There’s always a dish that defines a season in the kitchen — one that arrives and immediately becomes the thing you make twice a week without planning to. In winter it’s usually a braise. In autumn it tends to be something roasted slowly. In spring, the asparagus dish that appears in every iteration until the season ends.
For summer 2026 in our kitchen, it’s za’atar roasted chicken with flatbread and yoghurt.
Why this dish
The logic is simple: za’atar (dried thyme, sumac, sesame, salt — either blended yourself or bought from any Middle Eastern food shop) produces a crust on chicken that is simultaneously herby, tangy and sesame-nutty. It works at high heat. It works served hot, warm or at room temperature. It works eaten the next day from the fridge, torn into flatbread with yoghurt and herbs.
It’s the kind of dish where the technique is simple enough that you don’t need to concentrate, but the result is interesting enough that you keep returning to it. That ratio — low effort, high return — is what makes a dish genuinely useful in summer cooking rather than just seasonally appropriate.
Room temperature as a feature
Summer changes the logic of how food should arrive at the table. A January braise is at its best when it’s scalding, served from the pot into warmed bowls immediately. The same approach doesn’t apply in June. Food served at room temperature or slightly warm is often better in summer — it has more flavour than food straight from the fridge, less of the dulling effect that heat can have on fresh herbs and acidity.
Za’atar chicken cooked, rested properly, and allowed to come to a relaxed serving temperature is more interesting than the same chicken served immediately. The herbs on the crust settle. The yoghurt alongside is at the right temperature to eat. The flatbread, toasted briefly in the pan the chicken just came out of, picks up the residual oil and za’atar. This is how the dish wants to be eaten.
Building the spread
The move from “dish” to “meal” happens when you treat the chicken as the centrepiece of a spread rather than a single thing on a plate. A bowl of yoghurt, loosened slightly with lemon juice, a drizzle of good olive oil. A small pile of fresh herbs — parsley, mint, a little coriander if you like it. Lemon wedges. The flatbread, warm and pliable. Cucumber or a simple dressed salad alongside if you want it.
This is the way food is eaten across the Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean — not as a single plated dish but as a table of things to eat together, each part making the others better. It’s also the most practical format for summer cooking. You can prepare most of it ahead, the timings are forgiving, and it feeds however many people arrive without needing to adjust.
What summer cooking should feel like
The dishes we come back to in summer are almost always the ones that feel effortless to execute, produce something worth eating, and don’t leave you sweating over the cooker for the duration of the meal. Za’atar chicken meets all three criteria.
It’s what we’ll be making throughout June, July and into August — until the last of the stone fruit arrives and something else takes its place. That’s the nature of seasonal cooking. The dish defines the season for a few months, and then the season moves on, and you start looking for the next one.
The best summer dishes are the ones you don’t think about making. You just find yourself in the kitchen reaching for the za’atar again.