Zahav

“My palate was never fatigued; just before I tired of one dish, there was a a new bite to try.”

The appeal of mezze was so simple: The more different dishes we sampled, the more likely we would eat something great, and the more we would enjoy the meal overall. Wasn’t this the ultimate hospitality?

My first year as executive chef at Marigold Kitchen was an important year for me. I was in charge of my own kitchen for the first time and responsible for a restaurant that had already received considerable acclaim. I didn’t want to fuck that up. When I took over the kitchen in the fall of 2005, my menu was solidly New American, in step with what Steve had been doing since he opened the restaurant in October 2004. But I could feel something else starting to happen in my cooking. By the following summer, I was serving leg of lamb with Turkish coffee, bass steamed in grape leaves, and rose water and pistachio donuts. Almost unconsciously, the experiences of growing up Israeli—the very experiences I had dismissed as irrelevant to a career as a serious chef—were somehow creeping into my cooking.

Mary and I were married during that first year, in June 2006. The wedding was on her family’s farm on the Eastern Shore of Maryland—an outdoor ceremony that took place right after a monsoon. The catering truck rolled over in a ditch on the way to the farm. Thanks to the large number of Israeli guests (and my future father-in-law’s inexplicable collection of several dozen pairs of galoshes), ditches were dug and the field was drained. By early afternoon, the ankle-deep mud under the tent was covered with sheets of plywood and old doors, and Mary’s uncle married us in an interfaith ceremony on the shore of the Chesapeake. The humidity melted the buttercream on our wedding cake, and we danced until our clothes and shoes were ruined.

At the end of that summer, we closed Marigold for a few weeks and Mary and I flew to Israel. We arrived three days after the ceasefire that ended the Second Lebanon War.

For the first time in a long while, I experienced time off not as a chef, but as a guest. Back home, I was lucky if I had five minutes for dinner before the restaurant started to fill up. I ate mostly on my feet, shoveling down leftovers from a stainless steel bowl or plastic deli container. In Israel, as in most countries in the region, the tradition of mezze is practically synonymous with warm and generous hospitality. And seeing it all through Mary’s eyes was like experiencing it for the first time: so many flavors and temperatures and textures. My palate was never fatigued—just before I tired of one dish, a new one arrived. There was always a new bite to try, a new flavor to stimulate my appetite. And no matter how many meals we ate in a day, I never felt uncomfortably full. Despite the Israeli influences that had worked their way into my cooking, I suddenly knew that there was nothing Israeli about the dining experience at Marigold. I wanted people to experience the pleasures of eating this food in context. I wanted to welcome our guests with freshly baked laffa and the best hummus they had ever tasted. I wanted them to share such a variety of salads and mezze that each new plate would make them forget the last. I wanted them to appreciate the simple perfection of meat grilled over hardwood live fire. And I wanted to do it all according to the high standards that had been drilled into me in French and Italian kitchens.

When I got back to Philadelphia, I laid out my vision to Steve. We agreed that these ideas wouldn’t work in a traditional appetizer and entrée dining format. It would have to be a new restaurant, one that really had never been done before. We sat on the back steps outside the kitchen door at Marigold. The landing overlooked the top of the garage next door, where we grew tomatoes and parsley in large pots. Summer was turning into fall and our leafy residential block of West Philly looked like a postcard. As we basked in the last warmth of the setting sun, in the dreamy calm before another dinner service at Marigold, an Israeli restaurant not only seemed possible, it felt like it was our duty. It even seemed like a good idea.

We spent the better part of the next two years drawing up plans for the restaurant that would become Zahav. The budget for the project was more than twice what our previous restaurants cost to open, and we scratched and clawed our way to raise the money from family and friends and friends of friends. We borrowed more money from the bank and signed for it personally. And then we borrowed some more. We were all in. People thought we were crazy (although many of them waited until after we opened to tell us). A cousin who invested with us told me years later that he had expected to lose it all. A real estate advisor was convinced we had chosen a terrible location, perched on a hill above street level in a sort of no-man’s-land between the Society Hill and Old City neighborhoods of Philadelphia. In the first few months, it looked like they were right. Although we were generally well received by the critics, we were not connecting with customers. The restaurant had 100 seats but many nights we were lucky to fill thirty of them. Something had been lost in translation.

