On the day Israeli celebrity chef Eyal Shani won a coveted Michelin star for his West Village eatery Shmoné, he was near the Gaza border flipping steaks for IDF soldiers.
Shani — who gained notoriety by charging $24 for a single tomato appetizer at his West Side restaurant HaSalon – shut down his 16 restaurants in Israel on Oct. 7, the day Hamas terrorists slaughtered 1,200 people and kidnapped 240 more.
The abducted included infants, parents, and a wheelchair-bound 85-year-old grandmother who survived the Holocaust.
Two of Shani’s waitresses were among the hundreds murdered at a music festival near the border on that day of infamy.
One of his restaurant managers has since been killed in Gaza after Israel enacted the largest mobilization in its 75-year history to root out Hamas once and for all.
“We closed our restaurants and immediately converted [three of] them into food factories, producing 3,000 to 4,000 meals a day and driving them to army bases in the south,” Shani, 64, told Side Dish.
By Oct. 9, Shani brought in his own army to cook for the hospitalized terror survivors and the kibbutzim who lost their homes, along with the tens of thousands of troops.
Around 300 of his employees — one-third of his staff in Israel — had been engaged in combat before the recent cease-fire.
“They are in the depths of Gaza. We are worrying about them so much, and you can’t make contact with them,” the Jerusalem-born chef said.
Shani — who made Israeli street food famous with his Miznon line of fast-casual eateries – operates 41 restaurants from Tel Aviv to New York, Las Vegas, Miami, London, Paris, Singapore, and the UAE.
He was still serving meals to IDF troops on Nov. 7, the two-month anniversary of the barbarous attack, when Michelin honored Shmoné and its executive chef Nadav Greenberg.
Shani took a short break from the horrors at home to fly to New York, opening his new kosher restaurant Malka on the Upper West Side and cooking for his customers at Shmoné.
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However, he was immediately struck by the rise in antisemitism engulfing the city, where Jewish culture has always been part of the Big Apple’s core.
In one example, he cited watching a young couple cross the street to peer into the window of Shmoné.
“The man caught her in his arms. ‘Leave them,’ he said. ‘It’s a Jewish restaurant,’” Shani recalled.
“That was something, to hear that. He didn’t say, ‘They are Israelis, they are supporting the war in Gaza,’ but he immediately converted it into Jewish people hate. It’s a small story but it made such a change inside to hear that.”
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Returning to his war-torn country, he has been serving food at the reopened Israeli police station in Sderot, which had been destroyed in the terror attack.
“The reopening is very symbolic,” said Shani, who also plans to cook a dinner for survivors from Kibbutz Be’eri, which was ground zero on the day of the massacre.
In the past two weeks, Shani also began to “slowly reopen” some of his Tel Aviv restaurants. At first, it was just for a couple of hours each night in an effort to help residents take their minds off the conflict.
‘There is such a deep sadness in Israel,” he said. “All the values of your life, the things that you fought for, that you wish for, were emptied of value. All the ways that you live suddenly look useless. It completely changed the point of view of what is and what is not important. All the things you did before Oct. 7 no longer have meaning. It’s like somebody changed the floor you are standing on.”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
