How WWII Stories Inspired Alon Shaya’s New Cookbook

Chef Alon Shaya says that as a kid, he wasn’t just in with the wrong crowd — he was the wrong crowd. But with the help of a home ec teacher, he turned his life around and became one of the most successful chefs in the South. Still, it took him a long time to rediscover the food of his childhood and return to his roots in his restaurants, a process that involved his own family’s inherited recipes.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Pashman?

  There's nothing quite like Aruba. The white sand beaches are truly unlike anything you've seen. But what really stands out is the food. Because Aruba's not like other Caribbean islands. French pastries, Spanish paella, Peruvian barbecue, papardelle that has no business being that good that far from Florence. Not to mention the local fair. Aruba's food scene pulls you in with its astonishing variety of cuisines and beyond satisfies you with its unexpected flavors. So plan your escape to culinary delight at aruba.com. Your taste buds will thank you. Start the day strong with Quaker protein products. Quaker makes it easy and delicious to get a good source of protein. No matter what the day has in store, Quaker protein products give you a variety of ways to reach your protein goals.

• 0:45Dan Pashman?

  Oatmeal, granola, bars and rice snacks in flavors you already love, like maple and brown sugar and blueberries and cream. Quaker protein helps fuel you to start whatever's next. Get your protein with Quaker, available at a store near you.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  Serious XM Podcasts.

• 1:10Dan Pashman?

  This episode contains explicit language.

• 1:14Dan Pashman?

  Do you have a lamb chop in a cocktail party, eating a lamb chop by hand strategy?

• 1:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, my strategy is don't have a strategy and just go for it and enjoy it. And like, you know, get all the meat off the bone, dirty up a bunch of cocktail napkins.

• 1:30Dan Pashman?

  But getting all the meat off the bone a lot is one of the challenges because you get that first bite, that's the big hunk of meat that comes right off.

• 1:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36Dan Pashman?

  But then there's still a lot left.

• 1:38Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:38Dan Pashman?

  And now you gotta kind of, now you're really like tearing at the bone.

• 1:41Speaker 02

  You're gnawing. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, but you know, if, if you picture yourself as like a cute dog, you know, you'll be fine. I don't know if everyone else will picture you that way, but that's the way I picture myself.

• 2:00Dan Pashman?

  This is The Sporkful. It's not for foodies, it's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsess about food. We'll learn more about people. And I have a major announcement about something that has been in the works for a long time. And I am so excited to finally be able to share it with you. Ready? The Sporkful is now on YouTube. Yes, you can now watch the show in addition to listening to it. We'll be releasing about half our episodes on YouTube. At the beginning, it'll be a mix of recent ones and some of our favorites from the past year or so. Our show with Carla Lali is up now. We'll be dropping another one every week. And we still got a few more surprises for you on the YouTube channel. Of course, you can put the show on YouTube and still just listen.

• 2:44Dan Pashman?

  But the one thing I will ask you to do is to go to our YouTube page and like and subscribe. I've always wanted to say that. Smash that like button. That'll really help us out and it will ensure that you don't miss the other exciting things we have in store. The page is youtube.com/the-sporkful. We'll also put a link in the show description. Again, youtube.com/the-sporkful. Please subscribe now. All right, here we go. This week, I'm talking with chef Alon Shaya. He owns three restaurants, Saba and Safta's Table in New Orleans and Safta in Denver. Safta and Saba are the Hebrew words for grandma and grandpa, a nod to Alon's Israeli roots. He also has a new cookbook out entitled Memories of a Good Meal: Recipes of Resilience Inspired by Stories of World War II Survival.

• 3:29Dan Pashman?

  We'll dig into some of those stories later in the show. Now, I haven't yet had the pleasure of eating at any of Alon's restaurants, but I did eat his cooking at a pop-up he did in Vegas a few years ago called Safta 1964. Alon, imagine what it would have been like if his grandmother had owned a pink convertible and driven it out to Vegas to open a restaurant in 1964. This mythical restaurant would feature her cooking mixed with some Vegas flair. You know, like what if she had taken her handwritten recipes for things like matzo ball soup and added shaved truffles? Or made schnitzel with Dover sole? The food was incredible and I really loved the story behind it. I was eating alone, but I couldn't stop texting my wife Janie about the experience. Today, Alon's cooking is rooted in Israeli cuisine with his own twists. But that wasn't always the case.

