- [Genevieve] We didn't open a Middle Eastern
restaurant to mimic exactly what happens
or what you would find in the Middle East.
We opened a restaurant to bring people the flavors
of our backgrounds in the Middle East, but in our way.
- [Ori] It's the flavors that bring you back to childhood,
but then the techniques and the execution
is a little bit different than what they would be doing
in the Middle East.
- [Genevieve] Being in Los Angeles with a huge melting pot
allows you to do that mix.
It's our perspective of the Middle East.
- [Genevieve] We met at Laterza 13 years ago.
- [Ori] She was the hostess there, I was a line cook.
I was sitting outside with all the line cooks,
my first chance to have a conversation with her,
I said the dumbest thing on the planet.
- He asked me, "Are you Jewish?"
And I'm all, "No."
I learned later, Israelis are very straightforward.
They don't do small talk of getting to know you.
And I said, "Why?" And he said, "Because you look like
one of the beautiful women from my country."
And I was like, "oh, God, I have to go."
And I turned around and left,
it's like I am not sitting outside with these guys.
- [Ori] Eight months later, we started talking,
and we met up for coffee, and after that
she saw something different in me.
And now we have a beautiful girl named Saffron.
She's my toughest critic.
- I am horrible.
Everyone will be like, "That's perfect,"
and I'll be like, "Maybe it needs two less raisins."
I'll be the one who makes that tiny comment
and he'll be like, "Really?"
- [Ori] So I know that the real answer is if Genevieve
likes it or not, because she's very honest,
and we're very honest with each other because we wanna
create the best product possible.
There's a place in the old city in Tel Aviv,
it's called the Abu Hasan, and as a kid we would go there
at 11 o'clock, and by 12:30, there's no more hummus.
- When we're there, they're like,
"Let's go get breakfast, it's 9."
I'm like, "Who wants to eat a giant bowl of hummus at 9am?"
- Great for hangovers.
For me, hummus is very important on the menu.
I wanted it to taste like that bowl of hummus back home.
You know, I probably cooked 300 pots of garbanzo beans
to the point that I actually felt
like it was very, very similar.
To me, it's just all about
the quality of the beans, quality of tahini,
and it's just very, very pure, and every time I taste it,
it reminds me of something that I had as a kid,
and that's when I know it's perfect.
Alongside that, hummus is a pita bread
that took me a really long time to perfect as well.
Those were the two things when I opened the restaurant
where I had to really focus on,
because you can see flaws in something when it's so simple.
So the Lamb Neck Shawarma
was the last dish that I put on the menu,
'cause it took a really long time to perfect.
I remember when me and my chefs tested it out,
it was one of those moments that,
when we took the first bite,
all of us just like stared at each other and we knew that
we nailed it, and there was silence in the room,
and all five or six of us just
put arms over each other and we started dancing.
Shawarma to me is, my favorite part is the crispy edges.
As a kid, I would ask the guy that was slicing the shawarma
on the spit, I would say,
"I want all the crispy bits, all the fat parts on the top,
because all those parts have the most flavor."
So what we do with the Lamb Neck Shawarma
is we slow-roast it for 14 to 16 hours,
so it's moist on the inside, super crispy on the outside,
and then it accompanies different things
like bread, pickles, tahini, like a fermented chili sauce,
and you basically create your own sandwich,
just like a really good dish
to have together with all your friends,
and that's what we try to do at this restaurant.
We want people to eat together.
- I always have this constant inner battle
of wanting to put the things on the menu
that I love the most and trying to put things on the menu
that fit the restaurant.
So I knew that licorice was a component that I could use,
they use it as a natural sugar a lot in the Middle East.
A lot of Americans, when they think of licorice,
they'd rather have a Red Vine, including me.
This dessert is appealing to a larger percent
of the population that only likes black licorice.
I made an ice cream, a really silky, creamy ice cream that
isn't biting, but it has that
floral deliciousness of licorice.
And then I chose muscovado because it's very caramel-y,
and I wanted to bring out the caramel notes
that naturally occur in licorice.
Then I coated it with a caramelized white chocolate,
so the licorice is there, but it has
so much around it that kind of pillows it.
I love it when people go,
"I don't like black licorice but I can eat this."
Bavel is actually from the First Testament,
it's very biblical.
We know it as Babylon or Babel, but we like that word because
it was from a time before the Middle East and that whole
Babylonian region was separated into different regions.
- [Ori] The people were trying to reach the heavens,
to reach God, and that's where the
word "babbling" comes from, because they couldn't understand
each other and they couldn't work together to reach him,
and that was the separation in the Middle East.
- [Genevieve] And because we, our food is not from
one country, we were trying to figure out a way
to call our restaurant
that was encompassing of all the regions we were using.
- What we're trying to do here
is bring all those cultures back and just cook
one cuisine from the region.