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\n Eyval in Bushwick.
\n Photo: Dean Majd\n <\/p>\n
In the 2010s, Israeli chefs \u2014 some who made their name in the U.S., some famous\u2013in\u2013Tel Aviv restaurateurs \u2014 started racking up wins in New York. This was a falafel- and bagel-literate society, urbane, health-conscious, every kitchen with a copy of Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi\u2019s Jerusalem cookbook stashed next to a once-used tube of harissa and Michael Pollan\u2019s dictum (\u201cEat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.\u201d) ringing in our ears. The new Israeli restaurants weren\u2019t just popular because ours is a Jewish-ish town. The self-fashioned pluralism of what the press sometimes called New Israeli cuisine mirrored and flattered New York\u2019s cosmopolitan self-regard. It was salad-forward, za\u2019atar-laden, full of grilled meats, flatbreads, and fenugreek. We were told this was the flavor profile of this young country, which was so richly funded and supported by our own. Israeli cuisine was an idea the American food Establishment could get behind: food from a melting pot just starting to cook.<\/p>\n
The most popular dishes were Mizrahi, Arab, North African. Some were imported by Jewish immigrants. Many of the dishes were Palestinian. \u201cIsraeli cuisine is based on two things: on Palestinian cooking and on ethnic cooking,\u201d an Israeli food editor told a reporter<\/a> in 2013, joking that \u201cif you want to succeed in Israeli cooking, you better have a Moroccan grandmother, and if you don\u2019t \u2014 you better invent one.\u201d The chef Meir Adoni, who does have one<\/a>, said a crucial inspiration was \u201cthe Arabs\u2019 influence<\/a>.\u201d When he opened his New York restaurant, Nur, in 2017, he served a raw-beef dish he called \u201cPalestinian tartare\u201d; it was his take on what\u2019s known to Arabic speakers as kibbe nayyeh. Einat Admony, a chef with Persian and Yemeni Jewish roots who got into cooking while serving in the IDF, made her name with the falafel shop Ta\u00efm before turning it into a takeout chain and opening dinner spots like Balaboosta. Chef Eyal Shani, famous in Israel, did fast-casual with Miznon, went upscale, then later won a Michelin star with Shmon\u00e9. By the time Michael Solomonov opened rooftop grill house Laser Wolf in Williamsburg in 2022, his style of cooking needed no introduction. Within weeks, Laser Wolf\u2019s reservation waiting list was stretching into the thousands.<\/p>\n Habibi City<\/p>\n See All<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n There had been Israeli chefs in the city for nearly all of Israel\u2019s existence. There had been Syrian and Lebanese chefs here even longer. With few exceptions, however, most Arab, Iranian, or North African restaurants were assigned their role: cheap, quick, outer-borough. The food they made was relegated to halal carts outside your office and blandly exotic midtown dinner spots, mezze platters on Atlantic Avenue and grill houses in Bay Ridge. Some of these places served excellent food. But they tended to submerge their origins in euphemisms: They called their food \u201cOriental,\u201d then \u201cMediterranean.\u201d The New Israeli chefs cruised free of post-9\/11 baggage, happy to announce their connections to Israel and talk about the Tel Aviv food scene. Unhindered by the stereotypes that dogged other Middle Eastern food, the promoters of New Israeli cuisine gave themselves permission to be expensive.<\/p>\n They\u2019re not the only ones doing that now. More and more Middle Eastern chefs and owners are opening the kinds of restaurants that get booked out, hyped up, and earmarked for an extra-special dinner \u2014 and they\u2019re being specific about exactly what they want to cook. When the spare and elegant Iranian restaurant Sofreh opened in Prospect Heights in 2018, it was both incredibly popular and the first Persian place many of its customers had tried. Over the past five years, it\u2019s been joined by peers: There\u2019s now clean, sunny, subway-tiled Eyval in Bushwick, owned by a former Sofreh chef, where Persian dishes like kebab koobideh slide in with luscious yogurts, cheffy salads, and savory cocktails. Stainless-steel-sleek Little Flower Cafe in Astoria and Diljan Bakery in Brooklyn Heights, run by an Afghan American duo. Fuzzy-chaired, marble-countered Caf\u00e9 Habibti in Greenwich Village, which serves a Pakistani take on Persian sharbat. Levantine home cooking and house arak at Huda in Williamsburg. Modern Lebanese at Sawa in Park Slope. Bountiful lamb and flatbreads at the Palestinian place Al Badawi on Atlantic Avenue and the Upper East Side. Yemeni coffeehouses in the Bronx and Williamsburg alike. And everywhere from the Upper West Side to Bay Ridge, there\u2019s Ayat, the Palestinian restaurant that in 2023 had one location and now has ten.