The Making of Zahav

The drywall dust was flying wildly at Zahav on Tuesday (12/4) as a crew led by the owners' friend Ofer Shlomo started two weeks of demolition. The workers are stripping the dining room down to the studs and bare floor, removing a bar counter in front of the open kitchen, a low divider wall, a liquor cabinet, and the liquor bar. Most of the kitchen equipment will remain, and the partners -- who got the keys over the weekend -- say that the prep kitchen in the back just needs to be majorly cleaned. There's a recording studio next door, and the owners have promised to 'knock off" the racket during recording sessions. (As an aside, the retail tenants in that low-slung building on the north end of the Society Hill Towers complex have not been "treated" to construction noise too much over the years. Restaurants stuck around. It was the Copper Penny from the late 1970s through the mid-1990s. Sfizzio, the last restaurant, opened in 1998 and closed around Halloween.)

Chef Michael Solomonov, always a good sport, picked up a sledge and got into the work himself. See video.

The day had a serious/religious side, as Solomonov helped to install on the front doorpost a mezuzah, a small case containing a piece of parchment bearing Torah verses. Though the restaurant will not be kosher, the owners are Jewish. See video.

As you might imagine, Zahav looks like a war zone, as it's entering the second week of demolition. While the old furnishings, including a most hideous mural (see it in this video clip), are stripped down, work has begun to move the bar. Water and sewer pipes have to be rerouted. The one-story restaurant is constructed on a pad, and there's no basement. This means digging about 50 feet of trenches along the floor for the new pipes. And that's where the work crews hit a snag.

Rather, they hit concrete a full foot deep -- not the few inches they had expected to find. So Zahav sounds like a war zone. "I think we've used up our goodwill with our neighbor," an audio studio, says Steven Cook, one of the partners.

They're hauling out foot-square cubes of concrete (shown below). The extra work will not delay the opening. "It's not time," Cook said. "It's only money." In the main photo, the worker is standing in front of what was the hideous mural. The bar will line up in front of the trench at his feet.

They'll get their plumber in to lay the pipes and close up the floor.

Meanwhile, Cook and partner Michael Solomonov are debating the restaurant's floor plan: Should they offer a large community table near the open kitchen -- where people can sit with strangers while the cooks do their thing nearby -- in addition to the usual tables for smaller parties? "Here's what I'm thinking," Cook said. "This kind of food is normally eaten together -- it's a social way of eating. But at the same time, we can't afford to waste seats if people don't want to eat with other people." (Zahav will not be like Benihana, Cook says, explaining that the staff will not be tossing bits of food at patrons.)

If it's like the communal table at Buddakan, I'd argue in favor of it.

Cook is seeking reader input: Your thoughts? Send them in and I'll post them in the comments section.

The partners also are trying (so far in vain) to contact importers of Israeli ingredients. (If you've ever tried to get a painter, plumber or electrician to return your call, you will understand their frustration.) "It's amazing how many people don't want to call you back even when you're giving them money," Cook says.

Zahav is still a demolition site, as the last vestiges of Sfizzio have been stripped away.

Ofer, the construction chief, oversaw the completing of the trenches that will accommodate the new iron pipes to feed the new bar. A plumber came in to hook them up; it's a messy job, involving molten lead. The work was inspected by the city, and given the green light.

This coming week, the trenches will be filled in and closed up, and framing of the interior begins.

Meanwhile, co-owner Steven Cook met with architect Elisabeth Knapp to go over materials and the configuration of tables. Tile will be a major part of the interior, including walls and flooring, and it's important for the partners to select it now. The partners are considering tiles from all over the Middle East, including Morocco, Turkey and Palestine.

It needs to be ordered and delivered. Here is the floor tile that seems to be the front-runner. And Here's a wall tile that's in contention, next to a sample of a gold tile. The small squares will be replaced with gold squares from that tile, says Knapp. ("Zahav" means gold.)

Cook, naturally, wants to get in as many tables as possible. Knapp told me that she might need to adjust the interior air pressure. Huh? She was joking that the added air pressure would allow the walls to billow, allowing more interior space. Architect humor.

While workers complete the last acts of demolition, let's get into the head of architect Elisabeth Knapp for a moment.

Knapp has been involved with the project since the summer, when owners Steven Cook and Michael Solomonov led her around to see prospective spaces. (Even in a strong restaurant climate such as now, there are at least a dozen restaurants, both in business and out of business, in play at any one time.)

The Swarthmore-based Knapp is a veteran architect who's gotten into the restaurant game only relatively recently, in 2000. Her first was Ansill in Queen Village. She then did Xochitl in Society Hill -- for Cook and Solomonov. Next up was Fuji in Haddonfield.

When Cook approached Knapp about Zahav, "he told me, `Elisabeth, this will be right up your alley,' " she says.

Knapp spent a good portion of her childhood in the Middle East. She's a child of an American-born foreign-service worker and lived in Europe till age 5, when the family moved to Libya. She's lived in Baghdad, Tehran and Beirut, where she went to high school. Zahav is rooted in Israel --and, oddly, "that's the one place [in the Middle East] I haven't been to," Knapp says.

Knapp says that overall, the goal is to make Zahav's casual dining area resemble an outside courtyard. "Of course," Knapp says, "that's not literal." The floor tile in that space, the stone pavers, essentially are an "outside" material.

She also wants to use Jerusalem stone on certain key walls, such as those behind the bar. Handmade iron and glass windows will divide the open kitchen from the seating; they'll also keep flaming meat from the patrons. Tables will be tough-hewn wood.

"What we're trying to not do is any kind of literal Middle Eastern space. We're trying to choose materials that are evocative of materials used in Jerusalem, and then do it in a somewhat more contemporary and, at the same time, rustic way," she says.

The fine-dining space won't be elegant, per se, in terms of treatments but will be richer in terms of materials and colors, she says. Think fabrics, curtains and decorative rugs.

Photos: That's Cook with Knapp. At top, Cook's hand on the blueprints.