Jews everywhere connect to their people, their culture and their faith in many ways, but one of the biggest — and tastiest — is through food. For Chef Alon Shaya, food has always played an important role in bringing people together and sustaining and enhancing Jewish life in the home and around the world, much like Jewish Federation of Greater Kansas City.
That’s why Jewish Federation recently welcomed James Beard Award-winning Chef Shaya for a special event that highlighted the chef’s personal story, his culinary talents (working with celebrated local Jewish chef and caterer Lon Lane to create and execute the menu) and stories and memories from a book he never expected to write in the way he did.
Shaya’s cuisine has ranged from Italian and American, to Middle Eastern and even unconventional Jewish (think bacon kugel). And if this Jewish Philadelphian who calls New Orleans his home now had gone the traditional route, he would have thrown together a book of those innovative recipes and called it good.
Instead, Shaya charted his personal and family journey in his book, “Shaya: An Odyssey of Food, My Journey Back to Israel.” The cookbook/biography charts his course of Jewish identity and purpose from his childhood memories of his Bulgarian-Israeli grandmother’s recipes to a high school home ec teacher who inspired him to take life seriously with cuisine, to a globe-trotting culinary career that’s taken him all over the world.
It’s not the book he would have guessed he’d write.
“I’ve never been comfortable with vulnerability,” he said, but the book’s writing wound up digging deep into all of his inspirations and Jewish touch points. “It was such a therapeutic experience for me. The process of writing the book helped me truly understand who I was.”
Shaya describes how he learned to cook from his grandmother at a very young age. She drew from the Bulgarian recipes of her home country, then took advantage of the ingredients and spices from the local markets in Israel.
“I remember her food so vividly,” he said. “She made use all of the markets, starting in Jaffa, but then also in Bat Yam where my mom and I were living. Her cooking was influenced by the markets and cultures: Moroccan, Turkish, Syrian, Lebanese.”
Shaya doesn’t see himself as a chef devoted just to one particular cuisine, region or style. Like his grandmother, he’s drawn from the places he’s called home and worked: Israel, Italy, Las Vegas, St. Louis, New Orleans and more.
“It took my entire life to find my identity through food, to channel my roots,” said Shaya, which is perhaps why the cookbook became so personal and includes so much of Shaya’s own history.
The past few years have seen a lot of personal change and growth for Shaya. He fought through a legal battle with a former business partner over ownership of his first restaurants. Then he opened two more restaurants exclusively his own: Saba in New Orleans and Savta in Denver (names meaning “Grandpa” and “Grandma” in Hebrew). The names honor the grandparents in his and his wife’s lives.
The restaurants are just a part of the business Shaya and his wife are building Pomegranate Hospitality. He’s also started a nonprofit to inspire new cooks with the help of the high school home ec teacher, Donna Barnett, who inspired him to turn his life around, get a job and go to cooking school.
Like his open-minded cooking philosophy, Shaya’s vision of for-profit, nonprofit and culinary arts is big enough that he hasn’t locked it down, he said.
“It’s infinite, there’s no beginning or end,” he said of the ways business, food, family, Jewishness and community wind together in his life. “Every day, every year, things happen in my life that I use in one way or another.”
Shaya views his cooking much like his Jewish identity: a deep look at history and the past paired with a hopeful look to the future. It’s a recipe for Jewish identity that can help sustain and enhance Jewish life at home and around the world, just like the Jewish Federation.
Brendan Howard is a writer and editor living in Olathe, Kansas.