• 4:14Dan Pashman?

  It took him a long time to get to a place where he felt comfortable with who he was.

• 4:19Dan Pashman?

  Alon was born in Israel and moved to Philadelphia when he was five. His parents divorced soon after the move. And as a kid, he struggled.

• 4:26Speaker 02

  As a five-year-old with a mom working two jobs, still learning English, feeling really like a fish out of water, I developed this like huge identity crisis. I just felt kind of the need to assimilate as quickly as possible.

• 4:45Dan Pashman?

  There were moments of relief from these feelings, though.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  When my Saba and Safta would come and visit, the house smelled like home again. And she would cook all of these delicious foods that made me feel like everything was gonna be okay, like I could be myself again.

• 5:04Dan Pashman?

  Like what are some of the dishes that stand out?

• 5:06Speaker 02

  Well, one of them was lutonica. And she's from Bulgaria. And lutonica is this like roasted pepper and eggplant and tomato dip or spread. She would take the peppers and eggplants and she'd char them over the gas flame in the kitchen. I have this very vivid memory being like seven years old and opening the front door to my house, coming home from school and smelling those peppers and eggplants cooking in the house. And I credit that moment with me falling in love with food and with me like understanding this moment of cooking was gonna bring me comfort.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  It was gonna make me feel kind of whole again. She was gonna have chocolates in her suitcase. They were gonna take us out for Chinese food and ice cream. You know, we were so poor. Like every time my grandparents would come, something would happen that would make our lives better. Like we got an air conditioner for our house. Or my grandfather bought my mom a used car so that we wouldn't be taking the bus and getting in taxi cabs to go to school and all kinds of things like that. So that smell of food really just connected all these good things for me and took away a lot of the bad things.

• 6:28Dan Pashman?

  And I understand that you so loved when they came to visit that you sometimes faked being sick.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:35Dan Pashman?

  You could stay home from school.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 6:37Dan Pashman?

  And eat more of Safta's cooking.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  Yes, she would make this tomato soup and rice. I would be like, I just wanna stay home and cook with Safta. I wanna eat the tomato soup with rice. I want her to think that I'm like on my deathbed. So she'd make like a big batch of it and just keep it coming. Literally, I would take the thermometer and I'd put it between the radiator and get it to like, you know, 200 degrees or whatever.

• 7:04Dan Pashman?

  Alon, you're actually dead. This thermometer says you're dead.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  You're on fire. And then like, right when it got down to like, you know, 101 or 102, I'd be like, Safta, I'm sick.

• 7:19Dan Pashman?

  Do you think she was ever on to you?

• 7:21Speaker 02

  I do. I absolutely do. She could see right through me the whole time.

• 7:25Dan Pashman?

  But she was like, well, whatever. I'm here to hang out with my grandson.

• 7:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 7:28Dan Pashman?

  I was gonna make tomato soup anyway.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  That's right. That's right.

• 7:30Dan Pashman?

  He can go to school tomorrow.

• 7:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, I could see that. I could see me doing that one day with my grandkids. Being like, screw it. Let's just stay here and cook and have fun.

• 7:40Dan Pashman?

  But most of the time, Alon's grandparents weren't there. His mom worked long hours. His sister was a lot older and out with friends. And he didn't see his dad often. So Alon was mostly on his own.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  I once ran into my second grade teacher at the grocery store. And she was like, well, where's your, where's your mom? And I'm like, oh, she's at work. And so she's like, so you're here by yourself buying groceries? And I'm like, yeah. The grocery store would let me take the shopping cart home to unload all the ingredients and then I would bring it back. I really liked making macaroni and cheese. I liked making potatoes and cheese. And I just, from that age on, I just felt very comfortable in the kitchen. And it always felt to me like a place that I could be myself.

• 8:29Dan Pashman?