<\/p>\n Maybe there was a time when a lot of diners didn\u2019t know the difference or care: Israeli or Iranian, it was all \u201cMiddle Eastern.\u201d You\u2019d have to work to ignore the difference now. In the three years since October 7, awareness of Israel\u2019s genocide of Palestinians and the wars that keep proliferating have turned eating out into just one more way people are expressing their views on Israel, on Gaza, on Lebanon, on Iran. When in 2024, a reporter asked<\/a> Admony if the war had affected her business, she said, \u201cWe are busy. We are doing good. A lot of people only eat in Israeli restaurants since October 7.\u201d And while pro-Israel New Yorkers have doubled down on supporting Israeli restaurants, those horrified by the genocide are turning away \u2014 and toward chefs who they would rather support. Jumana Bishara, co-owner of Palestinian restaurant Tanoreen, remembers the \u201cMediterranean\u201d days, when it felt like going vague was the only way to get people in the door. \u201cAfter October 7, people were coming here to specifically support a Palestinian restaurant,\u201d she says. \u201cIt was the only positive thing against the backdrop of the genocide.\u201d The new SWANA chefs have emerged proud to declare their origins, to give themselves room to experiment, to play, and, finally, to charge more for their food. They know it\u2019s worth it.<\/p>\n \n Ali Saboor in the kitchen at Eyval. In 1899, a New York Times reporter named Cromwell Childe tried flatbread<\/a> and it sent him spiraling. \u201cA Syrian loaf is like unto a gigantic circular corn cake,\u201d he wrote. \u201cIt is of wheat, puffs at the centre, and when broken is discovered to be little more than a well-browned outer crust.\u201d Childe was visiting the first Arab neighborhood in New York, an area downtown around Washington Street that had sprouted up in the 1880s and was called the Syrian Colony or Little Syria; Greater Syria was the Ottoman-era term for a region that sprawled through and across the Levant, and New York\u2019s earliest \u201cSyrians\u201d came from everywhere from Beirut and Aleppo to Palestine. The first version of Sahadi\u2019s<\/a>, the grocery store whose flagship is now on Brooklyn\u2019s Atlantic Avenue, was opened in Little Syria in 1895 by a family from what is now Lebanon. Reporters made pilgrimages and wrote back with awe. In 1903, the New-York Tribune described a typical lunchtime meal for a prosperous Syrian: \u201cHe drinks the fiery arrack, which is to him what the cocktail is to the American \u2026 With two or three genial companions he orders a luncheon of laban, or curds of milk, makshie, or minced meat and rice wrapped up in grape leaves or stuffed into a squash gourd, and some grapes for dessert.\u201d After a smoke, this type of man \u201clingers over a tiny cup of coffee, as black as Erebus, and talks interminably about the Sultan and Tammany Hall.\u201d By the time the city cleared out the area to construct a tunnel in the 1940s, many of the remaining businesses had decamped for New Jersey or Atlantic Avenue \u2014 a location chosen because it was just a short ferry ride away.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a truism that most immigrants to the U.S. don\u2019t work in restaurants because they have a passion for cooking. They cook because it\u2019s the best available option. One of the first Yemeni families to do brisk business around Atlantic Avenue was the Almontasers<\/a>, who began immigrating to the U.S. around the middle of the 20th century; a generation of siblings and cousins opened restaurants along Atlantic and Court Street and in Brooklyn Heights \u2014 the Almontaser Restaurant, Near East, Atlantic House, Moroccan Star, Adnan, Bilqis Yemen. Upwardly mobile New Yorkers came to see dining and shopping on Atlantic Avenue as a way to travel