KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL
New York chef heads west to add her own distinctive touches to healthy Mediterranean cuisine
Israeli chicken salad and cheese sandwich souffle have all the ingredients to tickle your taste buds.
Los Angeles suits Sara Kramer. Sitting at the counter of Kismet, the airy restaurant she opened this year with Sarah Hymanson on a not-quitefashionable stretch of Hollywood Boulevard on the edge of Los Feliz, she talks about southern California ingredients with the same casual boosterism that makes estate agents bring up the climate.
“Local citrus, local dates,” said Kramer, 31, a native of New York. “This is really the ideal place for us to be making this kind of food.”
By “this kind of food”, Kramer meant her elegant approach to Israeli cooking, a deeply personal take on a cuisine that feels a little exotic despite the familiarity of its Mediterranean flavours. “I love this flaky malawach,” she said of a crispy, buttery, supple pastry-like bread you pull apart with your fingers. She said she grew up eating malawach made by her mother, who is Peruvian and Israeli. “It was such a weekend treat.”
At Kismet, the malawach is called “flaky bread”. It comes as a part of what is essentially a meal-size dessert, served with labneh (thick yoghurt made with kefir cultures), preserved lemon and honey, or as part of a savoury dish, again with labneh but accompanied this time
by a soft-boiled egg, zhoug (a spicy, garlicky condiment) and crushed tomatoes. The labneh is made in-house, and the zhoug is from a recipe Kramer credits to the mother of her father’s best friend.
“We can put it on the menu year-round because we always have tomatoes,” Kramer said. “Being able to do that here is amazing.”
It wasn’t as simple when Kramer was the chef at Glasserie, a restaurant that opened in June 2013 in Brooklyn. While it was an instant hit, she left the next February. New York, she said, is where you go to make it, and so she never went anywhere because it’s where she’s from. So she decided to move to Los Angeles. Two years later, she opened Madcapra, a falafel stand in the century-old Grand Central Market food hall in downtown Los Angeles, with Hymanson, who also cooked at Glasserie.
“New York grinds you down in a lot of ways,” Kramer said. “New York is also the most awesome place in the world, but if you grow up there and do not have an experience elsewhere, you could not appreciate it as much as you really should.”
Sitting inside Kismet, it’s easy to appreciate the appeal of being in Los Angeles. While Sade plays on the sound system and a breeze blows through the open windows, a casual but stylish crowd lingers over whatever you call the meal between lunch and dinner.
It’s the right audience for this food. Seemingly simple dishes contain complex flavours: Persian cucumbers are mixed with rose waterflavoured labneh, lightly pickled cherries and za’atar, made with parsley seeds, which are easier to find in the garden section of a hardware store than in a speciality market.
It’s how Kramer cooks at home, where she might grill a chicken, let it cool, pull it apart and toss it with a tomato and herb salad made with coriander, mint and different kinds of basil. “It’s patio-dining, rosé-weather food,” Kramer said, before correcting herself. “I should actually probably say riesling because it’s spicy, and because people don’t drink enough good riesling.”
The salad’s secret is its dressing, made with olive oil and lemon juice; the jus from the rested chicken; spicy chilli oil (the version at Kismet has Mediterranean spices: coriander, fennel, cardamom); powdered shallot (you can use powdered onion at home); and sumac (which she first encountered relatively late in life).
“I don’t have a very strong Israeli identity, which gives me the freedom to use these flavours and not be so bound by tradition,” Kramer said. “I feel this is a fairly typical answer in terms of creativity, but I don’t think it needs to be anything but.”