New Orleans is definitely having a moment, and it tastes delicious.
The Big Easy, this year named by the New York Times as destination number one in its annual 52 Places to Go list, is celebrating its third centennial this year. And at the ripe young age of 300, its restaurant scene has never looked better.
Among the notable young chefs bringing edgy fusion fare to this city by the bay is Alon Shaya, the Israeli-born, American-raised wunderkind whose marriage of Israeli and Cajun kitchens earned him a James Beard Award in 2015.
Shaya is a celebrity chef with humility and heart. He recently left his namesake restaurant, which showcases the bright flavors of Tel Aviv staples (lamb kebabs, chicken schnitzel) and singlehandedly turned gumbo-loving New Orleans onto the flavors of elevated modern Israeli cuisine. With that appetite whet, he has plans, he says, to open a new Israeli eatery in the city in the next year.
Shaya’s a chef who takes risks, who isn’t afraid to go against the grain, and when his debut cookbook hits bookstores this month, his most devoted fans won’t be surprised to learn that the book itself is as unconventional as its author.
“Shaya: An Odyssey of Food, My Journey Back to Israel” is equal parts cookbook and memoir. Depending on your perspective, it’s either a collection of 26 recipes or an anthology of 26 short stories, with each mini-narrative offering both a glimpse into Shaya’s own personal story and a template for cooking a dish whose taste and flavor encapsulates that emotional experience in an edible way.
Alon Shaya. (Credit: Rush Jagoe)
“It’s like a collection of short stories that I wanted to tell about the journey I’ve taken through my life, and of course food has always been a huge factor, every step of the way, since I was a kid,” he said in a phone interview. “I thought it would be interesting to compile, in chronological order, a list of all these short stories where food impacted me and changed my direction, and from those stories I wanted the recipes to reflect that moment in my life.”
Shaya was born outside of Tel Aviv, and at the age of 4, he moved to Philadelphia with his parents and older sister. His childhood in America, he says, was a study in assimilation and exoticism, with the kitchen as the magnet that always pulled him back to his Israeli and immigrant roots. In school, he learned accent-free English and ate sloppy Joes for lunch; at home, he stirred hummus with his mother and watched his visiting grandmother roast peppers and eggplants for lutenitsa, a Bulgarian puree he would eat with pita bread.
That lutenitsa, and the potent sense memories it invokes, serves as both beginning and end to Shaya’s story in the book. It’s a dish that many Shaya devotees are already familiar with, even if they haven’t had the good fortune to book a seat at his restaurant. The chef served it to Phil Rosenthal in the recent Netflix series “Somebody Feed Phil,” and Rosenthal gushed, “Believe it or not, that Israeli restaurant is rated the number one restaurant in New Orleans. In a place famous for Cajun and Creole food, this is rated the best. So that’s incredible.”
There are plenty of other tastes of Shaya’s childhood in the volume as well. Readers will be given a recipe for a peach and marscapone hamantaschen, the traditional triangle-shaped Purim cookie elevated with punchy stone fruit and creamy white cheese. And the accompanying story? Shaya shares with his readers how, at the age of 7, this child of divorce learned to experiment alone in his kitchen, tentatively opening a can of peach preserves with a can opener and folding the dough with his own hands.
There’s a fancy take on a turkey sandwich, made with whole grain bread with avocado and real sliced turkey, but the roots of this sandwich are also much simpler—it’s based on the white bread-and-turkey sandwiches Alon would eat while fishing with his father in the years after his parents split.
Fish roasted with brown butter and bay leaves also makes an appearance and is linked to those same pivotal moments with his dad.
The writing process, which Shaya shared with co-writer Tina Antolini, was cathartic, he says.
“As I would write, the memories would start pouring in that I hadn’t thought about in years,” he says. “I try to keep everything in my personal life to myself, but this was really therapeutic for me, and I found that I could express myself in a manner that I had never done before. I was super emotional.”
After tracing his childhood, the book travels with Shaya to Italy, where he apprenticed for a year, mostly in Parma, traveling, cooking, curing, baking, and peeling tomatoes. The food in these pages of the book may not be Israeli, but it’s an undeniable part of Shaya’s journey to developing his own imprint as a chef, and so he felt it had to be included.
“Another really important recipe for me in the book is the risotto,” he says, “because that’s a dish that I had when I was living in Italy and I would cook a family meal with the lady who owned the restaurant where I was working,” he explained. “They would take all the scraps [from cooking] and add it to the risotto and it was their lunch… to me that is the pinnacle of my joy when I get to experience food in a way that really means something to somebody.”
Notable in the selection of recipes and memories in this book is that some veer more bitter than sweet. Others are undeniably difficult. And that was important, Shaya says, because the story of his life, and the moments that brought him to where he is today, has been utterly complex and without filter.
“I like to cook food that has a story,” he says. “And I don’t think sadness has anything to do with flavor. You could be sad and still make something that tastes good. What makes food special is that it’s honest and it’s part of what I am, whether it’s good or bad. There’s a story to tell.”
Debra Kamin is an American journalist in Tel Aviv.
