Nashville, the city of rhinestone cowboys and twanging guitars, doesn’t seem an obvious target for Israeli fare. Yet hummus, shwarma and pita are going down a storm at Butcher and Bee, one of eight restaurants owned by Israeli, Michael Shemtov.
The first of his eateries to serve modern Israeli-inspired fare was in Charleston, South Carolina: “Butcher & Bee actually started as a sandwich shop there in 2009 rather than the full-blown restaurant it became in Nashville,” explains Shemtov at this second branch, where the restaurant has the comfortable, relaxed feel of a neighbourhood joint. It was this vibe which persuaded him to expand the eatery which owes so much to the land of his childhood.
“In Charleston we always served sabich and other dishes I grew up with at Butcher & Bee, but we also have a café, The Daily, where breakfast pitas and tahini shakes are on the menu,” he explains.
While Shemtov has brought a relaxed Middle Eastern-inspired menu to the American Deep South, Israeli-born Alon Shaya was the first to make Israeli food a fine dining choice here.
He started serving up hummus bowls topped with sticky, slow-cooked lamb with pillowy pita bread at his eponymously named restaurant in New Orleans in 2015. After splitting from his former business partner, he left Shaya to open Saba in the same neighbourhood earlier this year.
At Shaya, he received a James Beard award for Best Chef in the South in 2015 and his restaurant was named Best New Restaurant in 2016. He has inspired a number of Middle Eastern-influenced eateries in the southern USA.
Why has the food genre been so popular? Shaya believes the steamy temperatures the region enjoys may have had something to do with it: “In a hot climate it feels good to eat cucumbers, tomatoes and lemon.”
Shemtov, whose Butcher & Bee restaurant was voted best new restaurant in Nashville in 2016 says he believes the cuisine’s attraction is its different flavours: “This is not the kind of food they knew — but I think that was the whole point. I think southerners just love fresh, acidic flavours which cut through all the grease and fried food they’re used to.”
The craze for this kind of food has rapidly spread, and a number of street food-inspired Israeli eateries have sprung up. In Atlanta, Todd Ginsberg’s Yalla is the go-to place for hummus, sabich and shwarma, and Kameel Srouji cooks the Arab-Israeli food he grew up with in Nazareth at Aviva by Kameel.
In Charlotte, North Carolina, Yafo Kitchen is pulling in the crowds with organic hummus and pickled cauliflower, and at Asheville, Baba Nahum has brought za’atar, tahini and sabich.
The fresh, zingy salads, smoky grilled aubergines, feta and tahini of the Middle Eastern menu are a far cry from fried chicken, biscuits and gravy, sausage and grits — what Shemtov describes as the traditional “brown food” of the south.
There are however, he adds, some common areas: “We have a lot of peas in the south which can be used in the same way as chickpeas; we make green falafel from varieties of which the local farmers have excess, to support them, and that goes down very well.”
Unlike Shaya, Shemtov is not a chef, but when he employed Bryan Weaver, who already had great chef credentials, to create a sophisticated menu for Butcher & Bee in Nashville he started by taking the American to Israel. “We did Tel Aviv, of course, but we also went to Jerusalem to stay with my relatives and hit Machneyuda, up to Akko to see what the incredible Uri Jeremias was doing at Uri Buri, and Haifa before coming back to hit some more Tel Aviv restaurants.”
Weaver takes his influences from modern Israeli food, adding black garlic to tahini; dressing up grilled aubergine with pine nuts and pickled cherries and substituting mango and pineapple for tomatoes in Israeli salad in spring, until the tomatoes are ripe enough to take their place.
At Shaya’s new restaurant, Saba, the wood-fired pita oven and main-course hummus bowls are still a fixture, but the menu has been augmented by dishes evoking family memories (Saba means grandfather) others from travels in diverse outposts of Jewish cuisine from Morocco to Turkey and yet more, which offer a haimish take on the kind of dishes modern restaurants all over the world are serving now — think wild mushroom with soft poached egg and crispy chicken skin.
He does not feel he was the inspiration for popularising Israeli food across the south though: “I don’t think my history in New Orleans has contributed to other people opening restaurants. I think southerners are inherently soulful when it comes to food and enjoy tradition in cooking. Israeli food really embodies those principles, and I encourage any chef with a story of food to tell to keep cooking.”
