when you want, where you want.
Chef Eyal Shani Is a Man of Simple Means
Photo-Illustration: Sarah Kilcoyne
It has been just about a year since the Israeli chef Eyal Shani — whose empire includes Miznon, Schmoné, Naked Tomato, and Port Sa’id — opened his first kosher restaurant, Malka, on the Upper West Side, and only two months since he debuted its second location in Brooklyn. A third location will open its doors this December in West Palm Beach, Florida, where, Shani learned, “there are apparently more Jewish people than in all of London.” In this week’s “Grub Street Diet,” Shani travels from Israel to Florida to prepare for the opening, which includes sampling a lot of meat and drinking a lot of wine — though the latter is nothing new. “I always end the day with a good burgundy,” he says.
Thursday, October 31
Tonight, I fly out to West Palm Beach, where I’ll be back and forth over the next month getting Malka’s new location ready to launch.
For breakfast, my standard Thermomix-made oatmeal porridge. I pretty much limit myself to three tools: knives, fire, and Thermomix. I used to make porridge by hand, but I eventually realized I did not have the patience required to stand by the stove stirring for 20 minutes. The Thermomix can be tricky, though. You never really know how much water you need. Finding the right amount requires you to go into a kind of meditative state.
An early lunch of some hummus or masabacha on a wooden plate full of homemade pickles — olives, cucumbers, chile peppers — and tomato, cucumber, and onions from my garden. In the past three years, I’ve completely changed my diet. I’ve been on Master Chef in Israel for the past 12 years; that’s three months of shooting, three days a week, 16 hours a day, and you’re usually eating around 9,000 calories per shoot day. So I got to around 200 pounds.
I realized I’d spent years of my life cooking for other people and never really used my knowledge of food for myself. Now, I’m eating more than I ever have and I lost 70 pounds in a year and a half. Though there are, of course, things I miss. A pita with falafel is one of the most genius dishes in the world. It’s warm, it’s spicy, it’s fresh. I still can’t really resist a very good one.
Before my flight, I have a bit of feta-cheese carpaccio wrapped with olive oil, homemade za’atar powder, and tomato ovaries, along with tomato sashimi with black pepper, basil flowers, onions, and olive oil. Also: guacamole made with a Carrara mortar and pestle.
At the airport, I head to the El Al lounge. I love their food. Their simple egg salad with extra-hot chile sauce is a personal favorite, but that would kill me on the flight. So I give up and instead decide on a spicy carrot salad, a simple Arabic dish, with a single tablespoon of tahini on top.
We take off at 1:30 a.m. I’m hungry, and I know I have to wait 45 minutes until service begins. Finally, they bring over their signature bag of roasted salted nuts, which are so good I now look forward to long-distance flights. We also get some white wine that I trust will be at least okay; palates become less sensitive in such a high altitude and all the classic wine-making mistakes disappear.
My flight is a 13-hour red-eye. What happens when you spend the night crossing over the Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic Ocean is that you create another day in between. A night that exists in its own pocket of time, just for you.
We have to choose between roasted salmon or chicken shawarma. On most of the flights, I go with the fish, but this time I choose chicken. This comes with a side of fried rice and a green salad. The shawarma is big chunks of chicken breast — not a shawarma cut, which should be very thin. It’s spicy without much taste. I’m disappointed, but at the last minute they bring me a small tub of fake hummus that turns out to be very tasty. I ask for another and also for another glass of wine. I sleep soundly for the rest of the flight.
Friday, November 1
Two hours before landing, we’re served breakfast. I order an omelet, well done, with some side dishes: cream cheese, feta cheese, too-tough smoked salmon, and an assortment of cherry tomatoes in four colors. I also pick at some old, warmed Danish.
I stop at the first restaurant I see for lunch. It’s a Cuban restaurant, and I order a traditional chicken soup full of potatoes and chunks of chicken. Then I order a cod dish, which I assumed would be a fillet but is actually salted and dry, cut into small pieces, and cooked in a foggy tomato sauce. I ask for extra cups of their special green chile sauce.