in place, a kind of at-home tourism, like visiting Chinatown. Dr. Debbie Almontaser, whose uncles owned two of the restaurants, says her relatives\u2019 self-billed \u201cOriental\u201d restaurants didn\u2019t focus on Yemeni dishes they ate at home, like aseed, a luscious dough whipped into a mound and sometimes served with soup poured into the center or around the sides. Instead, they served French-inspired Continental dishes, like frogs\u2019-legs Proven\u00e7al, and Levantine hummus, baba ghannouj, and shish kebab \u2014 with, at most, a Yemeni dish or two. \u201cI think they landed on that because they saw that places like Sahadi\u2019s were becoming mainstream public destinations for food and were like, \u2018We need to replicate this,\u2019\u201d she says.<\/p>\n By the mid-20th century, musicians from the new state of Israel moved to New York and opened clubs; one in Greenwich Village, El Avram, billed itself as a \u201cMediterranean Restaurant\/Nite Club.\u201d In the \u201960s, Pierre Borday, a Lebanese actor turned casting director who first arrived in New York a decade before, decided to open what may have been one of the city\u2019s first falafel shops. \u201cWhy did he do falafel?\u201d says one of his sons, Robert Borday. \u201cMaybe because he saw something in the way hot dogs were being sold in America.\u201d Another son, Noel Borday, adds, \u201cAt the time, no one had really put falafel, hummus, and baba ghannouj together as a fast-food idea.\u201d It wouldn\u2019t have worked if the ingredients weren\u2019t so easy to get: fresh pita from his best friend\u2019s family\u2019s bakery, Damascus on Atlantic; tahini from Sahadi\u2019s or Malko Brothers. Around 1967, Pierre opened his first shops on 14th Street in Manhattan, later converting a hot-dog cart to flog falafel on the street. (For a while, his Palestinian American wife made the falafel mix in the basement of their house.) He opened one Pierre\u2019s Falafel<\/a>, then another; his sons went on to open falafel businesses of their own. One of Pierre\u2019s shops on Court Street is recommended in the 1977 edition of budget food guide The All New Underground Gourmet, co-written by New York co-founder Milton Glaser. The mention is glowing if mistaken about his origins: \u201cPierre Borday\u2019s energy in bringing falafel to the farthest reaches of the city has made this Israeli\u2019s import a formidable contender in the fast-food race.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1971, Pierre passed off his lease on a Macdougal Street storefront to a Syrian immigrant named Mamoun Chater<\/a> who opened his own shop, Mamoun\u2019s. It\u2019s now one of the oldest in the city with a bunch of locations and a signature recipe: a chomp through the crust of a Mamoun\u2019s falafel reveals a deep-green interior, its shaggy ground-chickpea mixture rich with herbs. Galal Chater, one of Mamoun\u2019s sons, says they lived peacefully cheek by jowl with Israeli neighbors. It was a more malleable time. It may have felt like, in a country where most people couldn\u2019t find the Levant on a map, they had more in common than not. Muslim, Jewish, and Christian Arab musicians jammed and recorded together, performed at weddings and bar mitzvahs. The chef at El Avram, the Israeli \u201cMediterranean Restaurant\/Nite Club,\u201d was Egyptian. As one regular at Israeli-owned Caf\u00e9 Feenjon later told a reporter<\/a>, though \u201cnone of us quite realized it, we were the inheritors of the defunct Ottoman Empire.\u201d Noel Borday remembers hawking his dad\u2019s falafel at an event for Israeli National Day in the late \u201970s. Galal Chater says one of his father\u2019s best friends was an Israeli guy who managed the Blue Note and gave great business advice, and they were tight with the Dwormans, who ran Caf\u00e9 Feenjon before opening the Olive Tree Cafe and Comedy Cellar next to Mamoun\u2019s; Galal heard it was his father who encouraged Manny Dworman to buy that building. When Galal was growing up on Macdougal, there were enough Arabic speakers in the neighborhood that his older relatives could get by on no English. Even so, many of the people who came through their shop were trying falafel or shawarma for the first time.