Recipe for togetherness...
MIRI BARAK took a roundabout route into catering. After a successful career in mobile phones and real estate in Israel, she arrived in London in 2001. “It was a big shock,” she says, to go from being a workaholic to doing nothing for a year, while getting used to the new surroundings. University followed — and she had planned to go back into property. But she had always enjoyed cooking and organising parties and entertaining guests. So her friends urged her to do something with her culinary talents.
She began by selling yeast cake on Fridays and it sold out fast — then more and more catering work followed. After 12 years, she said to herself: “Let’s admit it – you’re a cook!” And Dvash, the highend kosher catering company, was born.
The mission for Dvash was to take kosher event food to the next level. Her son, Dor, explains: “Miri and I are Israelis (I moved here when I was six and feel as Israeli as British). In the UK, it feels like there is a compromise between kashrut and quality and I think our community has been lulled into this — they feel because it is kosher it can’t be as good. In Israel you eat something and it will be amazing and only afterwards you find it’s kosher. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be the same here.”
Dor’s involvement in Dvash started out as a favour to his mother. He’d studied law and politics at Edinburgh and was meant to just be lending a hand with the business plan – but then he came with to present the plan to investors – and so it continued.
By the time the pandemic loomed, almost everything was in place for the new business but then they heard existing kosher caterer Food Story was selling up. They went to view the company’s cutlery — nothing more — and were wowed by the lavishly equipped premises. “For us it was a theme park of possibilities,” remembers Dor. They bought the entire business.
Dvash’s chefs come from backgrounds in top restaurants in London, the Middle East and all over the world.
“People assume that as an Israeli company we do Israeli food,” says Dor. “We always challenge that. For us what it means to be Israeli is not we just do hummus, falafel. We do those things — we do them really well but we don’t like to be limited by them. Also I don’t think ‘Israeli cuisine’ should be limited by that because if you look at why Israeli food is special and does so well globally it’s because it’s cosmopolitan.”
As an example he cites a Dvash canapé — the Pani Puri, originally an Indian snack. “It’s like a puffed ball made of semolina — we pipe it full of aubergine mousse like elevated baba ganoush and then top with ceviche or tuna tartare… Nothing apart from the aubergine mousse is what people perceive to be Israeli food but for us it’s Israeli food.”
Starting a company as a family intensified the entrepreneurial experience.
“The emotions that come with wins feel all the more special because you’re doing it with your family,” says Dor. “It… puts into perspective why we work in the first place.” In the workplace, his mother insists that “I’m not mum, I’m Miri.”
“That takes a bit of getting used to!” says Dor. “Our clients are baffled by it. We’re not shy about the fact that we are a family business but it’s not on the website... Sometimes people say ‘is there a relationship between you two guys?’” As for Yomtov, “Holidays for us are uncompromisable,” says Dor. “We’re a modern Liberal Jewish family but the culture, the essence of being Jewish wasn’t something either Miri or my dad were willing to compromise on — you had to be home for Friday-night dinner. Same with Rosh Hashanah. I love that we had that… It’s one of the things I love about Judaism.”
“It is very, very important for me,” stresses Miri. No matter how hard they are working, Yomtov means a family dinner at home and everybody has to dress up. For Rosh Hashanah, she feels that some traditional dishes are called for, alongside other cuisines. She always makes the soup that was served to her as a child, containing pumpkin, chickpea, coriander, lamb bones, bone marrow.
“I’m from a Moroccan family…” she says, “those dishes have spices and they fill you with warmth like someone hugging you, so when you open the pot you can see love.”
For us, the premises were a theme park of possibilities’