‘Food is the way to our hearts’: the supper club connecting Londoners to Gaza
Para-cycling team the Gaza Sunbirds are bringing community together over a shared meal to raise money for Palestinians
The scent of slow-cooked, spiced lamb drifts through an east London restaurant as guests take their seats at tables lined with plates of sambusak and hummus. There’s warmth here — not just from the food, but from the stories shared between bites.
Hosted at Ferm of Wyk in Hackney, the evening is part of a new seasonal supper club run by the Gaza Sunbirds, a Palestinian para-cycling team that, since the escalation of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, has shifted its resources towards providing community-led aid to Palestinians under siege.
In May, the group partnered with Palestinian chef Nour Elnono to develop a dining experience to raise awareness and funds for people in Gaza.
The menu features five Palestinian dishes, each carefully chosen by Elnono to evoke the flavours of her childhood and the family tables now lost to war. The dishes include salata, laban and maqluba — rice layered with aubergine, almonds, pomegranate seeds and spiced lamb, the name of which translates to “upside down”.
“Maqluba is more than just a dish,” says Elnono. “It was originally called ‘baitenjaniyeh’, which means ‘eggplant’ in Arabic. After the Muslim leader Saladin and his army reclaimed Jerusalem in the 12th century, people celebrated by cooking this dish and serving it to the soldiers. When Saladin saw how it was flipped before serving, he called it maqluba.
“Today, Palestinians serve maqluba at family gatherings and special occasions. It’s a way of saying: ‘This is our story, this is our culture, and we will not let it be erased’,” she says.
“That way of sharing food, the way that food is presented, it tells so much about a culture. Food is the way to our hearts,” adds actor Siobhán McSweeney, who attended the supper club in May.
“There is a huge historical connection between Ireland and Palestine — always has been and always will,” says McSweeney, known for her Bafta-winning performance as Sister Michael in the Channel 4 comedy series Derry Girls. “In Ireland, we also have a long and troubled history with colonialism and continue to have that history. It’s not overtly violent now, but it still exists and we still bear the literal wounds and the psychological wounds of colonialism.”
Elnono began fundraising for her family in Gaza in 2023 by selling food and running workshops on Palestinian cooking from her home in Belgium, where she has lived for seven years. She was able to help her parents, sister and her children evacuate in February 2024, but other family members remain trapped in Gaza.
“My brother-in-law and my mum’s family, including two of my uncles, passed away with one bombing of their house. It was the worst day of my life,” Elnono tells me.
Elnono has since pivoted her efforts to raise funds for others in Gaza through her cookery workshops and catering events. “All the people there feel like my family,” she says.
Proceeds from the supper club will go to the Gaza Sunbirds and Elnono’s grassroots project, Nour Kitchen for Gaza. Since January, the Gaza Sunbirds have delivered more than £332,500 worth of aid to families across the territory, including 120,000kg of food parcels, 15,000 hot meals and 140 toys for children. Aid is sourced from remaining farmers and suppliers in Gaza, then distributed by the team’s administrative staff and 20 athletes on the ground.
Israel blocked aid reaching Gaza for three months earlier this year and now only allows for limited resources through the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), backed by both the US and Israeli governments. However, at least 400 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces while trying to access GHF distribution points.
The UN has accused Israel of using starvation as a weapon and described its Gaza mission the “most obstructed in recent history”. In early June, Israeli forces seized the Madleen, an aid ship operated by the charity the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, including activist Greta Thunberg, which was attempting to deliver essential supplies.
“It has reached the point where there’s nothing we can really do,” Gaza Sunbirds co-founder Karim Ali says.
“We’re still working as much as we can — we’ve put on a ping-pong game and partnered with a mental health organisation to do an activity for children — but I think a lot of the focus right now has been on supporting the team members and staff because they’re starving as well.
“One of our team members said to me, ‘Karim, we’re hungry. We’re sick of this.’ I told him, ‘I know hunger is the worst part. I know how horrible you must feel. But I promise you, you won’t die of starvation.’ Then I paused and thought to myself: Can I even make that promise right now, with the way things are?”
Despite the shift to frontline aid work, the Gaza Sunbirds haven’t let go of their original mission. In May, two teammates competed in the para-cycling world cup in Belgium, qualifying for the world championships this August. Their resilience — both on and off the racetrack — is part of what Ali describes as “revolutionary optimism”, much like the spirit of the supper club.
“Palestinian food is such a strong part of our resistance,” he says. “No matter where we go in the diaspora, we hold on to that food and we hold on to that culture as a means for reconnection.”
The Gaza Sunbirds will be hosting more supper clubs and fundraising events in London and internationally. For updates, follow their Instagram page.
