And I turned a pita into a bagel. So I make and everything seasoning, and I stick it on this pita, and then you can stuff it with whatever you'd like. And it's, luckily, in my book, Hello Home Cooking, how'd that get there? How? Magic. How convenient.

All right, so can we go make some? Oh, let's go. Let's go try it. I'm excited. I'm hungry. Let's do it. That's chef Hamail Whaley of Strange Delight in Fort Green, Brooklyn. And don't just take my word for how good his food is.

Check out the link in our description to watch Ham and Me cook a rest of food. from his new cookbook, Hello Home Cooking. Thanks for listening to NYC Now. I'm Jenae Pierre. See you next time.