  Alon was also learning that the kitchen was a place where he could be creative. But by middle school, he was hanging out with the wrong crowd. Or as he puts it, he was the wrong crowd. He started drinking. Some of his friends were drug dealers or had guns or both. When he was 13, he stole his mom's car and drove to Atlantic City. He got stopped by the cops and his mom had to come pick him up.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  I think I was just an angry kid. I think I was always jealous. You know, we grew up in the main line of Philadelphia where we were super poor and everyone else was very rich.

• 9:03Dan Pashman?

  It's the main line. I mean, that's like the rich suburbs.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like a very wealthy suburb of Philly. And, and you know, I would kind of see all of this stuff that I didn't have. And I think it just kind of like built up anger in me. And also just not having like a lot of like parental guidance. I was just kind of doing whatever the hell I wanted. And it just kept going. And I got kicked out of Hebrew school. You know, I was just kind of fumbling my way through school. And then I met a teacher who kind of really changed everything for me.

• 9:37Dan Pashman?

  The teacher's name is Donna Barnett. Alon signed up for her home ec. class in high school.

• 9:41Speaker 02

  We had these little kitchenettes where there'd be like four or six kids all tasked with like making a blueberry muffin. And I couldn't stand having like five other people helping me make a blueberry muffin. So I would like elbow them out of my kitchenette. And I would like, be like, Donna, can I like just have this space to myself and make like linguine à la vongole? And she'd be like, yeah. And so she'd like sneak white wine into the class. We weren't allowed to cook with alcohol, but she was like, this is what the recipe needs. And she was just this like no nonsense, tell it like it is woman that really I looked up to.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  She was like the only adult figure that I would listen to. I felt like I could have like real conversations with her. And she saw in me potential that I think a lot of other teachers didn't see. She actually worked it out with all of the other teachers in my high school and the principal, that when I would get kicked out of their classroom, instead of going to detention, they would send me to her classroom. And she'd make me peel onions and slice carrots. And she'd have me help prep for her next class. And while I was doing that, she would be like, all right, what happened? Talk to me. Like what's going on?

• 11:08Dan Pashman?

  Donna Barnett, she was interviewed more recently about, in a profile about you.

• 11:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:13Dan Pashman?

  And she said that like, you had such a bad reputation among the other teachers, that her own colleagues told her, you're a fucking idiot for putting a knife in this kid's hands.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 11:26Dan Pashman?

  What do you think she saw in you that the other teachers didn't see?

• 11:30Speaker 02

  She saw that I actually loved to cook and had a talent for it. And she knew, I think, that if she just channeled that, like something positive could, could come from it.

• 11:41Dan Pashman?

  Donna helped Alon get a job at a local Italian restaurant. That's where something clicked for him.

• 11:46Speaker 02

  I'm like, you know, putting on a chef coat, I'm like working service. And, and there's like all of this noise and chaos and I'm just like so happy. Finally, I feel like I'm able to do something that I love and get other people, especially people like in authority and adults to like, look me in the eye and pay attention to me. Like I was like, this is what I want to do. Like I want to be this chef one day.

• 12:19Dan Pashman?

  Donna helped Alon get into a vocational high school where he went to school half the day and worked in a commercial kitchen half the day. Soon he was working in the restaurant at night too. So at age 16, he was basically out of the house from 6:30 in the morning to midnight every day. Alon didn't have time to get into trouble anymore. His life was starting to straighten out. Donna helped him figure out how to get into culinary school and get a scholarship. Culinary school was a new beginning, a clean slate. He had perfect attendance, earned good grades, but he hadn't yet totally moved beyond his rough past.

• 12:48Speaker 02

  I still had a couple little moments of like, there was this kid I didn't like. I flattened his tires in the parking lot with my fish fillet knife.

• 12:57Dan Pashman?

  That's not what that knife is for, Alon.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  It worked. You know, I, I like.

• 13:03Dan Pashman?

  So, but let's be real, like clearly you had hit rock bottom as a teenager and things were turning in a more positive direction.

• 13:09Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 13:09Dan Pashman?

  But still, like, you know, slashing a guy's tires.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  I had to shake some, I had to shake off some bad habits of like how to deal with conflict resolution.

• 13:19Dan Pashman?

  Coming up, Alon tries to get as far away from his roots as possible before coming back to them. That's after the break. Stick around.

• 13:31Speaker 03

  Hope you're hungry because it's time for some ads.

