Her father is from Israel, and her grandparents are from Tunisia and Morocco, while her mother is American, Amy explains. She always had Sephardic and Israeli-influenced food in her life, and grew up with vats of her father\u2019s tomato-based sauce. At her family\u2019s Shabbat dinners, she says, \u201cMy dad\u2019s making hummus. He\u2019s making tahini from scratch. He\u2019s making baba ganoush. I mean, my mom, too, is a phenomenal cook, but just very different foods. My dad is making harissa. And I remember Jake just like sweating through our first Shabbat dinner, because we like things very spicy,\u201d Amy says.<\/p>\n
With Jake\u2019s family, who are Ashkenazi, they would have bagel brunches, which introduced Amy to pickled herring and more.<\/p>\n
When Jake proposed in 2018, he assembled a feast of Amy\u2019s favorite dishes from New York restaurants (including chocolate babka from Breads Bakery, stuffed meatballs from Bar Primi, and Cereal Milk soft serve from Milk Bar). \u201cWhen she came home, I had tried to time it all in the oven so that it would all be a coursed meal, which also totally failed because neither of us ate after that,\u201d Jake recalls. \u201cAs soon as she walked in the door, she was like, What\u2019s going on here? We were excited. I blacked out, I don\u2019t remember what the hell I said. We just started calling our friends.\u201d<\/p>\n
When they got married in 2019, it was also a marriage of their respective family restaurants; they held their rehearsal dinner at Amy\u2019s father\u2019s restaurant at the time, an Upper East Side place called Eighteen. And to complete the weekend\u2019s festivities, they had brunch at Katz\u2019s.<\/p>\n
More recently, in fall 2025, they revamped a dish on the Katz\u2019s menu that embodies the blend of Jake and Amy\u2019s culinary traditions: the chili, which uses Amy\u2019s Saturday Sauce, a tomato-based sauce inspired by her father that she sells through her company, Sababa Foods.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs we talked about blending food cultures, blending her family tradition with my family tradition, blending Sephardic cultures and Ashkenazi cultures, the chili here is that,\u201d Jake explains. \u201cIt\u2019s the epitome of that, it\u2019s the symbol of that, right? It\u2019s Saturday Sauce and meat from Katz\u2019s, put together in chili form. That\u2019s something that lives at my restaurant now as an everlasting symbol of that in a lot of ways.\u201d<\/p>\n
When it comes to celebrating the holidays, they go to each of their families\u2019 seders, and then typically host their own. At Amy\u2019s parents\u2019 place, it\u2019s a smaller event where they\u2019ll read the full seder. At Jake\u2019s family\u2019s seder, it\u2019s \u201ca hundred people, it\u2019s crazy,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s not like everybody\u2019s even Jewish. There are all sorts of different people there, and they make it kind of silly and fun where they print out their own songs\u2014it\u2019s like a full Katz\u2019s menu,\u201d adds Amy.<\/p>\n
At home in Jake and Amy\u2019s Manhattan apartment, with their two kids (who are five and two and a half), they\u2019ll usually host a seder that combines all of their family\u2019s different food cultures, with the intention of building their own traditions. Last year, Amy made a jeweled rice dish that was a big hit. \u201cBeing Sephardic, rice is a yes on Passover,\u201d Amy says, before Jake adds: \u201cBut we also started with gefilte fish, so it\u2019s a little bit of both.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Her father is from Israel, and her grandparents are from Tunisia and Morocco, while her mother is American,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":558942,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61],"tags":[36966,32004,97,269,17271],"class_list":["post-558941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nutrition","tag-chefs","tag-cooking","tag-health","tag-nutrition","tag-recipes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=558941"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558941\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/558942"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=558941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=558941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=558941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}