PITA MASTER
Feasting and fun are the key ingredients to
Eyal Shani's rock-star approach to Israeli street food at Miznon.
For Eyal Shani it’s as much about the feel as the flavour. The Israeli restaurateur and celebrity chef opened the first Australian outlet of Miznon, his “fine dining in a fast-food mask” restaurant, in Melbourne last year.
It’s a raucous, high energy, tambourine-thumping kind of place, like a constant celebration.
“I need energy,” Shani says. “Making street food is all about getting the energy from the street, of people on the move. I take that energy and put it into the food.”
These dishes are all from the menu at Miznon Melbourne, where Afik Gal, Shani’s long-term collaborator, runs the show.
“The dishes that we are doing here are all about Eyal’s approach and attitude towards ingredients,” says Gal. “It has to be all about freshness – hardly anything at Miznon is rolled over to the next day – and pursuing the finest ingredients that you can.
“We give vegetables the stage. We hardly do any manipulation or any elaborate cooking processes. We use only black pepper and Atlantic sea salt as flavourings, so that the characteristic flavour and shape of the vegetables is emphasised. Sometimes we might make a dish that relies on something traditional, but mostly we keep the idea of fresh ingredients as the main one.”
Shani’s relationship to his ingredients and his technique are unique.
“Eggplant Lines” is inspired by cocaine, “the way it is cut into rows by a rhythmic, slightly nervous pulse that opens it with the edge of a credit card”. On the plate, the rather more wholesome option of molten eggplant mixed with tahini stands in for the drug, and the precise cutting technique is all about ensuring that the eggplant retains its shape.
Shani talks about beetroot as being “an animal with a firm body that can withstand high temperatures”, and calls his whole-cabbage dish a “cabbage cake” because of the sweetness the cabbage attains when slow-cooked and how it is served in wedges.
The cooking at Miznon is the real deal, but it’s not a place where anyone is encouraged to take themselves too seriously.
Fun is the key consideration. At HaSalon, the Tel Aviv restaurant where Gal first worked for Shani a decade ago, everything was cooked from scratch each day, and every night the restaurant would turn into a “wild animalistic zoo with people dancing on the tables, people hanging from the roof – a feast and a party”.
“People ask me if this is Israeli food and I say it’s more about an approach to ingredients, that’s what we do,” says Gal. “What’s most important is that there’s an atmosphere of feast and happiness and love.”