• 13:36Dan Pashman?

  There's nothing quite like Aruba. The white sand beaches are truly unlike anything you've seen. But what really stands out is the food. Because Aruba is not like other Caribbean islands. French pastries, Spanish paella, Peruvian barbecue, papardelle that has no business being that good, that far from Florence, not to mention the local fair. Aruba's food scene pulls you in with its astonishing variety of cuisines and beyond satisfies you with its unexpected flavors. So plan your escape to culinary delight at aruba.com. Your taste buds will thank you. Start the day strong with Quaker protein products. Quaker makes it easy and delicious to get a good source of protein. No matter what the day has in store, Quaker protein products give you a variety of ways to reach your protein goals.

• 14:21Dan Pashman?

  Oatmeal, granola, bars and rice snacks and flavors you already love like maple and brown sugar and blueberries and cream. Quaker protein helps fuel you to start whatever's next. Get your protein with Quaker, available at a store near you. I grew up on Lando Lakes cheese. I still remember going to the supermarket deli counter with my mom and her ordering Lando Lakes American cheese. And now Lando Lakes cheese and butter are a huge part of my home. There are so many easy weeknight recipes using Lando Lakes cheese and butter that bring delicious restaurant taste right to your table. From chicken parm to weeknight shrimp pad thai, Lando Lakes has plenty of quick dishes that'll have the whole dinner table talking. Visit landolakes.com/reцепes/collection for easy weeknight dinners.

• 15:08Dan Pashman?

  Welcome back to the Sporkful. I'm Dan Pashman. Last week on the show, we dive into a New Jersey whiskey mystery. 10 years ago, Akil and Nisha Dial found a whiskey bottle at an estate sale. It seemed to have come out of nowhere. They couldn't find any information about the brand online. So we decided to take on the case to try to learn where this mysterious whiskey came from. But as we started digging, we realized just how much was missing from the story of this bottle.

• 15:32Speaker 04

  The address is 237 Palisade Avenue in Garfield.

• 15:37Dan Pashman?

  No business is coming up. I'm on Google Earth right now. Wait a second.

• 15:42Dan Pashman?

  The Chinese restaurant is 235 Palisade Avenue, Garfield, New Jersey. The very next house, 239, there is no 237 Palisade Avenue in Garfield, New Jersey. Whoa. As we get closer to learning the truth, we discover that this story is about a lot more than just a bottle of liquor. That episode's up now. Check it out. Okay, back now to Alon Shaya, whose new cookbook is Memories of a Good Meal, Recipes of Resilience Inspired by Stories of World War II Survival. Alon grew up with a strong connection to the foods his grandmother made for him when he was a kid. But when he started cooking professionally, that's not where his interest was.

• 16:20Speaker 02

  Because I started working in an Italian restaurant, I really kind of connected with the Italian palate. You know, the roasted peppers and the eggplants.

• 16:31Dan Pashman?

  It's the Mediterranean.

• 16:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, the goat cheese. It all still felt very comfortable to me. It connected a little bit to like the food that I ate growing up. But it was cool because it was Italian and not Israeli.

• 16:45Dan Pashman?

  At some point, am I right, somewhere around the time that you're coming out of culinary school and starting cooking Italian food, you also had a trip back to Israel to see your safta.

• 16:55Speaker 02

  I did. She, she was about to pass away. And I said to her, when we were there, I said, I want to learn all of the recipes that you and I would cook when I was a kid. And I got a scale out and she wrote down a list of ingredients to go to the market. And I would cook and, and bring her spoons full of the food that I was making to taste. And she'd be like, do this and do that. And I wrote all the recipes down and I kind of filed them away and then didn't look at them again for 10 years.

• 17:27Dan Pashman?

