Chef Michael Solomonov on finding his career path

Chef Michael Solomonov, who together with Steven Cook owns a group of restaurants (Zahav, Percy Street Barbecue, Federal Donuts, Abe Fisher, and Dizengoff), appeared at the Free Library of Philadelphia last week to promote his new book, Zahav: A World of Israeli Cooking. Here's an excerpt of our conversation:

Can you explain the back and forth from Israel?

So, I was born in a little town in Israel called G'nei Yehuda, by the airport. And my mom is American. She grew up in Ohio, which is very different than Israel. Her father, my grandfather Alex Fisher, was a really big Israel bonds guy. He got everybody pretty fired up about Israel growing up. I think my mom figured if she moved to Israel, she could date whoever she wanted, because everybody was Jewish.

So she moved in the '70s, and she met my dad. They had me, and my dad wanted to come to America to, you know, kill it in the land of opportunity. And they moved, and we had a very normal Jewish life in Pittsburgh.

When you were in Israel, you wished you were here, when in the U.S., you wished you were in Israel.

We moved back to Israel when I was 15 years old. I didn't want to go. But when I came back to the U.S., things were different. [Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin was assassinated shortly after, and everything seemed a lot closer to me. Then I tried college here, failed, went back to Israel, got a job cooking in a bakery. I mean, I wasn't cooking. I was washing sheet trays. It wasn't because I was into cooking. It was because I had no other skills. I just sort of walked up and down the street and asked this one bakery if they were hiring. And they got a fancy American immigrant that they could exploit. And I loved it. That's how it started.

It seemed like that job really helped you find your place in the world. Shockingly, it did. I certainly didn't think that the day I started there.

On Shabbat, you'd go in Thursday night at midnight and you'd work till Friday sundown. And I certainly wasn't scrubbing sheet trays, saying, 'I'm going to do great at this. We should open an Israeli restaurant in Philadelphia.' No, I was enjoying working, being humbled, and doing something totally different.

There's so many different slices of society that you interact with when you work at a bakery in the Middle East. You make challah on Thursday nights, and every single person buys bread - you know, they're not scared of bread like they are here, or pastries. You'd see everybody. It's a ritual. So it was really fascinating.

So you started to see this as a career path?

I got a job after that working in a cafe up the street. I think everybody in my family was just psyched that I wasn't, like, in jail. There was something legitimate.

I got a job as a cook. And I fell in love with cooking, and with eating. I was an incredibly picky eater until then. It was still tons of work, and that summer the ventilation system in the kitchen had broken, so it was like 105 degrees and blowing hot winds, and, you know, people yelling. I went in at 4 p.m., and we'd leave at 8 in the morning. But when you can leave that shift and say, 'I want to go do that again,' that's something special.

I knew I wanted to go to culinary school. I went to a little school in Florida, like a suburb of Israel, West Palm Beach.

You must have been pretty good. You made your way to Striped Bass, and then to Vetri.

I got fired and rehired from Striped Bass, and I'm sure Marc [Vetri] wanted to choke me out every night. I don't know if I was that good, but I was good enough.

After the first year at Vetri, my brother was killed in action in the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces]. I came from Israel [after the funeral] still very excited to cook at Vetri, but the next year, I self-consciously decided that I wasn't into it. The food was amazing. I love Italian food, but it wasn't where my heart was.

So you go to work for Steve Cook at Marigold Kitchen, and these Israeli dishes began to creep into your cooking.

It wasn't something I set out to do. Steve hired me and said, 'Do whatever you want.' I created a menu, and Israeli items sort of ended up on it.

It wasn't like the food we serve at Zahav. It was sneaky. It was American. We did blue-nosed bass wrapped in grape leaves with a chickpea puree - otherwise known as hummus, right? And at some point, Steve and I said - he had also spent time in Israel - 'We should open an Israeli restaurant.'

Was this partly to honor your brother?

Yeah, well, it took maybe a few years to understand that. What we wanted to do was open a cool restaurant. Nobody else was doing Israeli food. And if they were, it was falafel, shwarma, and hummus, and that was it. We wanted to explore new cuisine.

When you go over there and you eat, you start with like 10 different salads and bread that's fresh-baked out of a wood-burning oven with all these different dips. You've got the Moroccan, the Yemeni, the Ethiopian, the Georgian, the Balkan, the Greek, the Turkish. We wanted to open an Israeli restaurant like that.

We took our chefs over there before we opened and went around the country to eat, because nobody knew what it was. At the end of that trip, it was March 6, it happened to be my brother's birthday. We stopped by the military cemetery where he was buried. I don't know, I thought it was important for people to see.

There's something very spiritual about cooking this food in the way that it relates to my ancestry and to my brother as well. To be able to do something that you think is great, that gets you fired up every single day, then also has deeper meaning, has been incredible.

Watch a video of the full interview at: www.livestream.com/accounts/7370687/Solomonov

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