From the acclaimed chefs behind award-winning Los Angeles restaurant Bavel comes a gorgeous cookbook featuring personal stories and more than eighty recipes that celebrate the diversity of Middle Eastern cuisines.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST COOKBOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TIME OUT • “Ori and Genevieve manage to pull off a style of cooking that is both familiar (and therefore comforting) but also new (and therefore fresh and exciting). This is the sort of food I could live on.” — Yotam Ottolenghi
When chef Ori Menashe and pastry chef Genevieve Gergis opened their first Los Angeles restaurant, Bestia, the city fell in love. By the time they launched their second restaurant, Bavel, the love affair had expanded to cooks and food lovers nationwide. Bavel, the cookbook, invites home cooks to explore the broad and varied cuisines of the Middle East through fragrant spice blends; sublime zhougs, tahini, labneh, and hummus; rainbows of crisp-pickled vegetables; tender, oven-baked flatbreads; fall-off-the-bone meats and tagines; buttery pastries and tarts; and so much more.
Bavel — pronounced bah-VELLE, the Hebrew name for Babel — is a metaphor for the myriad cultural, spiritual, and political differences that divide us. The food of Bavel tells the many stories of the countries defined as “the Middle East.” These recipes are influenced by the flavors and techniques from all corners of the region, and many, such as Tomato with Smoked Harissa, Turmeric Chicken with Toum, and Date-Walnut Tart, are inspired by Menashe’s Israeli upbringing and Gergis’s Egyptian roots. Bavel celebrates the freedom to cook what we love without loyalty to any specific country, and represents a world before the region was divided into separate nations. This is cooking without borders.
Cookbook
Bavel: Modern Recipes Inspired by the Middle East
January 13, 2021
Discussion Questions
Through lush photographs, personal reminiscences, and delicious recipes, Bavel tells the intertwined stories of the creation of one of Los Angeles’s hottest restaurants and the history of its owners, chef Ori Menashe and pastry chef Genevieve Gergis. Though both were born in the United States, their ancestries link them to the Middle East — Menashe to Israel, where he spent his teenage years, and Gergis to Egypt, from where her father, a Coptic Christian, emigrated. The subtle mixing of flavors and identities, as well as the effective place-making that emerge from the pages of this book are an appetizing jumble, like a pita sandwich whose components meld. The focus is on Bavel, the couple’s Middle Eastern restaurant in L.A.’s Art District, which they created by weaving together their professional experience working in European restaurants with their memories of tastes and travels through the foods and the countries of the Middle East. The restaurant’s menu is the basis for this evocative collection of recipes that are unique but that resonate collectively with the cultures and climates of Los Angeles and Tel Aviv, with the food of the past and the trends of the present. The book is a pleasure to flip through and to cook from. “We wanted to showcase how complex these flavors can be, how deft use of spices and fire can create something ten times as powerful as any French sauce,” they write in the introduction. They have succeeded.
Jewish literature inspires, enriches, and educates the community.
Help support the Jewish Book Council.