![]() ![]() In 2016, the James Beard Foundation smiled on the chef again, this time with a national accolade: Shaya was named America’s Best New Restaurant.īolting onstage at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, surrounded by his BRG family, Shaya told the crowd: “We are so blown away by this. In 2015, Shaya won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: South for his cooking at Domenica.īy that time, he’d been perversely sneaking Middle Eastern ingredients onto the Domenica menu, and in 2015, again with the backing of BRG, he went full out-Israeli with Shaya, his first restaurant to pay homage to the food of his homeland. In 2009, with Shaya as executive chef, BRG opened Domenica, a contemporary Italian restaurant in New Orleans’ Roosevelt Hotel. (And despite his fickleness, Emily stuck with him.) Since his earliest days in professional kitchens, he had felt an affinity for the food of Italy, and he wanted to go deep into the art of pasta, charcuterie, and pizza. Shortly after meeting Emily Ostuw at a mixer for Jewish singles in 2007, Shaya got a wild hair and moved to Italy for eight months. I’m not trying to sweep it under the rug and be something else.”Īnd yet for many years, he did wrestle with his past, even as he attended the Culinary Institute of America, became wildly ambitious, and worked his way up the BRG ladder. “I’m now cooking Israeli food because I’ve come to terms with my life,” he tells me as we glide from market to cheese shop to his home in Bayou St. With pita and hummus, he found his raison dêtre. ![]() Only after he began to cook the food of his beloved Bulgarian-Israeli grandmother, Matilda, and have people love it in return, did Alon Shaya feel whole again. It would take three decades to heal the rift. When his parents moved from Israel to Philadelphia, it was as if his identity was split in two - like a walnut or pecan. ![]() He’ll take two dozen.Īlon Shaya’s unmooring started at the tender age of 4. He gives her a tip anyway: “Put a little turmeric in the dough.” Adds a nice golden sheen.Īn egg vendor with a Cajun accent and a sign for “Pickled PeeWee Eggs” stuck to the front of his table sees the chef approaching and shouts out a heads-up: “You ain’t going to like it. Babs allows she’s never even made challah. He calls it “Game of Thrones” Bread because it looks so lusty and primal. Passing by a grass-fed-beef purveyor with a Sylvia Plath quote posing for an ad (“I want books and babies and beef stew”), Shaya stops to gab with a woman named Babs about the lamb-stuffed challah he plans to bake for the get-together. Bite into one, and here come all your feel-good pheromones. ![]() Pausing in front of a table of hot chiles, he fixates on the so-called “rat-poison peppers.” They’re an antidepressant, he says. In baggy jeans, a worn T-shirt, and a baseball cap, he is clearly at home and frequently recognized in this carnival of growers and artisans. With a just-bought tamale in one hand and a watermelon agua fresca in the other, he roams from table to table, shooting the shit with farmers, fishers, familiar faces - anybody who will take the time to listen. The Israeli-born chef and his Georgia-born wife, Emily, are having friends over for dinner that night, and Shaya is assembling the ingredients for a feast. It’s about half past noon on a Tuesday, and Alon Shaya is meandering through the Crescent City Farmers Market, next to the Mississippi River levee in his adopted hometown of New Orleans. ![]()
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