The Making of Zahav

If you're going to open an Israeli restaurant, you need to go there before opening.

Excellent logic.

Jennie Hatton of Profile PR, Zahav's agency, filed this dispatch today (3/6/08) at the end of what she calls an "eight-day eating extravaganza."

Besides Hatton, the travelers are Zahav owners Steven Cook and Michael Solomonov; Mike's wife, Mary; general manager Max Shapiro; architect/designer Elisabeth Knapp and her husband John; baker Wes Johnson; sous chef Sam Smith; Solomonov buddy Pervaiz Shallwni; photog Mike Regan; and chef/entertainer Phil Roy, also a Solomonov friend.

"Within 30 minutes of landing, we started eating and it hasn't stopped unless we were sleeping (which has been limited)," writes Hatton. "There is no way to put down everything that we ate -- but we had at least four to five meals a day. We've eaten in restaurants, from street vendors and in the markets, but the best meals have been in people's homes, either friends or family, where we ate foods from the different cultures that make up Israeli cuisine. Those meals included a traditional Morrocan Shabbat dinner in Jerusalem; a late-day meal at Mike Solomonov's father's house, where his family cooked for us; and Yemenite soup at construction chief Ofer's mother's house."

"Markets we visited included Tavlin, a spice market and restaurant in the Judean Hills, where we bought spices, fruit teas and olive oil and ate about 15 different dishes of salads, fish and meats, plus Machane Yehuda, the main open market in Jerusalem, and Shuk HaKarmel Market in Tel Aviv.

"We also visited a date farm at Kibbutz Kinneret, the second kibbutz created in Israel, where we sampled more than 11 types of dates and visited the home of a woman who has been making her own olive oil for over 30 years.

"Some dishes that we've feasted on include shakshuka (tomato pepper stew with poached eggs), sabich (an eggplant and hard-boiled egg sandwich in a pita with all the fixins of a falafel -- and let me tell you, this beats any late-night cheesesteak snack); hummus three ways and lemonnana (fresh lemonade with mint).

"We've also enjoyed (very much) the local anise liquoir called Arak - we've had this every night."

"We took camel rides and then spent a night in a Bedouin tent. While we were all lounging on our sleeping mats, post dinner, Elisabeth got a call from Ofer needing an immediate decision on how to lay the wall tiles at the restaurant. Elisabeth had her plans with her, so she Steve and Mike figured out the pattern they wanted to go with. At the same time, John, Elisabeth's husband, got a text message from a friend wanting a reservation at Xochitl for that evening (we are 7 hours ahead) and Steve sent a BlackBerry email to make it happen. On the other side of the tent, I was fact-checking the Food & Wine magazine feature on this trip and the opening of the restaurant, which will be in the May issue.

"Who knew we could all be taking care of business while hanging out in a tent in the desert."

The travelers also woke at 4 a.m. to drive to Masada to see sunrise over the Dead Sea. They took a "float" in the Dead Sea, followed by mud baths and a sulfur showers. "We all smelled like eggs, but we felt totally relaxed," she says.

Now for Zahav business:

They bought the coffee service (cups, saucers, creamers, sugar caddies, etc, all in the bright blue patterned ceramics that you find all over Israel) for $700 US. They got a fruit juicer, a kibbe maker, and skewers for kebobs, and they pciked up some decorations at the flea market in Yaffo in Tel Aviv.

The travelers head back to Philly Friday 3/7. "The best thing is, anytime we crave the amazing food that we've had here, we can always go to Zahav," Hatton says.

Back from Israel, the partners got some good news and some bad.

First the good news: The stone floor and wall tiles, put up in their absence, look amazing. (You're looking at The Quarter, the fancier room, through an archway. In the center of the photo is one entrance to the restaurant, the one from the courtyard of Society Hill Towers. At right is the wood stove.)

The metalwork above the kitchen counter, which you can see in the bottom photo (and which is to the right of the wood stove), is a beautiful touch, and gives the appearance of window frames.

Now for the bad news, starting with the projected opening, pushed from April 1 to sometime in May.

The tiles took a week longer to install than expected because of the difficulty of the pattern. Time is money.

Speaking of money... The partners also learned that if you're going to burn raw materials (e.g. wood or charcoal), you need to have a separate kitchen hood -- that gleaming fixture that every restaurants has above the stove to exhaust the fumes from the cooking area.

The 30-foot hood that came with the restaurant will not legally work with both the gas stove and the partners' shiny, new $6,000 charcoal grill. The bill for new hoods: $36,000.

The partners have decided to bag the idea of stitching together lovely Oriental rugs for the flooring in The Quarter. Wall-to-wall carpet will do just fine. "Our budget is threadbare," says Steven Cook.

In this photo, you can barely see the old hood tucked behind the newly framed "windows" over the kitchen counter. Yes, this is a job and a half. Workers will have to remove the old hood in sections and then carefully place the new hoods.

Those timbers that workers shlepped into Zahav a few weeks ago went under the saw of Scott Walker, who calls himself a truss builder or timber framer. In short, Walker gets wood from old barns from his buddy, a timber recycler, and makes new stuff out of them.

Such as Zahav's bar -- a rough-hewn, 17-foot-long creation made out of 200-year-old oak from a barn somewhere in Bucks County. Took Walker about two weeks.

In the first photo, Steven Cook is in the back next to Michael Solomonov. Walker is in the foreground beside a special helper named Jim Beam. (Fiery fellow, that Jim Beam. Makes non-drinking bloggers take even blurrier photos.)

In the very back, at top left, will be the restaurant's wine-storage shelf. (Here's the same perspective in a previous photo.) To the right at rear will be the entrance to The Quarter, the fancier dining room.

In the bottom photo, Walker measures twice and cuts once as he prepares the support for the bar top. This photo was taken before the bar top was installed. The bar top sits at left.

So what do you when you're opening a restaurant, you've hired most of your kitchen staff and then you find out your opening is delayed a month, at least?

The budget is already stretched to the breaking point and absorbing the extra bodies on your payroll is not an option. You can ask them to wait, but for how long? Cooks aren't known for their huge savings accounts.

Zahav co-owner Michael Solomonov has dreamed up new jobs for idle staff. Long a regular customer at 12 Steps Down, a great bar in the Italian Market that's not known for its food (other than Solomonov's favorite pork sandwich in the city), Solomonov approached the owner about revamping the menu and temporarily installing two of his cooks to execute it.

Less than two weeks after the idea first came to Solomonov in the middle of a sleepless night, 12 Steps customers were eating chicken wings cooked in duck fat and tossed with pickled mango sauce, macaroni and cheese with New York State cheddar and Fried Calamari Salad with carrot-miso dressing.

This, of course, is in addition to the best french fries in the city.