  In the meantime, Alon's career was on the rise. In 2003, after working as a chef in a few different cities, he landed a job at Harrah's New Orleans, a casino hotel where he ran the 24 hour buffet. That's where he met John Besch, owner of a restaurant group in New Orleans. Besch was a big deal in the city. At its peak, his empire grew to 12 restaurants, including some of the best regarded spots in town. Besch hired Alon and they became close friends. Alon even got married at Besch's house. Eventually, Alon helped him open the Italian restaurant, Domenica, as executive chef. In 2015, Alon won a James Beard Award for Best Chef in the South. Right around then, he took another trip to Israel.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  I'm walking through the markets in the Sheik Carmel in Tel Aviv. And like I hear these women talking and it just, to me, sounded like my grandmother speaking to me. You know, these old women speaking in Hebrew. This light bulb went off and I thought to myself like, why have I put all of this on a shelf? And why have I not been open to understanding this food, to researching it, to cooking it for my customers? It was like this moment where I was just way more comfortable with who I was and my identity. All of these years had passed.

• 18:46Speaker 02

  I wasn't that like scared Israeli kid, just trying to be American anymore. And from that trip on, I came home and I began like sprinkling za'atar on the pizza crust and making hummus and calling it chechi puree. I started saying like, hey, well, what if I didn't roll out this pizza dough the same way? And I just popped it in the oven and made a pita bread out of it and it worked. And all of these little moments where I was like, I can actually do this. And this actually reinforces who I am, where I'm from, my family story. It channels those moments with my mother and my grandmother in the kitchen.

• 19:31Speaker 02

  It makes me feel proud of who I am and where I'm from by doing this. And my customers really saw that and they encouraged me to keep going that way. And, and I think that gave me the courage to eventually open an Israeli restaurant.

• 19:49Dan Pashman?

  Was any portion of your reticence to incorporate more Israeli cooking into your food, concerns about antisemitism and issues around that? Or was it more just, it was personal, it was your own personal stuff?

• 20:00Speaker 02

  It was just my personal stuff. It was, it was just me not feeling comfortable in my own shoes, which stemmed back to the very beginning of my life when we immigrated to America.

• 20:13Dan Pashman?

  So then you opened Shaya, which is straight up an Israeli restaurant. No more kind of a fusion dabbling.

• 20:20Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 20:20Dan Pashman?

  And that was a big hit.

• 20:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:23Dan Pashman?

  And it wins best new restaurant in the country. James Beard Award, best new restaurant in the entire country.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 20:29Dan Pashman?

  You had already acquired some acclaim. You had already won a James Beard Award before that.

• 20:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:33Dan Pashman?

  Now you win a second one for this restaurant.

• 20:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:36Dan Pashman?

  That's so much more personal.

• 20:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:38Dan Pashman?

  How did that feel?

• 20:39Speaker 02

  It just felt validating that I could be who I was, that I could be proud of where I'm from and that I can cook food that had real family history for, for me. And that people would be open to it and be accepting of it. From the outside, it all looked great. But on the inside, it was chaos and not sustainable. And, you know, it all eventually crashed down.

• 21:10Dan Pashman?

  Inside the incredibly successful Besch Restaurant Group, things were not going well. The company employed more than a thousand people, but had no HR department. Alon says multiple times he pushed for an HR department to be created, but he was denied. The company disputes that he made this request. In 2017, a reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune was in the process of writing an expose on the restaurant group and Alon decided to speak to him on the record. Alon says when his bosses found out he had talked to a reporter, they fired him. A month after the firing, the expose came out. It documented dozens of allegations of sexual harassment and sexual assault against John Besch himself and others at the group. Besch and his business partner, Octavio Mantilla, denied all the allegations.

• 21:51Dan Pashman?

  Now, to be very clear, Alon was not accused of any kind of harassment or abusive behavior. But he was accused of not fostering a culture where employees were comfortable enough speaking up. Some of the people who spoke on the record detailed harassment that happened at the restaurant where Alon was chef. Alon attempted to buy the restaurant, but both sides said the other was being unreasonable. Alon then sued the group to have his name taken off of Shaya, the restaurant he created, but he lost in court. He later said in an interview, I realize the mistakes that I've made in the past that contributed to an environment where people didn't feel as empowered as they should. Brett Anderson, the journalist who broke the whole story, later said, I believe Alon is trying to hold himself accountable. He has, to my mind, taken the steps that we would want someone to take.

• 22:36Dan Pashman?

  As for Bech, he stepped down from Bech Restaurant Group right after the expose came out, although he remained an owner. The company changed its name to BRG Hospitality. After lying low for several years, Bech has become more publicly involved in the restaurants again. I asked Alon what he learned from the whole experience.

