A taste of Israel comes to the City of Brotherly Love

 Philadelphia: It means "brotherly love." In the city there is a restaurant called Zahav, which is Hebrew for "gold." The restaurant serves typical Israeli food prepared by Michael Solomonov, a trained chef who opened the restaurant. Michael Solomonov was awakened to his Israeli roots when his brother was shot and fatally wounded by a sniper while on duty with the IDF. Michael, who had been cooking at a popular Italian restaurant, garnered his own strengths and experience to open "Zahav," and honor his brother, if not all Israelis, whose lives are constantly on the line for daring to live in the Jewish state.

Chef Turns to Israeli Food To Honor Memory Of Brother

(NY Times) MICHAEL SOLOMONOV was cooking Italian food here at Vetri when he heard that his younger brother, David, was about to get a furlough before being released from the Israeli Army in 2003.

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Vetri was closed for a few weeks while his brother was on leave, so he flew to Israel to spend time with David. “We went to the beach a lot, discoed in an orange grove,” he said, “ate at a lot of different places, hung out at a lot of places.” About a month after he returned home, Mr. Solomonov got a call. David had volunteered for duty on Yom Kippur to let someone else go home. In an apple orchard near the Lebanese border, he had been killed by snipers.

A couple of months later, at his brother’s army base, Mr. Solomonov held a memorial dinner that he says changed the direction of his life. He might stay in Philadelphia, he realized, but his roots were in Israel. “Until I visited that place,” he said, “I had no intention of cooking Israeli food. But, after my brother’s death, the path I was going to take became clear.”

He and Steven Cook, an investment banker turned chef, decided to open an Israeli restaurant with food native to that land as well as dishes that were brought there by many streams of immigrants. They called it Zahav, which means gold, evoking the sun sparkling on Jerusalem stone, like the limestone they installed on the floors and walls when they opened three years ago in a mini-mall right between Society Hill and Independence Mall.

“I felt that through this restaurant I could share the experience of my brother’s life with everyone,” he added.


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