Eyal Shani

Eyal Tuvia Mordechai Shani was born in Jerusalem in January 1959 and attended Beit HaYeled elementary school and a gymnasium.[1] A ninth-generation Jerusalemite, he later made his home in Tel Aviv.[3][7] He studied cinematography and became a self-trained chef.[7]

Shani has traced his interest in food to his vegan grandfather, who lived upstairs and served him raw foods, juices, and salads.[7] Visits together to markets and vineyards helped him develop an appreciation for fruit and vegetables.[7] He has also recalled an early, less successful encounter with professional cooking during his military service: after a missile accident damaged his hearing and led him to leave combat service, he asked to work in the army kitchen despite having little cooking knowledge.[8] In his account, diners initially threw his food out of the windows.[8]

After military service, Shani traveled in Europe for two years and ran an Israeli shawarma business in Zwolle, in the Netherlands.[7][8] On returning to Israel, he spent a year in seclusion on a friend's farm in the north.[8] He remembered a barbecue there, involving porcupines cooked over a fire and wine shared with friends, as an awakening that helped persuade him to become a cook.[7][8]

In 1988, after working as a house painter, Shani obtained a job at the restaurant of Hotel HaSharon in Herzliya Pituah despite his limited cooking experience.[7] He recalled becoming sous-chef within six months and consulting a Julia Child cookbook that he kept in his car.[7][8] His early professional work also included the Kankan restaurant in Ayalon Mall.[1]

In 1989, Shani opened Oceanus, a 24-seat Jerusalem restaurant, with investment from Reuven Gross.[7][8] Its dishes included bouillabaisse, focaccia, fish, and salad; Shani recalled operating with seven tables and seven kitchen workers.[7][8] A favorable review of its bouillabaisse and seafood platter brought a large influx of customers.[8]

At Oceanus, Shani experimented with preparations unfamiliar to him, including seafood grilled over charcoal.[8] A Bedouin employee made a flatbread that Shani called focaccia, although he later described it as closer to Iraqi pita or Bedouin bread.[8] He also recalled developing fish carpaccio and beginning to create menus after a trip to Italy.[8] In reflecting on this period, he associated the restaurant with his discovery of sage in the Jerusalem hills, village stone ovens, and olive oil, and with his ambition to create a local Israeli kitchen.[9]

Oceanus operated in Jerusalem for 11 years, and a Herzliya branch also opened.[7][1] Both Oceanus restaurants closed in 2000.[9] Ocean in Tel Aviv followed and operated for two years.[7]

Shani and director Shahar Segal presented the Channel 8 program Food for Thought in 2004, with Shani cooking dishes inspired by each episode's subject and guests.[2] Shani and his partner, writer Miri Hanokh, subsequently wrote a food column for Haaretz.[2] His television work also included Where Is the Food? and MasterChef Israel, which he joined as a judge from its first season.[2] The MasterChef role made him widely known in Israel.[10]

Shani and Segal opened HaSalon in Tel Aviv in February 2008, serving modern interpretations of Israeli cuisine with Italian influences.[1][7] North Abraxas followed in 2009 as a bistro associated with HaSalon.[1] The first Miznon opened on Tel Aviv's Ibn Gabirol Street in January 2011, serving dishes from Shani's other menus inside pita; Port Said followed a year later.[1] Shani explained that Miznon was intended to make his cooking accessible to people unable to afford expensive restaurant meals.[1]

In 2018, Shani opened Malka in Tel Aviv, his first kosher restaurant.[11] It aimed to bring contemporary Tel Aviv dining to kosher customers, using locally grown produce and free-range animals.[11] Malka also continued its predecessor restaurant's program of employing and training young people with special needs.[11] By 2022, his Israeli restaurants included HaSalon, Malka, North Abraxas, Port Said, Romano, and multiple Miznon branches.[10]

During food-assistance efforts in October 2023, Shani organized food and essential supplies for soldiers through North Abraxas and Port Sa'id.[12] He also hosted families from the southern kibbutz Karmia at his Tel Aviv restaurant Dvora.[12]

Miznon expanded from Tel Aviv to Paris, Vienna, and Melbourne before opening at New York City's Chelsea Market in 2018.[7] Shani recalled that, after returning to Israel from an earlier abandoned New York restaurant venture, he began experimenting with breaking culinary conventions.[13] Putting his food inside pita became the basis of Miznon, whose first Tel Aviv menu he said he wrote in four minutes on the night before opening.[13] At the time of his 2018 New York opening, he said his Israeli restaurants served about 3,500 people daily.[13]

The Chelsea Market restaurant was the seventh Miznon location.[14] Its menu combined Israeli street food with New York-oriented fillings: corned beef and pickles, lobster and crème fraîche, and cheeseburgers appeared inside pita.[14] Other dishes included flattened potato with sour cream and whole roasted cauliflower.[14] By 2018, Shani had more than a dozen restaurants worldwide, including establishments in Israel, Paris, Vienna, Melbourne, and New York.[4]

Two further New York restaurants—a second Miznon and a HaSalon—were being planned in 2019 as his 15th and 16th restaurants worldwide.[3] The proposed Miznon address was 161 West 72nd Street on the Upper West Side, while HaSalon was planned for Hell's Kitchen.[3] Miznon, whose name means “cafeteria” in Hebrew, focused on pita sandwiches; HaSalon, meaning “the living room,” offered an upscale restaurant format.[3]

