Published: 3 May 2019
Last updated: 5 March 2024
He is not the first to find rich inspiration in the diversity of the cuisine of Israel and her neighbours, acknowledging the ongoing conflict about who came up with the genius of hummus, tabbouleh and falafel first. It is an argument unlikely to be settled anytime soon.
Ottolenghi may be the most persuasively charming ambassador for the food of the Middle East, but it’s worth remembering that Claudia Roden got there first, without becoming a TV celebrity, which is why by today’s standards, she is easily forgotten. Her cookbooks are still the benchmark of a deep and scholarly understanding of the food of the region.
Israeli food is proving to be a long-term flavour of the month – its appeal is partly in its healthy ingredients, its tang, texture and complexity, and also in the casual way it is eaten, often on the street, with your hands.
Murdoch Books recently published a new cookbook Tel Aviv by Haya Molcho, who has gathered up 150 recipes that appear on the menus of her Neni restaurants – the first in Vienna, and subsequently others across Europe, inspired by the vibrant café food culture of her native city. Many are traditional – like maqluba, the popular dish of upside-down meat, rice and vegetables found across the region.
Speaking by phone from Vienna, Molcho likened the appeal of Middle Eastern food to that of world music. “Today, people want diversity in everything. Like music, food is a conduit to memory and emotion. Both touch the soul.”
That may be, but Vienna is not an obvious choice for the kind of food experiment she launched there. Vienna is a city with a socially and gastronomically conservative and starchy reputation, and is still haunted by a Nazi past it failed to come to terms with and atone for in the way that Berlin (where there is also a thriving Neni restaurant) has managed to do.
“When I came 20 years ago, nothing interesting was happening here,” says Molcho, who moved to Vienna with her Israeli mime-artist husband, Samy Molcho. “That changed with Chancellor Bruno Kreisky (a Jewish socialist) and the opening of the UN office in 1980. Things began to move.”
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Even so, the quiet end of Naschmarkt where she opened, was male-dominated and she was viewed warily by other stall-holders until she brought new clients and a fresh buzz to the area.
The success of Neni (an acronym named after her four sons) did not come out of the blue, owing much to Molcho running a successful catering business in Vienna for several years. She was a known brand for those who wanted something different at their events. “I adapted the catering to the restaurant and offered the Viennese something unfamiliar, which was communal eating and shared food, exactly as we eat in our own family,” she says, adding that she was doing so “long before Ottolenghi (of whom she is a great admirer)”.
“He did it in a mega-city, London, so it got a lot of attention, whereas we were doing it on a much smaller scale in a place that was not on the food map in the same way,” she says.
Her son, Nuriel, who is responsible for marketing and PR, joins her on the line to point out that today half of Neni’s revenue comes from its hugely popular supermarket range of hummus, babaganoush and salads, available in Austria, Germany and Switzerland.
“We are proud of our ingredients, we make excellent hummus because we use the best tahini,” she says. “It is expensive, but such a versatile ingredient, you can do both sweet and savoury dishes with it.” Her other most important ingredients are zhug, a coriander chilli paste “we use to add heat and intensity” and tomatoes and eggplant “which I cannot live without”.
With an acute awareness of the impact of migration, Molcho is concerned at the backlash against refugees she is witnessing across Europe. Without being overtly political, Neni expresses its social conscience by feeding refugees from Syria “to give them a taste of home when they come somewhere where everything is unfamiliar”, says Nuriel.
The brand, which has 10 branches across Europe and employs a staggering 300 people, has plans to expand to other cities and has a new cookbook in the pipeline. Neni may not claim to have the solution to world peace, but at least they are bringing people to the table.
Photo: Haya Molcho and Neni staff member (Youtube)