<\/p>\n Middle Eastern restaurant menus echo across the decades: the mezze, the chopped salads, the grilled meats, the rice. When Samaya Boueri Ziade, the owner of Sawa, moved to New York from Lebanon in the early aughts, she and her Lebanese friends went to Bay Ridge restaurants like Le Sajj, where you might watch a belly dancer during dinner and where they ordered what she calls typical Lebanese restaurant food: tabbouleh, hummus, kibbe, cheese rolls, kofta. \u201cThe menu at restaurants was very different from what you make at home,\u201d she says. Many of the most elaborate and beloved dishes from this region only come out of home kitchens, sometimes because they\u2019re considered too complicated, time-consuming, seasonal, or sensitive to prepare for service. But a dogged chef can adapt them \u2014 and what nearly all the new, more upscale Middle Eastern restaurants have in common is that they do.<\/p>\n Gehad Hadidi, the Syrian American chef and owner of the Williamsburg restaurant Huda, was so determined to only offer homestyle food that he didn\u2019t want to sell hummus or pita. He caved after customers kept asking for them \u2014 but, he told me triumphantly, \u201cWe still don\u2019t serve rice!\u201d What he really wanted to highlight was dishes like shish barak; at Huda, the delicate, hand-shaped beef dumplings come out plump and juicy, perched atop a yogurt pond marbled with Aleppo pepper\u2013infused oil and showered in pine nuts and ribbons of herbs. \u201cIt\u2019s one of those things where, if you get that at home, you\u2019re like, Wow, either we have really important guests coming or someone really loves me,\u201d says Hadidi. At Tanoreen, Jumana Bishara and her mother, Rawia Bishara, who founded the restaurant, were eager for me to try a dish made with khubayzeh, a wild Palestinian mallow that Rawia used to bring back in her suitcase from their home in Galilee before finding a Palestinian farmer in Pennsylvania who grows it. The khubayzeh was saut\u00e9ed and silky, the gentle greens topped with twists of fried onion and salty black olives. At Sawa in late winter, Boueri Ziade offered a stew made with tahini, clementines, and Seville oranges, possible to cook only when those oranges are in season.<\/p>\n Ali Saboor, who was born in Iran and spent his adolescence in Orange County, California, worked at Sofreh alongside the owner, Nasim Alikhani, to help adapt her home cooking into dishes that made sense to offer at a restaurant. Now at his own restaurant, Eyval, he\u2019s free to obsess. He can\u2019t stop tweaking his version of ghormeh sabzi, a canonical Persian stew made with mountains of finely chopped herbs, kidney beans, and tender beef, bolstered by the tang of preserved lime. The flavors are deep, savory, nonobvious, adult. When I dined at Eyval recently, Saboor and his crew served it with a long halved beef bone balanced across the top of the bowl, its core of glistening marrow ready to be scooped into the stew and slurped. Saboor does not pretend to be a traditionalist; the dishes he cooks are pulled from regions across Iran, and some are pure seasonal improv, like a salad that offers peaches and plums, sliced into fat wedges, with dollops of farmer cheese, just enough lamb bacon, and a glowing sauce made from the pickled-mango condiment called amba. He has been surprised to find that if any Persian customers are disappointed with his playing around, it tends to be the young ones, who say things like, \u201cThis is not how my grandma made it.\u201d But a lot of people just get emotional \u2014 like the guy who told him, \u201cNone of this looked anything like Iranian food, but man, when I tasted it, everything tasted like my childhood.\u201d<\/p>\n The confidence to make food that can do both might be what is really new. At Ali Zaman and Mohamed Ghiasi\u2019s Astoria spot Little Flower, which Mayor Mamdani has cited as one of his favorite caf\u00e9s, the star drink is a perfectly postable pink Afghan chai. The star pastry is a doughnut filled with firni, an Afghan cardamom milk pudding. The dish I ordered at Little Flower wasn\u2019t obviously Afghan at all: I got the cheeky \u201cCwunchwap Supweme,\u201d a trademark-dodging ode, and it was just what you\u2019d want and expect: a flour tortilla crammed with ground beef, tostada, and cheese sauce. It was toothsome and halal and delicious with a well-balanced spice that made total sense scarfed down between sips of the chai. Zaman and Ghiasi are both sons of Afghan immigrants whose own adventures in food world