Israeli flavors to his life
Last year, at the Pebble Beach Food & Wine festival, there were two things people seemed to be buzzing about: The first was New Orleans-based chef Alon Shaya’s paratha topped with labneh, avocado, herbs and chicken marinated in the sauce known as zhoug; the second was Shaya’s cookbook, published last month by Knopf, “Shaya: An Odyssey of Food, My Journey Back to Israel.” It’s more autobiography than just greatest hits recipe collection: The Israeli-born chef tells his story, from latchkey kid teaching himself English with “Sesame Street,” to teen waster saved by a home economics teacher, to a double James Beard Award-winning rise through the restaurant world. Those who pored over the Times-Picayune and NOLA.com articles about sexual harassment allegations against Shaya’s former partner, John Besh, will be drawn to the chapter which describes the duo cooking up gallons of meatless red beans and rice to feed Hurricane Katrina victims as well as first responders. Reading how the two men tirelessly problem-solved side by side feels all the more mesmerizing because of what isn’t addressed in the book: Since last year, Shaya and Besh have been in a legal battle. After leaving the Besh Restaurant Group, Shaya filed a lawsuit for the rights to his namesake restaurant, Shaya, one of three places he developed with Besh at BRG. Recently, when we spoke to Shaya, he talked enthusiastically about the critical embracing of his cookbook and about the food he’ll be serving in his two new restaurants, New Orleans’ Saba and Denver’s Safta. “We’ve learned a lot over the past several years,” he said. “This is going to be our best work yet.”
Which came first, the memoir or the recipes?
When I sat down and began writing the book I really didn’t know how I was going to get my life of recipes into a cookbook that would make sense. I was born in Israel. I’ve been fortunate enough to live in Italy, in the South, in Vegas, in St. Louis. I thought, “How do hummus and gnocchi go into one book that anyone will want to read?” So I started writing my life story and I began to see that the book was going to be a series of stories, and from there I decided what the recipes should be.
Walk us through an early kitchen memory.
I was very independent from the age of 5 on. My mother was raising us by herself, working her butt off to keep a roof over our heads. She’d arrange for a taxi to pick me up from school every day and take me to daycare and then home because she couldn’t get out of work. I was always home for a few hours by myself. By the second grade, I was grocery shopping. Then I’d come home and start cooking. I once saw my teacher while I was filling the cart and she was like, “Where’s your mom?” and I said, “Oh, she’s at work. I’m just getting groceries for the house.” Today, it would be a disaster. What’s an 8-year-old doing grocery shopping by himself?
What were some of little Alon’s culinary creations?
I wasn’t roasting chickens. I’d scramble eggs; I’d put potatoes in the microwave with cheese. I’d take already-cooked things out of the refrigerator and mix them — like leftover mashed potatoes with Israeli salad. That combination is something that even today I crave. As I got older, I started doing more elaborate stuff. By 13, I was already working in food service.
“Shaya” starts out with a Proustian moment: You come home from school and smell your visiting grandmother making a Bulgarian pepper spread called lutenitsa.
That smell of roasting peppers and eggplants over the flame always stuck with me. Every time I smell that I think of my grandmother, of a sense of home and normalcy. Then I spent the next 30 years trying to focus on Italian food.
Why?
At the age that I came [to the U.S.], I didn’t want anything to do with Israel. I didn’t want to be different; I wanted to be American. So subliminally I think I did everything I could through my childhood to push that away. I had an inclination when I started cooking Israeli food again about why I was doing it — but when I started writing it down, it opened my eyes to all that.
When did that reconnection happen? In 2011, I went to Israel — this is already after Hurricane Katrina, after living in Italy, after opening Domenica [in New Orleans]. I’d grown a lot as a chef and had confidence in the food I was cooking, but I still wasn’t connecting with the food of my heritage. I was walking through the Carmel market [in Tel Aviv], there was the smell of vegetables cooking over coals, and all those spices, and I heard some old ladies speaking Hebrew and it just hit me that this was who I was, this is where I was from. I thought, “What if we stayed in Israel? Would I still be a chef? Would I be cooking Italian food? Would I be cooking this stuff?” And I realized that it was something that I needed to begin embracing — and I finally felt confident enough to do that.
Was there any trepidation about introducing dishes like shakshouka or kibbeh nayeh to New Orleans?
I didn’t think New Orleans was ready for Israeli food. The first thing I put on the menu after that trip to Israel was whole cauliflower [roasted in an 800-degree pizza oven]. It got rave reviews. But I was passing it off as Italian food. I’d make hummus and call it ceci purée. But the more people liked it, the more confident I became. Eventually I felt like I needed to open Shaya.
Let’s talk about your new restaurant, Saba, which opens in New Orleans at the end of April. Will the menu be similar to Shaya?
What we’ve cooked in the past is the tip of the iceberg of Israeli cuisine. We’re going to have a charcoal grill where we’ll be cooking stuff over coals with skewers. There will be octopus with shawarma spice, my grandmother’s lamb kebabs over charcoal. We’re going to make our pita with fresh-milled wheat, which I’m super-psyched about.
The Katrina chapter. Was there ever a conversation with your editor about taking it out of the book because of your severed ties with John Besh?
I think the beautiful thing about the book is that they are true depictions of my moments in life at those times. The book had to be honest and thorough because I knew that’s what would make a difference for people. Life is life. You have to take the opportunities as they come and you have to make the most out of every situation and stay positive.
food@latimes.com