“Our guests had no idea what (or how much) to order. They left hungry, confused, and unimpressed.”

Our opening menu had eight separate sections, crammed with foreign words and no descriptions. The salad section alone listed seventeen options and asked diners to choose four, six, or eight for the table. Our guests had no idea what (or how much) to order. They left hungry, confused, and unimpressed. Steve and I cut our salaries in half, then eliminated them entirely. We had to make some very painful decisions to let go a few key employees we simply couldn’t afford. Even so, we were dangerously close to not being able to make payroll. Zahav almost didn’t make it to its first birthday.

We spent hours every day talking about ways to jump-start the restaurant. We cut our costs to the bare minimum and piled on additional responsibilities—Steve took over the beverage program, and I worked lunch and dinner—to keep things running with a skeleton crew. Our first break came when we participated in Philadelphia’s restaurant week four months after we opened. This meant we had to consolidate our absurdly complex menu to fit the restaurant-week format. That constraint forced us to think about what we wanted the essential Zahav experience to be. For one price, we laid out a meal that reminded us of eating in Israel: hummus and laffa, salads, mezze, grilled meats, and dessert. Walking through the dining room that week, I was surprised by the happy vibe. Instead of confusion and stress, I saw relaxed smiles. We had given our guests a clear blueprint that provided the right amount of choice and the right amount of food at the right value. It was a revelation! When restaurant week ended, we consolidated our menu from eight sections to three and kept the restaurant-week option. Today, about two thirds of our customers choose this fixed-price route. Still, a table of four could conceivably share twenty-four different dishes over the course of a meal!

“My cooking comes from a deep well of Israeli hospitality, from the intimacy of sharing food.”

Next, we turned our attention to the food itself. From day one, I had strived to make the menu as authentic as possible. I somehow thought that operating an Israeli restaurant required me to be faithful to tradition. The trouble was that our American audience lacked the context to give a shit. Sure, I could make the most authentic stuffed grape leaves, but what was anyone comparing them to? The guests only cared whether a dish was good in absolute terms. And even if it was authentic, would it be good enough to get excited about? On yet another slow night, Steve and I were standing on either side of the counter that separates the bread oven and the dining room. I was struggling with a dish of cured mackerel that had Balkan origins. I could see that our customers weren’t enjoying it, and I worried about how to improve it while still paying proper respect to its roots. Steve looked at me and said: “Just cook.”

Things began to click. I got out of my own head, and I began to create dishes that reflected my Israeli-American identity but were designed to connect with our guests right here in Philadelphia. Crispy Haloumi (see recipe), previously a simple plate of fried cheese, got dressed up with dates, apples, and walnuts, making an addictive sweet-and-salty dish that became an instant hit. An Ashkenazi staple of smoked fish became the basis for our Smoked Sable Egg-in-the-Hole (see recipe), a soulful version of an American classic. The Mexican influence on Philadelphia’s restaurant scene led to a dish of Baked Kashkaval with Sweet Tomato Relish and Egg Yolks (see recipe), utilizing Israeli staples in a cross-cultural mash-up. Our growing customer base responded to these changes with genuine enthusiasm. So did our staff, and so did Steve and I.

Zahav was finally becoming the restaurant that we’d dreamed about on the back steps of Marigold almost three years before. Not a monument to a static notion of Israeli cuisine, but a dynamic restaurant that celebrated everything that was great about Israel and Philadelphia. In May 2009, Philadelphia magazine ranked us number one on their list of the city’s top fifty restaurants, and we haven’t looked back since.

You would have a hard time finding many of the recipes in this chapter at a restaurant in Israel. But I’ve come to understand that the success of my cooking at Zahav is not a result of a slavish devotion to a canon of traditional dishes. It comes from a deeper well of Israeli hospitality. It comes from the intimacy created when friends and family gather together to share food. It comes from the variety of small plates that, taken together, create a satisfying and delightful meal. And it comes from the way that time slows down at the table when you have everything you need. The dishes I’ve chosen are not all traditional mezze, and each could be a perfect first course to any meal. To me, mezze is just a state of mind.

AFTER THE DELUGE

ANCIENT GROVES

OLIVE HEAVEN

MEDITATION