• 22:53Speaker 02

  It was life-changing. I think that what I learned is that values mean more than anything technical. It means more than any award. It means more than a dining room full of customers. It was like back to my childhood where I felt myself surrounded by all these sharks, you know? And it was not something that I, in my heart, felt comfortable with. You know, I would say up until the age of about 38 or so, like, that was like, every restaurant I worked in was like this kind of crazy, chaotic place.

• 23:32Dan Pashman?

  After Alon was fired, he and his wife Emily started their own restaurant group called Pomegranate Hospitality.

• 23:37Speaker 02

  And we did everything from the beginning to build a company that was based on the values that we felt were important to us personally. How to treat people with respect, how to build people up and not break them down, how to create an environment where the team feels like they can focus on their craft and not deal with toxicity.

• 24:03Dan Pashman?

  Pomegranate Hospitality now includes Alon's three restaurants: Saba and Safta's Table in New Orleans and Safta in Denver. All of them are strongly tied to Alon's family and the food he grew up with. In fact, that lutonica, the roasted eggplant, pepper, and tomato spread that he remembers his Safta making, that's on the menu at all three places.

• 24:23Speaker 02

  It's exactly the recipe, not one difference to it.

• 24:26Dan Pashman?

  When you're teaching a cook in your restaurant how to make this, do you tell them the story?

• 24:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely, I do. And I feel that the more we do that, the more that we're digging into the whys behind what we're doing with our team, the more that they get behind it and have respect for what it is that we're trying to accomplish at the restaurants. And well, you know, no one outside of Bulgaria that I knew was saying the word lutonica in New Orleans. Now people are saying it all over the place, and it's a huge deal for me to know that, like, we've made this mark, you know, and that we've created something that honors my grandmother's memory and history.

• 25:10Dan Pashman?

  Coming up, Alon's interest in inherited recipes takes him far beyond his own family to a years-long project that's finally just come out. Stick around.

• 25:20Speaker 03

  And now, a delicious word from our sponsors.

• 25:30Dan Pashman?

  Mmm, it's very good. You put a lot of love into the things you send during the holidays. It's baked with love, carefully packed with love, or shipped with love right from home. Because what you're sending isn't just what's inside the box, it's the time, thought, and care you put into it. And this holiday season, the United States Postal Service is delivering your love to more addresses in America than anyone else. So send it with love. Send it with USPS. The United States Postal Service. Learn more at USPS.com/holiday. I grew up on Lando Lakes cheese. I still remember going to the supermarket deli counter with my mom and her ordering Lando Lakes American cheese. And now, Lando Lakes cheese and butter are a huge part of my home.

• 26:12Dan Pashman?

  There are so many easy weeknight recipes using Lando Lakes cheese and butter that bring delicious restaurant taste right to your table. From chicken parm to weeknight shrimp pad thai, Lando Lakes has plenty of quick dishes that'll have the whole dinner table talking. Visit landolakes.com/reцепes/collection for easy weeknight dinners. For a long time, I did not understand the point of vests. Like, why not just have a jacket? That covers your arms, too. But something clicked for me. I think I got gifted a vest, and now I am obsessed with vests. And it just adds that little bit of toastiness, and I got this new Quince packable puffer vest. I love that you can just squish it up and shove it in the bottom of your bag, that way you have it with you all day. If it gets a little chilly, break out the vest. I also got a Quince Down quilted vest.

• 26:57Dan Pashman?

  It is so soft and cozy. They make them for men and women, and as with everything you get at Quince, they focus on high-quality staples made with premium materials like 100% Mongolian cashmere, 14-karat gold, and Italian leather. These are all timeless, versatile pieces that feel special to unwrap and become everyday favorites long after the holidays. Give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was The Sporkful. It's the best way to support the show. Welcome back. Quick note here that if you want to win a copy of Alon Shaya's new book, subscribe

• 27:42Dan Pashman?

  to our newsletter. All subscribers are automatically entered to win. Sign up now at sporkful.com/newsletter. More details at the end of the show. In 2015, as Alon was gaining national acclaim for his cooking, he took a trip that would have a profound impact on him. In fact, it would become a years-long project that would consume much of his time outside his restaurants. It all started when he went with a group of chefs and food writers to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Israel.