At that time, HaSalon in Tel Aviv operated on Wednesdays and Thursdays with a daily-changing Mediterranean menu.[3] Rack of lamb and tomato pasta were recurring classics.[3] Its open kitchen allowed guests to watch their meals being cooked, supporting a relaxed experience intended to feel more like a party than a formal meal.[15]

During the pandemic, Shani opened Naked Tomato in New York.[7] It served a single tomato for $24, inspired by a tomato he encountered in an upstate New York greenhouse.[7] He explained the restaurant's approach through a linguistic analogy: “If a dish is a sentence, my culinary sentence is one word and that is the subject,” arguing that sauces should not mask the tomato itself.[7]

Shmoné opened on West Eighth Street in New York in May 2022 and received one Michelin star in November 2023.[5][7] Nadav Greenberg was its operating chef at the time of the award.[5] The restaurant offered a new menu daily and an open kitchen, sourcing vegetables from Union Square Greenmarket and chicken from a small Pennsylvania farm.[7] Its menu grouped dishes into food from the land, food from the sea, animals, and desserts, with offerings including sabich, chicken kebab, and yogurt with sumac.[5]

In 2025, Shmoné retained its star for a third consecutive year.[6] By then, Orian Shapira, who had come from HaSalon in Tel Aviv and developed within Shani's restaurant group, led its kitchen.[6] Shani praised her knife work, comparing her hand movements to those of a dancer.[6] He described the restaurant's deliberately unruly presentation, including steak served on paper and dessert placed on a cloth napkin over the remnants of the meal, as a way to let diners experience food without unnecessary decoration.[6]

In a 2026 interview, Shani described Shmoné as a 70-seat restaurant serving 160–180 diners nightly across two and a half services, working with 140 ingredients and 110 suppliers.[16] He said he had not pursued Michelin recognition because he valued creative freedom and wanted to give diners happiness and a sense of life, but acknowledged that the star brought recognition and changed how people viewed him.[16]

Shani describes his cooking as centered on the character of individual ingredients.[4] At Naked Tomato in New York, he argued that tomato should be served without sauces that warp, cover, or mask it.[7] His roasted cauliflower uses a similarly spare method: briefly boiling it, then roasting it with olive oil and coarse salt.[17]

At Miznon, this ingredient-centered approach is presented as higher-end cuisine in the form of Israeli street food.[4] Fillings range from carefully cooked vegetables to large cheeseburgers, with fish and corned beef also appearing on menus.[4][3] Shani has described pita itself as an active part of the preparation: “The pita is a genius pocket. The pita knows how to do things chefs do not know how to do.”[4]

Whole roasted cauliflower became one of his best-known dishes.[4] A reported family connection links its technique to his business partner's mother, who regularly roasted whole cauliflower for Shabbat.[18] The dish became a hit at North Abraxas, and Israeli-American chef Alon Shaya later helped popularize it at his New Orleans restaurant Shaya.[18] A preparation associated with Shani's “baby cauliflower” involves blanching it in salted water, then oiling and charring it in a wood-fired oven.[19]

In 2018, Food & Wine selected Shani's roasted baby cauliflower among its best dishes of the year.[17] Shani said the dish was being served at Malka and 14 of his restaurants in Israel and abroad, and used the occasion to advocate eating more vegetables and less meat.[17]

Shani's whole roasted cauliflower helped spread a style of vegetable-centered restaurant cooking beyond his own establishments.[19] The trend was taken up by Jamie Oliver, Rachael Ray, and Giada De Laurentiis, while the dish became associated with modern Israeli cooking.[19] Miznon's international expansion also carried his combination of elaborate fillings and the familiar pita format to cities outside Israel.[4][7]

A 2013 essay in the Jewish Review of Books places Shani alongside Haim Cohen, Erez Komorovsky, and Ezra Kedem as chefs who had “actively reinvented” Israel's “cuisine-in-the-making.”[20] The essay interprets their work as drawing on family food traditions, Mediterranean and Middle Eastern sources, and French and Italian techniques.[20] It associates the movement with fresh, seasonal ingredients and, at least in aspiration, indigenous wild plants and heirloom varieties, framing Israeli cuisine as a negotiation between multicultural influences and local terroir.[20]

Shani's financial difficulties led to bankruptcy and creditor proceedings. Globes reported that he was declared bankrupt in 2011 and that a court-approved proposal required payment of NIS 1.45 million plus half of his media income. After a conditional 45-day imprisonment order was issued in December 2012, a 2013 settlement called for a total of NIS 4 million, described as 100% of his debts.[9]

In interviews, Shani attributed the collapse to several factors, including the cost of the Herzliya Oceanus, debts connected to a partner's Jerusalem Cinematheque café investment, and prolonged insecurity in Jerusalem while he continued employing staff.[1][9] These explanations were his accounts of responsibility. Mako reported in 2014 that he had completed repayment to creditors, and Ynet later reported that he said he had paid the debts in full.[1][8]

Shani's assessments of his culinary influence have also been expansive: in 2023 he called himself “the godfather of Israeli cuisine” and characterized the cuisine as having begun “without roots in any tradition.”[7] These are his interpretations of culinary history and his own contribution, not settled historical conclusions.[7]