Around noon, I head to the new restaurant. Jewish food is all about slow cooking on an open fire, so it’s only fitting that this new location has the largest expanse of open wood and coal fires I’ve ever seen, around 12 meters.
For dinner, we try out a nearby Italian restaurant. I mostly stopped eating pizza when I embarked on my diet, but I miss it terribly and do allow myself the occasional slice. It’s a sensitive, delicate kind of food; you can read all the books, every recipe, use the best flour, the best water, and still mess it up. It belongs to the gods. It might be controversial, but I think Israel has the best pizza in the world. It’s crunchy with lots of bubbles and a sweet tomato sauce.
Tonight, we order a very thick margherita pie, and on the side, an octopus salad with cooked peppers and onions. For our main, branzino fillet with toasted pine nuts, zucchini, and onion. We also add a no-name, very Tuscan red wine.
Saturday, November 2
Jet lag has me up at 6 a.m. I fight with the Smeg filter coffee machine in my rental apartment for a single cup of filter coffee.
Around noon, I walk to the farmers’ market thinking I’ll find a restaurant to stop at for lunch on the way back. After a couple of hours, I finally stumble upon a tearoom, which mostly serves delicate English tea sandwiches. I’m the only man there.
I usually cannot stand chicken curry; I find the flavors overwhelming, the tomato buried. But occasionally, I like to test myself, challenge my taste. So I order a chicken-curry salad and a natural Chardonnay. It’s strange, unlike any curry I’ve had before. I can’t say I dislike it more than I like the surprise of eating it. I feel like a new man for the four minutes it takes me to eat it.
My co-chef, Loel Müller, arrives from New York. He’s joining me on a mission to build a new menu for the new location. We are starving with nothing to eat in our apartment, so we make a quick stop at a nearby supermarket and pick up a smoked Irish salmon, Brie, and Boursin. On our way home, we also buy five bottles of red burgundy wine. Half an hour later, we’ve gone through all the cheese and salmon and feel like we’ve eaten nothing.
Ten years ago, my wife told me she was going vegan. I initially pushed back; food was a kind of language for us, and it felt like she was rewriting it. It took us a couple of months, but I eventually promised that I would also stop eating meat. For the most part, I do a good job of keeping that promise but not tonight. Tonight, we go to Harry’s, a steakhouse, and order a filet mignon and a dozen oysters. We pair it all with one of the best wines I’ve ever had: a 2021 Domaine Méo-Camuzet Vosne-Romanée, a pinot noir.
Back home, we stay up until midnight and go through another bottle of burgundy, deep in conversation, while picking at a bowl of salted nuts.
Sunday, November 2
I wake up at 5 a.m. — more jet lag. I drink two cups of filter coffee and find some yogurt in the fridge. More coffee while I sit down to get some work done.
After another hour, I feel hungry again, but we’ve gone through all the salty nuts. I find a plantain and slice the fruit into chunks, unpeeling each bit as I eat. I realize this is still not enough food and dig up some of last night’s Brie, plus a new discovery: a container of premade guacamole. I taste it with the blade of the knife and immediately put it back.
I have a long day of eating ahead of me. Today is our first day operating our new open-fire kitchen. We’re planning to light it all with different olive woods and test its influence on big chunks of meat. And, of course, we still have to account for the three bottles of leftover burgundy.
It takes a surprisingly long time to track down a good piece of kosher rib eye. Still, I’m tempted by the gefilte fish, matjes, schmaltz herring, horseradish, egg salad, and tuna salad at the various stores we visit, and I eventually give in.
Back at Malka, the team samples our bounty, but it’s all a little too sweet for my taste.
Finally, it’s time to test the meat. We decide to try out all the cooking mechanisms in the kitchen, placing the rib eye on the plancha, grill, and oven and, of course, hanging above the flames. After half an hour, everything is ready to sample. The meat is medium rare, burnt on the outside, only seasoned with salt and pepper. I find I can’t stop eating it.
After a long day of meat sampling, I don’t feel so good, but somehow I’m still hungry. I’m feeling a little lonely, in need of something comforting and warm, and decide to head back to the Cuban restaurant from the previous day for another bowl of chicken soup.
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