run the gamut: Zaman\u2019s dad, Sami, drove a cab, then ran a fruit stand and a midtown coffee cart. Their respective fathers owned fried-chicken shops \u2014 a common gateway business for Afghan immigrants \u2014 and now each own Afghan kebab restaurants in Astoria and Ditmas Park. Zaman and Ghiasi share that hustle. Their polished Brooklyn Heights bakery, Diljan, where the executive chef is Honduran American Bryan Ford, serves laminated pastries bursting with delicate saffron-scented cream and long Afghan flatbreads displayed like the crown jewels inside a minimal glass case. When I visited Little Flower in the middle of a weekday, the woman sitting across the table from me said she was visiting New York from L.A.; she\u2019d made a special trip from her hotel after seeing Little Flower all over TikTok. When the lunch hour hit, there was a line out the door.<\/p>\n The new Middle Eastern restaurant owners are aware their food will be politicized \u2014 how could they not be? Restaurantgoers make their preferences known. Before October 7, a Jewish friend tells me, she thought nothing of going to Israeli restaurants like Miss Ada. After, horrified by Israel\u2019s genocide, she and her other Jewish friends started consulting restaurants\u2019 social-media posts to discern the owners\u2019 political views before agreeing to eat there \u2014 while her pro-Israel parents became much more adamant about buying Israeli wine and eating at their preferred Israeli restaurant chain. \u201cThey think it\u2019s righteous, like they\u2019re supporting their people by getting a waffle there,\u201d she says. Plenty of people choosing Palestinian restaurants instead feel the same way.<\/p>\n Ayat\u2019s menus currently include a cheerful tourist-style map in which the land mass currently called Israel is titled \u201cDiscover Palestine.\u201d Not everyone is so combative. Boueri Ziade, the Sawa owner, was motivated to open in 2024 because of a series of recent crises in Lebanon, where she was born and raised. \u201cI genuinely felt like there was a part of me that was going to disappear,\u201d she says. Her advocacy through Sawa has focused on fundraising for the Lebanese Red Cross and other nonprofits as well as stocking wine from Lebanon. Eyval has stocked Palestinian wines and Saboor believes Palestinians \u201cdeserve to have control of their borders and deserve to have rights.\u201d But he\u2019d eat at an Israeli restaurant too. \u201cFor me, hospitality means open arms to all, so I don\u2019t view my space as political,\u201d he says. In September, he\u2019ll cook at an event in upstate New York<\/a> hosted by Einat Admony.<\/p>\n Huda opened just a couple weeks after October 7, timing that made Hadidi wonder if he should delay in case there was an outburst of anti-Arab sentiment. He discovered, instead, that \u201cthe Arab community needed community even more.\u201d When Spain, a national team seen as being pro-Palestine, made the World Cup final, Huda\u2019s Instagram promoted its screening of the match with a 2008 photo of the Egyptian soccer player Mohamed Aboutrika lifting his jersey after a match to reveal a shirt that said SYMPATHIZE WITH GAZA. Zaman, who\u2019s working with Ghiasi on opening what he describes as a \u201chalal Dean & DeLuca\u201d in Astoria, made the Palestinian flag Little Flower\u2019s profile picture on Instagram and posts Muslim memes on main. \u201cI\u2019ve definitely had people hit us up and say, \u2018You\u2019re a terrorist,\u2019 or \u2018Hamas supporter,\u2019 or \u2018Get the fuck out of this country,\u2019\u201d he says. He rejects the claim sometimes forwarded by Israel supporters that anyone would do this to be cool. \u201cIt\u2019s not a trend to believe in human rights and the dignity of a group of people that are being massacred,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n There is no way to please everyone. The Israeli chefs Daniel Soskolne and Loren Abramovitch don\u2019t own a restaurant, nor do they want to; they cook independently under the name LEV, hosting regular pop-ups at an event space in Bed-Stuy where they could be described as the chefs in residence. One ongoing project is a tricked-out hot-dog cart they have parked in front of the former REI space in Soho, where on a recent weekday they were serving kebab sandwiches with zhug, chicken-schnitzel salad, gazpacho, and a potato-and-egg brika, a savory Tunisian pastry kissed by the deep fryer and topped with swatches of harissa, zhug, and preserved lemon. In 2021, as their profile was rising, they were called out by the Palestinian artist Amanny Ahmad, who posted on Instagram that LEV \u201cmade a career out of cooking Palestinian food (under any name but that).