The Mahaneh Yehuda area’s newest restaurant serves up gourmet street food.
By ARIEL DOMINIQUE HENDELMANCrave restaurant(photo credit: PR)
Chef-driven restaurants are not something we have a lot of in Jerusalem. But with the holy city’s evolving culinary scene come new forays into exciting gastronomic territory. Mahaneh Yehuda and its surrounding streets are perhaps the best example of this.The new kid on the block is Crave. Crave’s head chef, Todd Aarons, has had an illustrious career in the US, and is perhaps best known for creating the Tierra Sur restaurant at the Herzog Winery in California.Aarons’s personal journey is intertwined with his culinary one. “In Los Angeles, I grew up with Mexican and Asian flavors because the main populations of LA are Korean and Mexican,” he recalls. “My best friend to this day is Mexican, and I grew up eating in his house. My parents are Jews from New York.They loved deli and classic Ashkenazi food, so that weighed strongly on my food consciousness as well.”Aarons went to college for food science. He was always interested in artisanal projects like pickling and fermenting. He went on to the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco. “I liked expressing myself artistically in the culinary world,” he says.“I was always curious about where food comes from and what is the process. I love the artisanal qualities of making olives, for example.”After graduating culinary school, he moved to New York. Although he always felt connected to Israel because his father was a Zionist, Aarons was not yet religious. His ties to Judaism were mostly through food.“Those were still my pre-kosher days,” Aarons shares. “But growing up, holidays were all about the food: Jewish soul food. I remember having kishke for the first time when my dad took me to the butcher, and it was a revelation for me. That’s poor man’s sausage and it’s delicious. Making kishke nowadays would be the highest form of charcuterie because all of those peasant foods have come back onto our menus in certain ways.”He worked at Savoy in Manhattan for seven years.In the middle, he had a stint in Italy, where he further honed his culinary skills.
“At some point, I was looking for more spirituality, and I started coming back to Judaism,” he adds. “I had already gone through Buddhism and that whole shtick, but you sort of write off what you grew up with. Eventually, I found my way back and started learning more Torah. I left my position as the chef of the private dining room in Savoy to go to yeshiva in Israel for a year.“I wanted to get married at some point and raise a family successfully, and the year in yeshiva gave me guidelines on how to do that. It helped me set the course. The only thing I was worried about during the year was, how am I going to cook after this?” Aarons returned to New York from his year in Israel as a religious Jew, keeping kosher and Shabbat.He had dedicated a substantial part of his life to cooking, and was now faced with the challenge of integrating his career as a chef with his new, Jewish identity. It’s nearly impossible to work as a chef at a non-kosher restaurant and not work on Friday night. He helped a close friend open her restaurant.“I cooked the best pork chop as a kosher guy and I did it all from taste memory,” he exclaims.He began to explore the kosher restaurants in New York to get a taste for what kosher cuisine really had to offer. “I wanted to put a bullet in my head,” he says. “I could not relate. It was either quantity and not quality, or a lack of professionalism. I didn’t want to redefine myself as being someone who cooked kosher if people would think I stopped cooking good food. In those days, the biggest problem was product. You can’t compete as a kosher restaurant if you’re not getting good product, if your meat has no marbling or is too salty.”He subsequently opened his own kosher restaurant in New Jersey, called Mosaica. The restaurant received rave reviews from food critics and was by all accounts a success. But he was eager to continue growing in the kosher culinary world. When an offer came to open a restaurant in the Herzog Winery in Oxnard, California, he took it. The area in and around Oxnard is Mexican, Filipino and Japanese, and mostly agricultural. The rural setting posed the challenge of creating a restaurant to which people would travel. Aarons incorporated Mexican food into the menu and developed relationships with the farmers, thus enabling a very seasonal restaurant. Tierra Sur became known as a definitive kosher gastronomic experience, highly acclaimed by critics and diners.But after nine years, he was again ready for a change. “I loved that that was what kosher could be,” he says. “But I was looking for the next thing that I wanted to do.”He and his family decided to move to Israel. “I always felt something special about Israel, plus I had been watching the food scene here,” he adds.“I think Israel is like a young New Orleans of the Middle East, in the sense that it still needs another 100 years to come up with its own unique cuisine.It’s such a great melting pot of cultures. There are no rules; people come back from traveling with ideas and influences. Here, you shoot from the hip. There’s black garlic here, which is amazing. I thought I would be the guy to bring black garlic to Israel, but of course, five minutes after something is invented in the world, Israelis have it already!” Aarons’s newest culinary venture, Crave, is truly a culmination of his gastronomic journey. Co-partners Tzvi Maller, James Oppenheim and Yoni Van Leeuwen share Aarons’s vision of gourmet street food with Asian and Mexican influences that also happens to be kosher.“Our menu is devised on what we can get locally,” he says. “The menu being inspired by Mexican and Asian ingredients is really just the way I grew up.There’s also a homage to the Middle Eastern cookbook.Israelis travel to South America and Southeast Asia a lot, so those are flavors that they want. Israelis are adventurous. When we were doing tastings with Israelis, we wanted to make sure that the food wasn’t going to be too strange for them. They might wonder why we put rice in a laffa and accuse us of trying to give them less meat, but burritos are peasant food. What we cook, as far as the rice, makes it really substantial.”Substantial is an understatement. Crave offers kimchi fried rice with lamb bacon, as well as an option without the bacon. It also has coconut rice on the menu. Many mouthwatering sandwiches, such as the Reuben, feature meat that Crave smokes itself.“Crave is not a Mexican or Asian name,” Aarons points out. “It’s street food. Pastrami and hot dogs you can get in New York, so we do that, but we mix it in with Asian flavors. Israelis understand Mexican food completely: cilantro, spice. They get it.These are flavors and profiles that are relevant. The tonkatsu sliders came from Japanese street food.It’s originally a breaded pork cutlet served with tonkatsu sauce. The idea to fry the burger in panko came from a place that opened up in my neighborhood in LA called Schnitz Burger. I went in one day, expecting to find a breaded and fried schnitzel burger, but he meant he was selling schnitzel and burgers. I took it one step forward in my mind and thought fried burgers, man. I put the two ideas together.”The tonkatsu sliders are certainly a standout item on Crave’s menu. Aarons is adamant that when you fry it at the right temperature, the burger becomes crispy on the outside while locking in all of the moisture on the inside, enabling it to not be greasy or heavy.Crave’s teriyaki slider was born from the fact that not everyone will want fried. Aarons makes his own teriyaki glaze and potato buns.“I love pickling things,” he says. “For the teriyaki slider, we pickle mushrooms. Crave is fun food. We make everything ourselves. I got used to that once I went kosher. I remember years ago not being able to find salt cod, so I made my own. Some sauces you just can’t improve on, like Heinz ketchup, Tabasco or Sriracha; but pretty much everything else, we make ourselves.“Israel is a really ripe place for these ideas. It’s one thing to write it on the menu and another thing to really pull it off. I think we’re pulling it off.”For more information: www.facebook.com/gotcrave