Until he trained as a chef, Tomer Amedi dreamed of being a famous musician or a Lego engineer.
“I still buy a Lego Technic set every year. It’s important to stay in touch with what you liked as a child — there’s a reason you loved it,” he remarks, talking to me from La Fonda Hotel in Marbella, where he is helping set up the hotel’s new restaurant.
He still plays rock guitar — sharing joyful Instagram posts of himself at the end of a shift, still decked in chef’s whites, flinging his long hair to Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody while strumming his guitar. As well as guitar, he’s a drummer, having originally intended to make music his career: “It’s still a big part of my life. I was planning on going to MI [the Musicians’ Institute] in California to study music.”
However, in 2005, with a year to fill after finishing in the Israeli army and before heading to the US, a friend suggested he take a culinary course paid for by the IDF. “It sounded like a cool thing — cooking is a life skill which I’d need if I was going to live on my own. I fell in love with it.”
No surprise perhaps, when he tells me both his mother Sima, from Morocco and father Yoav, who is Kurdish, were good cooks. “My father was a chef at one of the oldest restaurants in Jerusalem — Rachmo.” Amedi cooked at home with his parents from a young age.
Two months into his culinary career he was already working in a professional kitchen while he studied. He’s modest about his rapid rise in the world of restaurants. “Luckily I was in the right place at the right time most of the time and worked in amazing restaurants — from [top Tel Aviv restaurant] Shila to Mul Yam [another leading light, later destroyed by fire] then Machneyuda [in Jerusalem], which was an amazing experience.”
He moved across the street to take the helm at the Yudale (“The naughty little sister of Machneyuda”) before being dispatched by Machneyuda’s founding fathers to London as head chef at their first foreign outpost — and one of the capital’s earliest high-end Israeli restaurants — The Palomar.
His success in London, he says, was largely down to his naivety. “I was lucky I was so clueless.” He’s probably the the only chef to try and hug and kiss the food critic AA Gill or to high-five with Jay Rayner. “My cluelessness made me adorable, but I was authentic about how I felt about hospitality and how people should feel when they go out to eat.”
Pascor Samneh Challah Credit @lateef.photography
Samneh challah is a shared experience at Pascor Photo: @lateef.photography
What’s important for diners, he says, is the whole experience, “how I want people to feel when they eat in my places”. He believes his inexperience made it easy for him to defy the then status quo about how a restaurant should feel.
In his view, it’s not just food that makes a successful restaurant — “It needs to have a bit of an extra oomph!” After four years heading the kitchen at The Palomar, Amedi returned to Israel. His plan was to start a restaurant consultancy — pulling together all the strands of what he believed the restaurant experience should be.
Being outside the kitchen, he says, gives him a better perspective. “It allows me to put my ego on the side. When I was a head chef, it was all about proving to everyone I was amazing and talented and all of that. But now I get the chance to take a step back and look at the best experience I can create for everyone — for my cooks, the waiters, the guests, the venue itself and the location it’s in.
“I’m there to make sure it’s going to work. To make sure it’s going to work every day, period, whether I’m there or not.”
Pascor Burnt aubergine Credit @lateef.photography
Smokey aubergine stars on the Levantine-influenced menu Photo: @lateef.photography
The pandemic saw him pivot to private catering for a time, but he emerged oozing creativity, constructing an art installation at Jerusalem’s Ha Miffal which included cooking “edible memories” to be eaten by his audience to a soundtrack which he also curated.
He takes this holistic approach to each of his restaurant projects, and, as a cinephile, likens himself to film director Quentin Tarantino.
“He sits at home and writes his scripts; he imagines the music; he also knows how to direct them, then he sits in the editing room. He touches all aspects and all the stages of creating a movie. That’s how I see the role I’m doing right now. I’m a theatre director and restaurants are living, breathing theatre.”
His most recent project is Kensington restaurant Pascor. Owner Tati Rurenko approached him as a consultant. His vision was a cool bar to attract regular visits from locals. “When I arrived there, I thought, why does Kensington not have any fun restaurants to sit in? It has a lot of high-end restaurants; it has fast food; it has ethnic restaurants but not anywhere to properly hang out. A place you can come three, four times a month without leaving your whole salary in the restaurant, where the music is cool.”
After meeting Rurenko, Amedi returned to Israel for five months to work with graphic designers on the 50-seater restaurant, to develop the menu and even the soundtrack. “I spent a month of my life creating the playlist.”
Pascor Cured Mackerel Credit @lateef.photography
Fresh flavours from Amedi Photo: @lateef.photography
He explains that the Middle Eastern-influenced menu is cooked over charcoal in an open kitchen — with that Palomar vibe. “The food is super-tasty, the wine list is interesting and diverse, and we have plenty of wine by the glass and Levantine wines.
“I worked very hard to make the whole experience complete. The bread and butter of the idea is finding what the people needed and they don’t have.”
Never one to sit still, he has already embarked on his next project — creating Jane restaurant at refurbished boutique hotel La Fonda in Marbella’s old town. The original was popular with the glitterati between the 1960s and 1980s and he’s looking to recreate that glamour.
He still returns to Pascor monthly to ensure his creation is running smoothly and also squeezes in the odd television appearance — “I’ve done Saturday Kitchen three times — I feel very natural on television.”
It’s no surprise with his passion for performing, and his all-encompassing vision.
Pascor
