Zahav is going to end up 10 to 15 percent over budget. A lot of money, yes, but for a restaurant, not so extraordinary. How did we end up in this situation? Lots of ways really, but I think Mike Solomonov summed it up yesterday when he said: "Everything costs so much goddamned money!" We had to buy a new exhaust hood to accommodate the open coal cooking, of course, and that's the biggest component of our budget deficit. The other reasons are small, but they add up. There's a lot of metal that goes into restaurants, and metal is a lot more expensive than the last time i prepared a budget to open a restaurant. So far, we’ve spent about $25,000 on banking and legal fees (and we’re not finished yet), which is a lot more than I’ve ever spent before. We’ve had to replace a few pieces of kitchen equipment that were beyond repair. Sometimes you forget to budget for sales tax, and when you buy $50,000 worth of equipment, the tax is a big number. When you open late (we're running about a month behind schedule) your operating costs start creeping up - you have to pay utilities and insurance from day 1 and when you bring on key employees to prepare for the opening, it can start to feel like all your pockets have holes in them. There are things you can do when the budget is running away from you. in the last few weeks, we've made some tough decisions on some of the finishes we planned on using. Substituting wood countertops in place of stone, for example, or eliminating intricate tile work that could take days of skilled labor to complete. There is strange sense of euphoria that comes with saving a few thousand dollars, maybe only surpassed by the feeling of spending a few thousand dollars. And now there are a million little decisions to make, and they always seem to hinge on economics. For example, you might decide not to put a shelf exactly where you want it, because there's a light switch in the way and it would take half a day of labor to relocate the switch, patch the drywall and re-paint it. For the most part though, it's like steering a giant ship: you probably needed to turn the wheel BEFORE you saw the iceberg to avoid a collision. In other words, the expensive decisions were made a long time ago, when the budget was still the budget. The money we're spending now -- on mop buckets and liquor licenses and paint -- is necessary, not discretionary. The prospect of going over budget used to keep me up nights. But about a month ago, a sense of calm came over me. There comes a point in every restaurant buildout and opening (at least the ones I’ve been involved with), when you just have to give yourself over to the project. You put your head down and fight your way to the finish line. there is no consolation prize for almost opening a restaurant. As my football coach used to say, coming in second place is just being the first loser. Besides, now that we’re only a few weeks away from actually opening, I’ve got other things keeping me up at night.

"When I go home to Israel, I’m on a strict five-meal-a-day eating regimen,” says Philadelphia chef Michael Solomonov. “I just can’t get the same flavors here in the States.” Recently, he set out to change that: Solomonov, who spent the past two years as executive chef of Marigold Kitchen, has opened a new restaurant, Zahav, serving the foods of his home country: smooth, nutty hummus; light, chewy Yemenite flatbread; and dozens of variations of eggplant dishes, ranging from a tangy stew to sabich, a fried-eggplant pita sandwich. To educate and inspire his staff before Zahav’s opening, Solomonov took them on a weeklong tour of the restaurants in Jaffa and Tel Aviv and around Ganei Yehuda, the small Israeli community where he was born.