Honey - Honey & Co: the bookbook

To my sabba Manny and my savta Cissie I miss you every day

Sarit

To my savta Esther and my sabba Yehiel for all that was on and around your big table

Itamar

I got hunger.

Alice Russell

We are a couple. We met ten years ago in a restaurant kitchen in Israel, where we were both born. Sarit had just come back from London, having trained there as a chef and worked at the Orrery for two years, as part of the team that got them their Michelin star, working in the classic French brigade system, where hierarchy, discipline and meticulous cooking are the only way. These values clashed a bit with the hippy, happy, laissez-faire attitude of the Israeli cooking culture. Trying to get a bunch of Israeli know-it-all chefs to act like Swiss watchmakers was never going to work. I thought she was highly strung and uptight. We married a year later.

We were not an obvious match. I was a skinny 23-year-old beach bum. I thought I knew everything there was to know about cooking and food, but I always preferred sleeping or reading to working. She, a plump 24-year-old war machine with a Bolshevik work ethic and a spreadsheet for a brain, intent on a stellar career, had (still has) an endless interest in cooking and food, and a soft spot for beaches.

We spent a lot of time together at work and, by chance, we lived a couple of streets away from each other in Tel Aviv. We had a lot of mutual friends from the restaurant and we became close. Sarit would give me a ride to and from work in her decrepit Subaru. On Saturday morning shed have to call me before she left the house to make sure I was awake for my shift. We would go to lunch together sometimes, or for a drink, and would bump into each other at the local video store (such things still existed back then).

Tel Aviv is a hot, sticky place from May till October. The only relief to be had from the heat of the eastern Med is on the beach, day or night. One such night, sweaty after slaving over a six-compartment pasta boiler and a 12-top gas range, we got in the car and decided to hit the beach on our way home. Six months later we moved in together.

The beginning was all about introducing each other to our favorite foods and places. I took my wife-to-be to Jerusalem, my hometown, to Rochelles Sandwichesa hole-in-the-wall canteen where an ancient Tunisian woman and her daughter cooked the most delicious stews, soups and mezze; and to Philadelphiaa Jordanian restaurant in the old town of East Jerusalem where they serve such exotic dishes as pigeon stuffed with pine nut rice, and rabbit cooked in yogurt and raisins; and I made her try Jerusalems best falafel, which she sneered at but secretly enjoyed.

In Tel Aviv I took her to Big Itzik, the best kebab shop in Jaffa, and told her how one day I would open the best kebab shop in the world; and we went to the Bulgarian grill by the beach, where wed have eggplant salad and taramasalata and kofta kebab seasoned with kashkaval cheese, and we would reek of garlic for days afterwards. Together we went looking for Eden, a famed Persian restaurant tucked in among the sex shops and brothels of Tel Avivs red light district, that served the lightest, most fragrant chicken dumplings and herby stews.