Israel and Yemen Meet in Brooklyn for Brunch With Einat Admony
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Version 0 of 1. “I love attention,” Einat Admony said. She had just pulled up to the curb on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn on a Bazooka-pink Vespa. She is not one to make a shy entrance. The funny and feisty chef parked the scooter beneath a street lamp with a neighborhood-promoting banner that read, “Always More to Explore.” Exploration was the order of the day. Ms. Admony is the 42-year-old, five-foot-tall, Israeli-born force behind Balaboosta, in NoLIta, and two Taïm falafel spots downtown. She wanted to drop into Sahadi’s, a Middle Eastern food emporium, to gather spices and other ingredients for a Sunday brunch with friends at her apartment in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. There would be no eggs Benedict at this brunch. Instead there would be a table overflowing with the spicy-sour Yemenite food she ate as a child. There would be hard-boiled “brown eggs” that had been soaked overnight in tea, and oxtail soup, and a casserole of eggplant simmered with onions, tomato paste, paprika and cumin. Ms. Admony’s mother comes from Iran, but her father’s roots can be traced to Yemen. Growing up near Tel Aviv, Ms. Admony got used to enjoying a bifurcated Sabbath. Every Friday night her family sat down for a Persian feast; come Saturday, after religious services, the crew returned to the table for a Yemenite brunch. At Ms. Admony’s gathering, the unifying condiment would be zhoug, a green relish that could be described as a cross between hot salsa and chimichurri. How central is zhoug to the Yemenite way of life? Ms. Admony’s family rarely went to restaurants when she was young, but she remembers that one time, for a special occasion, they headed to a kosher Chinese place in Tel Aviv. As they settled into their seats, her father opened a bag and removed his private stash of zhoug. “He took the jar everywhere,” she said. From Sahadi’s, Ms. Admony wanted a spice mix called hawaij and a version of clarified butter known as samneh; she needed nigella seeds and fenugreek seeds and the dough for jachnun, a sort of dense, glistening Yemeni croissant. “Yemenite food is very basic, and it’s very poor,” she said. “Most of the dishes are bread.” That doesn’t mean the cuisine is a breeze to prepare. Soaking the fenugreek seeds requires nearly as much attention as a new baby. To reduce the bitterness, she said, “You need to drain the water like 20 times overnight.” What about sleep? “You’re not sleeping. If you wake up, you drain the water.” There are other complications. “The fenugreek makes you stink,” she said. “That’s one of the downsides. It’s coming from your pores, it’s everywhere.” She tended to dodge her father after Sabbath. Ms. Admony has been ruminating about her roots a lot lately. She has a new cookbook (“Balaboosta”) and a new restaurant (Bar Bolonat, in the West Village) set to arrive this fall; both will showcase her unpredictable, inventive and heartily satisfying twists on the Middle-Eastern-meets-Mediterranean cuisine she specializes in. The trip to Sahadi’s set off a flurry of memories. Right inside the front door, Ms. Admony encountered a box full of loquats. “These — my grandma used to have a tree,” she said. “We used to climb the tree and grab them. Wait until they’re a little bit soft.” She demonstrated the best way to eat a fresh, green almond — crack open its surface with your molars — and bemoaned the way spices were trapped in little plastic tubs, instead of open sacks. “In Israel you can smell it, you can touch it,” she said. On the way out, though, she spotted something in a jar that she hadn’t tasted for 30 years or so: chickpeas covered in candy shells, like Jordan almonds. “Yes, this is the one,” she said, scooping the candies into a bag. “Amazing. My grandpa, my Iranian grandpa, always had them. I used to love these.” She slipped one into her mouth, placed her fingers to her heart, and uttered two words, in almost a whisper, that seemed to be infused with the passing of all those intervening years: “It’s crazy.” |