Hagop Keshishian, Founder of Cooking with Keshishian, has spent nearly two decades building a culinary identity around one question: what happens when you take something familiar and push it just far enough that it becomes something else, without losing where it came from?
That idea sits at the heart of his supper club concept, where Lebanese and regional dishes are reimagined with European techniques and flavours. The result is not fusion for novelty, but a deliberate layering of cultures that sometimes challenges expectations.
Born in the UAE, he moved to Lebanon for university, where he studied culinary arts and human resource management at the American University of Science and Technology. “My love for food overtook everything, and it was all I wanted to do,” he said, adding that he stayed on for five years working at Caspers and Gambini restaurant, learning from industry professionals.
Kitchens That Shaped Instinct
In Lebanon, what began as study quickly became practice, and those five years in Beirut gave Keshishian his first deep exposure to professional kitchens, rhythm and repetition.
From there, the work pulled him into Bahrain, where he stepped into a culinary director role overseeing multiple restaurant branches and shaping menus across different concepts. It was a shift from execution to authorship, building dishes rather than simply cooking them.
The pull of missing home brought him back to the UAE, where his work expanded again in Abu Dhabi. Managing three restaurants across steakhouse, international and Arabic cuisine, he was responsible for everything from menu creation to supplier relationships and kitchen teams, moving constantly between identities and formats.
By 2019, another shift arrived in Dubai, this time into technical food advisory work focused on pastry and bakery development. It was a different discipline, but one that broadened his technical range. Over the past six years, he has trained across Europe and now describes himself as fully qualified in pastry, while also teaching chefs through classes focused on skill development.
Despite that expansion, he resists being defined by one lane. “I prefer to be known as a culinary chef,” he said. “I don’t want to lose this identity.”
When Tradition Meets Disruption
At the core of his cooking is a consistent method: start with something recognisable, then shift one or two elements just far enough to change the emotional response to the dish. “The idea is to keep the tradition of the Lebanese cuisine but to add this European twist and their flavours to it, which gave it a nice combination,” he said.
One example is Kibbeh bil laban with pesto. The yoghurt base remains, the structure stays intact, but basil pesto changes the direction of the dish entirely. “This twist honestly shocked people, and they loved it because they weren’t expecting it.”
He applies the same thinking to texture. A traditional Fattoush becomes something different when the bread element is replaced with puff pastry, shifting crunch into something closer to a croissant while keeping the salad’s original reference point.
Even flavour experimentation follows the same logic. In a smoked salmon sandwich, lemon is removed entirely and replaced with mango and passionfruit. “I removed the lemon, and I added the sweet and sour together,” he said.
Taste, Tension and Acceptance
That approach does not always land immediately, and Keshishian is direct about the reaction it can create.“Of course. I think most chefs face this. You can’t please everyone, but as long as you keep creating and keep pushing the boundaries, you can create truly amazing dishes with amazing flavours,” he said.
For him, resistance is part of the process, not a deterrent. The point is not universal agreement, but exploration of how far a familiar dish can be stretched before it becomes something new.
Even in pastry, where precision often dominates, he looks for contrast and surprise. One of his most unusual creations combined black sesame and praline. “The flavour, taste, texture. I can honestly say it was weird,” he said.
What ties everything together is not technique alone, but curiosity, and a willingness to keep shifting the boundary between comfort and surprise.