She uses a Grillworks wood-burning grill and has stacks of wood decorating the entryway to the restaurant. “That’s how the food here came about,” Robbins chimes in. “You eat it and you’re like, why the f- are we eating anything else? Why are we dissecting food? This is how you want to eat.” “I would get to Israel and get off the airplane, you would sit down at a restaurant, and there was a communal taboon,” says Solomonov of his travels that inspired both Zahav and Laser Wolf. The two chefs also came up in an era when sous vide circulators and molecular gastronomy were all the rage, but both abandoned those techniques in favor of open flames when they opened their own restaurants. One more thing: The grill, which also plays a large role at Laser Wolf. It’s not something that can be reproduced.”
“The thing that makes Lilia is the location. “I feel like Lilia and Zahav are kind of the same,” says Solomonov. Both Solomonov and Robbins got their big breaks working at Italian restaurants, Robbins at Spiaggia in Chicago and Solomonov at Vetri Cucina in Philadelphia. There are other parallels between the two restaurants, not the least of which is that Lilia’s chef/owner Missy Robbins is a fellow James Beard Award laureate. “The yurts probably saved the company last winter,” says Solomonov of his own mini village, set up outside Zahav. Walking up to Lilia, Solomonov recognizes a familiar sight: a cluster of yurts offering outdoor dining, one of the only options in many cities during last winter’s COVID surge, just as vaccinations were starting to get underway. “The yurts probably saved the company last winter,” says Solomonov of Zahav’s similar setup. Missy Robbins and Solomonov have coffee inside a yurt at Lilia. But we’re not actually kosher.” Missy Robbins and Solomonov have coffee inside a yurt at Lilia. “Laser Wolf is kosher-style, so we’re not going to mix milk and meat, we’re not going to have shellfish or pork or anything like that,” says Solomonov - as he rips into strawberry-glazed pork ribs, a longtime staple at Traif. Consider it “foods that Jews enjoy,” without the limitations of being closed on the Sabbath or the meat being prepared by a shochet, a religious butcher of sorts. Solomonov, meantime, has tirelessly promoted Israeli cuisine stateside, though he is not kosher himself, and neither are his restaurants. Since then, the two chefs have gone in drastically different directions with their restaurant concepts, especially as it pertains to their shared religion: Marcus created a bit of commotion when he opened Traif - a Yiddish word for “unkosher” - across the street from one of New York’s largest populations of Orthodox Jews in South Williamsburg. “You’d cook and there’d be DJs and we’d be awake dancing on tables until 3 a.m.” “It was such a nightmare of a restaurant, we’d do like 700 covers a night,” says Solomonov. Solomonov and Traif chef Jason Marcus are both Jewish and have been friends for over two decades, getting their start working - and raging - together at Sunset Beach on Shelter Island over the summers. “We initially opened Zahav because of the Laser Wolf experience,” says Solomonov. So Zahav was born, utilizing a small charcoal grill for some of its cooking.Ī decade later, with more cash and a lease in hand for an empty warehouse across town, the duo opened Laser Wolf, which utilizes a much larger grill for pretty much everything. As Solomonov tells it, the restaurant style is widespread in Tel Aviv and inspired him to open a similar concept stateside, but he was unable to fully translate the experience inside the Philadelphia restaurant space at his disposal at the time. Loosely named after the butcher from “Fiddler on the Roof,” Laser Wolf is a shipudiya, or an Israeli kebab house. The restaurant has 225 seats and boasts some of the most panoramic views of the New York City skyline from this side of the East River. Laser Wolf, the Israeli grill concept that is considered a sequel to Zahav, will open a second location at the beginning of May on the rooftop of the Hoxton Hotel in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
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