Eyal Shani.Illustration by PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY THE GLOBE AND MAIL. SOURCE: BRITNEY TOWNSEND
Off Duty is a series of lively conversations with influential people, from CEOs to celebrities, on life, work and the art of taking time off.
Eyal Shani, one of Israel’s most celebrated chefs, is a ball of creative energy. During a recent chat at his Miznon restaurant in Toronto’s Yorkville neighbourhood, he slips into poetic prose about vegetables and leaps from his seat to go to the kitchen to cook me lima beans. Shani’s eccentric, larger-than-life energy has made him a TV personality in Israel and has driven the launch of 40 restaurants worldwide, including New York’s Michelin-nominated Shmoné.
The long-time Tel Aviv resident moved recently to a seaside home in HaBonim, south of Haifa. Just two days later, he came to Toronto for his first visit. Shani explains that his local business partners “seduced” him into setting up a version of his Miznon chain, his first Canadian outpost that opened with much buzz in February.
The menu is a fascinating blend of high and low end. Shani takes carefully sourced and prepared ingredients, such as lobster and rib eye steak, and stuffs them into a humble pita. During his visit, he experimented with Canadian-only menu items, preparing his own version of Montreal smoked meat brushed with maple syrup, which he calls “the perfect sweetener.” When you taste Shani’s memorable creations, you can’t help but absorb some of his culinary passion.
What do you do on a day off?
First of all, I don’t have a day off. In Tel Aviv, I have 17 restaurants. I am always involved, day and night. If I do have some time, I listen to classical music and I play with my giant tortoise. She’s four years old and she weighs 100 pounds. She’s going to weigh 400 pounds and live for another 200 years. I play with her, wash her, talk with her, feed her. She brings me this energy from the beginning of the world.
I could go across the street and get a stuffed pita for $9. Why should I pay $20 for a pita at Miznon?
First of all, you can taste it. It’s a street food, but it’s a street food that has been cooked in a big kitchen with knowledgeable cooks and with the best ingredients. We are a restaurant that decided that the destination for fine food will be a pita and not a plate. It changes the food to a mobile food. When you take the pita and go on the street and eat it, you are making all the streets that you walk through a part of my restaurant.
Your menu says you have the best hummus that you’re ever going to eat, and it really is quite good. What makes it special?
I’ve been doing hummus for years, not just for my businesses but also at my home. It’s very simple to do. Fifty per cent is the chickpeas and 50 per cent is good tahini, and some citric acid and salt and chili pepper and you got it. You have to cook the chickpeas very precisely. It takes time. Sometimes I really can make the best hummus in the world, but it depends on so many things. The freshness of the tahini, for example. Here we are importing Har Bracha. It’s the best tahini in the world, but two months pass before it reaches here and that lowers the sweetness and creates a kind of bitterness, which makes me very upset. Also to find a perfect chickpea, that’s not easy. People import it and there’s no consistency, so you have to run around to find it.
One of your claims to fame is that you’re the one who popularized the trend of roasting cauliflower whole. How do you back up that claim?
I’m not the one that popularized it. I was the one to invent it. Take a look at this cauliflower here. [Shani pulls a whole cauliflower off the restaurant’s window display.] Is it made up of hundreds or thousands of small flowers? No, it is one flower. It’s a terrible thing for somebody to break a flower. So I decided I’m not going to break the flowers. I learned how to cook it, and I learned how to roast it.
Many restaurants have replaced traditional menus with ones you get with a QR code on your cellphone. What do you think of the trend?
I cannot stand it. I’ll tell you why. You cannot involve digital instruments with food. When you read a book, different parts of your brain are working than when you read from a screen. It’s a completely different experience. Printing words with ink on paper, that’s a deep experience, so I cannot stand that you are going to eat in my restaurant and I’m bringing you a screen. It’s artificial, it’s so cold.
Another trend in restaurants is having to pay a deposit for a reservation, or charging the customer a fee if they don’t show up. What do you think about that?
My HaSalon restaurant is only open three days a week. That is the principle of HaSalon because our chefs make things from scratch and we change the menu from evening to evening completely. There are something like 1,000 people who want to come each evening we are open, and we can’t feed more than 200 people in two shifts, so we must take reservations. At HaSalon people are charged [US$100 per person if they cancel within 48 hours of the reservation] because the operation is so expensive that we cannot lose even one table in the evening. I don’t like it, but if you want the restaurant to survive, there is no other way. At our other restaurants, we are not charging.
This interview has been edited and condensed.