\u201d They were shocked; Abramovitch describes it as a \u201closs of innocence.\u201d They think it was unjust and can\u2019t help but protest. They are now, however, avoiding cooking falafel. \u201cDeep, deep in my mind, I think I have all the authority in the world to make falafel, but at the same time, I understand that it\u2019s going to be a mess because people want to accuse us that we are appropriating Palestinian cuisine,\u201d says Abramovitch. Soskolne is frustrated that their cooking even gets defined as Israeli. \u201cWe never nationalized our food, not because we\u2019re afraid or ashamed,\u201d he says. \u201cWe have so much influence from all over the world. Some of it is Jewish, some of it is not.\u201d<\/p>\n After October 7, as Israel began its retaliation against Gaza, Abramovitch persuaded Soskolne that they should post about what was going on. On November 9, they wrote on Instagram <\/a>that they and their friends and family in Israel were \u201csuffering from the horrific and brutal acts on Oct 7th\u201d and \u201csuffering from the massive killing in Gaza, the killing of so many innocent people must stop.\u201d They were both criticized by pro-Palestine posters who saw their sympathy for Israelis as unearned and inundated with texts and calls from pro-Israel Jewish clients telling them to take down the post because it expressed sympathy for Palestinians. \u201cThey\u2019re like, \u2018Are you stupid? What are you doing?\u2019\u201d says Abramovitch. \u201cThey don\u2019t understand that we don\u2019t see the world in the same way.\u201d They lost those clients. But they say their business is doing fine without them. They tell me they now both consider what the Israeli government is doing to Palestinians to be genocide.<\/p>\n For some, it\u2019s been easier to not say anything at all. That seems to be the strategy for Tomer Blechman, whose decision not to speak or post about the war publicly has left many fans of his restaurants Miss Ada and Theodora confused about where he stands. (He declined my request for an interview.) In the last few years, some Israeli restaurants have been vandalized, spray-painted with notices that accuse them of co-signing the Israeli government\u2019s project. This may be one reason why some are staying silent. Others, like chef Eyal Shani, leaned in: In November 2023, on the day his West Village restaurant Shmon\u00e9 received its first Michelin star, Shani was serving food to IDF troops near the border with Gaza. Many Israeli chefs landed somewhere in between: hosting fundraisers, making content, writing op-eds. Admony took to wearing the yellow-ribbon pin symbolizing the Israeli hostages and continued to collaborate on videos with Zionist influencer Yoav Davis; according to a report by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, public financial filings show that Davis was paid over $160,000 by a contractor working for the Israeli government to produce pro-Israel social-media content. (Admony did not respond to multiple requests for an interview but noted that she was not paid for her appearances in Davis\u2019s videos.)<\/p>\n Perhaps more than any other Israeli American chef, Michael Solomonov has been credited as both a co-creator and a face of the concept of Israeli cuisine, which was even more amorphous when he and Steve Cook opened Zahav, the first of their many Philadelphia restaurants, in 2008. The pair published a best-selling cookbook in 2015, Zahav: A World of Israeli Cooking, then another cookbook, Israeli Soul, in 2018. They won James Beard awards year after year. Solomonov, as the duo\u2019s public face, has been held up as a kind of American Ottolenghi. Still, he and Cook hadn\u2019t managed to make a restaurant stick in New York. The opening and huge success of the New York location of Laser Wolf said they\u2019d arrived, and soon they opened a second Israeli restaurant in the same hotel building, an all-day caf\u00e9 and bakery called K\u2019Far. The real estate for Laser Wolf was primo: the rooftop of the Hoxton hotel a block and change from the waterfront, where, on clear days, the windows around the dining room could be pulled open all the way. As you tore into dripping skewers of lamb kofta and brisket kebab and plowed through the bottomless salatim \u2014 platters of hummus, salads, and pickles \u2014 the Manhattan skyline offered itself up to you, just another item on this elevated buffet. Both Laser Wolf and K\u2019Far became destinations. Former employees say Chuck Schumer dined there multiple times, Amy Schumer once or twice, Martha Stewart too. Anne Hathaway and her husband booked a private dining room. Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, ate at Laser Wolf with his bodyguard. Kamala Harris\u2019s security team showed up to scout out whether it was safe for her to dine at K\u2019Far with her stepdaughter, Ella Emhoff. (They didn\u2019t end up dining there.) Natalie Portman\u2019s father, Avner Hershlag, was such a regular that K\u2019Far named a nonalcoholic drink after him, the passionfruit-flavored Avner Palmer.<\/p>\n Solomonov and Cook\u2019s relationship with Israel is deep and ongoing. It has been often recounted that Solomonov was inspired to focus on promoting and developing Israeli cuisine after his brother, David, was killed while serving in the IDF. In Zahav, he writes in the chapter about hummus, \u201cHummus originated in the Middle East long before Israel, but Israelis have adopted it as their own,\u201d and throws shade: \u201cIs the tabbouleh ridiculously acidic and composed of 80 percent parsley? You\u2019re probably in a Palestinian restaurant.\u201d The Israeli government has been so pleased with his efforts that in 2017 the Ministry of Tourism bestowed on Solomonov a title: For a year, he was an Israeli \u201cculinary ambassador.\u201d Last month, the host of a Times of Israel podcast asked<\/a> Solomonov and Cook if they\u2019d noticed more customers coming since October 7 specifically to show support for Israel. Cook said \u201cyes\u201d: \u201cOn some level, I think that there is and there has been periodically as things have flared.\u201d He added, \u201cOur Jewish clientele, I think, gets an extra level of satisfaction from coming here because they know what they\u2019re supporting.\u201d<\/p>\n Laser Wolf and K\u2019Far\u2019s employees had a front-row seat to how their clientele evolved. As the weeks ticked by after October 7, the front-of-house staff noticed that more and more of their customers saw the restaurants as what a former K\u2019Far manager described as \u201ca safe space\u201d for Zionism. Five former employees of the restaurants tell me many of the people working there felt uninformed about the politics of Israel and Palestine when they took the jobs; after the war began, they say many, if not most, of their co-workers went through the same shock of discovery many Americans were experiencing via the onslaught of horrifying images Palestinians in Gaza were sharing on social media. The difference was they then needed to turn around and show up to work at an Israeli restaurant. At the same time that the staff was becoming pro-Palestine, the restaurants were becoming, as a former manager there puts it, \u201cthis safe haven for people to speak their truths.\u201d The customer base began to seem more and more dominated by people who were vocally pro-Israel. Customers showed up wearing flag pins, eager to engage their servers in conversations about Israel. Within a few months, the manager was fielding comments from customers about what they wanted to see in Gaza: \u201cPeople at the bar felt comfortable saying things to us like, \u2018We gotta carpet-bomb everyone,\u2019\u201d he says. \u201cI was like, \u2018Holy, this is a bloodthirsty environment.\u2019\u201d K\u2019Far served a version of kibbe nayyeh that, like the one at Nur, was listed as \u201cPalestinian tartare\u201d on the guest checks; the K\u2019Far manager says several guests who noticed this complained, evidently not wanting to see a dish at an Israeli restaurant acknowledged as Palestinian. (Solomonov and Cook declined to speak to me on the record, but a representative says they don\u2019t recall hearing complaints.) A Laser Wolf host was so horrified by news from Gaza that he began to feel he was betraying his values just by coming to work: \u201cI realized our whole job was propaganda.