Bible Meets Atlas Cuisine

To salute the city of Tel Aviv on its 100th anniversary, Israeli chef Meir Adoni fires up a nine course salute. Joan Nathan takes in the scene.

Joan Nathan
Posted: February 3, 2009

"I'm so creative right now. Maybe it's because my wife just had a baby," said Meir Adoni with a huge grin on his face. "I think of food when I think about women with passion. A woman is most beautiful when she's pregnant."

Adoni and his team from his Catit restaurant in Tel Aviv were assembling the yellowtail tartare with marinated watermelon appetizer at an ambitious dinner at the James Beard House late last May in Manhattan. Adoni, Israel's chef of the moment, was chosen to showcase his food for the 100th anniversary of the city of Tel Aviv, established on land overlooking the Mediterranean Sea that would later become Israel. Tel Aviv was known then as the "all-Jewish city."

The 36 year old is known for his unique combination of the finest ingredients, meshing his local roots of Mediterranean cooking with influences from his mother's North African kitchen, time he spent apprenticing in kitchens in Australia, modern French culinary methods, and the scientific cooking techniques he learned at Alinea in Chicago. Adoni first made his U.S. debut at The Culinary Institute of America's Worlds of Flavor Conference in Napa, California, in November 2008.

When I first met Adoni in Napa, I was impressed by his creative combinations, such as his delicious sage roasted grouper with beetroot cream and goat cheese ravioli, a variation of which he made at this dinner, substituting grilled scallops with sorrel/cumin crëme for the grouper. "In Israel we use fresh and flash frozen scallops from Europe," he said, "but always local goat cheese."

Not only does Adoni have the energy I associate with young chefs in Israel but he's also open to all culinary influences. "That's a very Israeli thing," said Vered Guttman, an Israeli caterer living in Washington, D.C. "The Israeli kitchen is the fusion of all the Jewish kitchens from the Diaspora and the neighboring Palestinian cuisine they grew up with. In addition, young Israelis, once they finish their army service, take a break and travel far away all around the world. He's bringing all these influences back to create a very sophisticated new Israeli cuisine. When Adoni was in San Francisco, for example, he was a sponge in Chinatown, soaking up ingredients new to him. At Pine Ridge Winery, where we had a private tour, he was like a kid tasting, creating, and exploring."

Adoni, who is from Modi'in, the plain where David slew Goliath, started his restaurant in an old stone house nearby in a little village called Kfar Ruth. In 2005 he opened in a beautiful Bauhaus building in Tel Aviv. At first some of the reviewers scoffed at his ambitious food but then changed their minds, ranking him as one of the best chefs in Israel today.

His five tiny hors d'oeuvres, all served with Bartenura Prosecco, made me realize why Adoni's restaurant is one of the most expensive in Israel. One, grilled lamb with smoked eggplant, raw tahini, date honey, yogurt spheres, and Persian lemons, says it all. Local ingredients like the yogurt and the date honey or molasses, which are the biblical "milk and honey," complemented the lamb that he gets from Galilee in the north. In this dish he used two different kinds of lemons. Persian lemons, which are dried tiny lemons usually from Iran and Iraq, were used in the sauce, and preserved lemons accompanied the lamb. To make his preserved lemons, a recipe he got from his mother, who came to Israel from Morocco, he slices them in thin rounds that he layers in coarse salt with black peppercorns, bay leaves, and cayenne pepper, then leaves in the kitchen for three days (in the winter from six days to two weeks). When Adoni can find tiny lemons at the market in Tel Aviv, he cuts them in half and cures them the same way.

Another dish, accompanied by Binyamina Avnei Hachoshen "Odem" Ruby Syrah 2005, was char-grilled lamb tenderloin with green garlic crëme, baby artichokes, and what he calls a burnt eggplant crëme but I would call a puree. To make the smoked eggplant, Adoni places the whole eggplant on a grill, turning it as it chars on the surface and softens inside. Instead of discarding the skin, as most cooks do, he mashes the whole eggplant with truffles, olive oil, garlic, lemon salt, smoked sea salt, and crushed pepper, then blends it and presses it through a sieve. The result so tantalized the taste buds that I went straight to the kitchen for the recipe.

For this nine course dinner, he brought cheese from Kommehl in the Negev. "It's a tiny place in the desert where they make cheese without using electricity," he told me. In Israel, where there is a huge increase of boutique cheeses throughout the country, "every second kibbutz-every place that has cows or goats-makes cheese now."

There were two desserts: kaddaif filled with goat cheese soufflè, rose water, honey, and sage ice cream, plus pistachio crëme brûlèe with roasted apricots, spiced ice cream, and a vanilla/cardamom crumble.

The dish I found most interesting was the yellowtail tartare with watermelon, Worcestershire sauce, honey, watermelon jelly, and osetra topped with a sprig of baby basil. First, he soaked tiny 2-by-1-inch rectangles of watermelon in a mixture of Worcestershire and soy sauces and date molasses for three minutes. Then he made a tartare of the yellowtail, a very common Mediterranean fish, with an Asian mayonnaise pungent with ginger, vinegar, soy sauce, molasses honey, and fish sauce. He gets his Asian products either from friends who bring them back to Israel or from East West, Tel Aviv's one-store Chinatown, started by a boat person from Vietnam. On top of the tartare, he laid a thin layer of watermelon jelly made from watermelon juice and algin, a natural vegetable stabilizer extracted from brown algae.

Israeli wines, chosen by Sholomo Blashka of Royal Wines, melded well with the dishes, considering that Blashka, an orthodox Jew, had never tasted scallops, crabs, or oysters, which were all on the menu.

After tasting everything at this dinner, cookbook author/chef Rozanne Gold said, "These are new, interesting, complex combinations, but they're very old flavors."