\u201d<\/p>\n These workers didn\u2019t feel like they could quit: The restaurant paid its staff relatively well, tips were robust, and because the Hoxton restaurants are run by the corporate management company Boka Restaurant Group in partnership with Cook and Solomonov, they were getting health insurance, which is not guaranteed at every food-service job. Piers Mrkusic, who is Jewish and anti-Zionist, was a server at K\u2019Far during this time. He decided to try to change his workplace from within. He and a server at Laser Wolf began buying and handing out small watermelon pins to their co-workers, many of whom \u2014 including some managers \u2014 started wearing them during shifts. (Although some customers complained, management didn\u2019t tell them to stop; Mrkusic and the other former employees think this may be because workers at another Cook and Solomonov restaurant in Philadelphia claimed they\u2019d been fired for wearing something similar. Cook and Solomonov say they have \u201cnever fired anyone for their political beliefs.\u201d) The restaurants offered a wine from the Golan Heights, the region Israel annexed from Syria; international law considers the Israeli settlements there to be illegal. Mrkusic wondered if he could persuade them to stop selling it, and in late 2023, he wrote an open letter requesting the wine\u2019s removal, posting it to the work group chat and emailing it to Boka. Shortly after, the wine was removed from the menu and replaced with a bottle of white from Israel. Slightly encouraged but unsatisfied, Mrkusic and other colleagues began circulating a petition that urged both Boka and Solomonov to call for a permanent cease-fire. Around 80 of their co-workers signed on, and they submitted it to management. Boka equivocated. Solomonov never replied. Mrkusic quit shortly after. (Boka declined to comment, stating, \u201cAll are welcome at our restaurant.\u201d)<\/p>\n Mrkusic has noticed something in the time since he stopped working at K\u2019Far: Many new Israeli restaurants are describing themselves as \u201cMediterranean.\u201d There could be many reasons why. Perhaps there\u2019s a fear of being targeted. Or they\u2019re second-guessing if they should call their food \u201cIsraeli\u201d at all. Regardless of intentions, many people told me that now when they see a restaurant labeled \u201cMediterranean,\u201d or even \u201cMiddle Eastern,\u201d they automatically assume the lack of specificity means it might be Israeli. Theodora, which opened in 2024, describes itself as offering \u201cMediterranean flavors.\u201d Or\u2019esh, a high-end Soho restaurant by Israeli chef Nadav Greenberg that opened in February, serves food inspired by the \u201cMediterranean\u201d and the \u201cLevant.\u201d In late July, the owners of Israeli establishment 12 Chairs Cafe opened a kosher restaurant in Williamsburg called LIBA. They\u2019re describing the food as \u201cMediterranean.\u201d For Jumana Bishara of Tanoreen, there\u2019s some satisfaction in this. \u201cWe are asserting our nationalities more, and they\u2019re trying to associate with theirs less because their state is genocidal,\u201d she says. \u201cIf they want to distance themselves from that, then that says it all.\u201d<\/p>\n When Hadidi opened Huda, he chose to describe it as a \u201cLevantine\u201d restaurant because he has family connections everywhere from Syria to Jordan to Palestine. Now he sees that the descriptor has actually caused some people to assume it\u2019s Israeli \u2014 including those who want it to be. (This despite the name being written in Arabic on the restaurant\u2019s window.) The first time I ate at Huda, in the summer of 2024, the servers were handing out small GAZA stickers with guests\u2019 checks; I watched as a guy at the table next to ours received his sticker, blanched, and started interrogating the server. \u201cWhat is this for?\u201d he demanded. \u201cI don\u2019t want this!\u201d Hadidi is unsurprised when I tell him what happened. \u201cThey see \u2018Levantine,\u2019 they see that it\u2019s a new, chic-looking place, and they assume it\u2019s Israeli,\u201d he says. \u201cThen they come in and they slowly realize that maybe it\u2019s not and they freak out. They\u2019re not used to being that close to something that they\u2019ve othered so much.\u201d<\/p>\n Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. 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