• 28:08Speaker 02

  They were showing us like recipes that they had saved from concentration camps. And they showed us this torn piece of red cloth, signed by probably 15 to 20 women. And there were these little drawings on it of like little radishes and candlesticks and like a loaf of bread with steam coming off of it. This was found in the Ravens Brook concentration camp, and these women would all come together. They would have this kind of like cooking club, this food club. They would talk about their children's favorite meals.

• 28:50Speaker 02

  They would argue over how to make the best matzoh ball or bread. And I'm like, well, they definitely weren't eating anything like it was a concentration camp. And they were like, yeah, there was no cooking or food happening. It was just all fantasy. And it just was so moving to me to see this gathering of people coming together to talk about food while they were starving to death in their darkest hour, and how food was able to kind of bring people together even when the food didn't exist.

• 29:26Dan Pashman?

  That bit of cloth stuck with Alon. Four years later, he was telling a friend about it, and that person suggested Alon reach out to the Holocaust Museum in DC to ask if they had any food-related artifacts. That's when Alon learned about Stephen Fenvez.

• 29:39Speaker 02

  Stephen Fenvez, him and his sister were Auschwitz survivors. When his family was being taken from their home, he was 13 years old, and they were sent to Auschwitz. Their family cook, her name was Marish, went into the apartment when all of the neighbors were looting and taking what they could out of there. And she saved this cookbook because she knew how important it was to the family. And after he survived the war, she returned it to him, and it became one of the only physical things that he had left over from his family's history. That and a lot of the artwork that his mother had done. And his mother died in Auschwitz.

• 30:23Dan Pashman?

  They were a Hungarian family in Yugoslavia.

• 30:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. This was a book that was about 150 handwritten recipes in this, in this old leather-bound book with like gold leaf. It was like a very beautiful book. But I was just blown away by it. And they said, look, you know, we can put you in touch with Stephen. I'm sure he'd want to talk to you about it. And so I, I call Stephen and I say, I would love to cook some of your mother's recipes for you.

• 30:52Dan Pashman?

  At this time, Stephen was 89, living in Bethesda, Maryland. The recipes were all in Hungarian, so Stephen first had to translate them for Alon.

• 30:59Speaker 02

  So him and I would get on the phone, and we would talk through some of the recipes. We would talk through his food memories. And we just became friends and like built this beautiful relationship. And I began cooking the food for him, shipping it in boxes to him and his family.

• 31:16Dan Pashman?

  So what kinds of things are you cooking and shipping to him?

• 31:18Speaker 02

  I was making like walnut tarts. I was making savory potato and lamb donuts. I was making walnut cream cake, a stuffed turkey that he remembers eating as a child, these little breaded semolina sticks. Like, he would give me feedback. He'd be like, no, it's kind of more like this.

• 31:39Dan Pashman?

  Alon refined the recipes with Stephen's feedback. And that work was a lot like the time he visited his Safta in Israel when he cooked with her and wrote down all of her recipes. Pretty soon, Alon had a bigger idea. What if he toured the country cooking these recipes at events as a fundraiser for the museum? They called it the Rescued Recipes Initiative, and they raised close to $1 million. This project then sparked another idea.

• 32:01Speaker 02

  I thought to myself, you know, this is one of millions of stories from the war. And we have so little time left to be able to actually talk to survivors of the war, people that saw it firsthand, that were old enough to remember what they saw.

• 32:20Dan Pashman?

  Alon wanted to document these stories, not just about the Holocaust, but about the whole range of experiences of different people during World War II. He brought on a co-author, culinary historian June Hirsch, and together they went out looking for recipes with stories. They've just published all of it in a new cookbook, Memories of a Good Meal: Recipes of Resilience Inspired by Stories of World War II Survival. And they've taken the same approach that Alon was developing for years, perhaps without even totally knowing it, searching out elders to hear their firsthand accounts. In the book, there's a chapter on the Fenvez family cookbook, of course, and a chapter with stories and recipes from one family's experience in a Japanese internment camp. Many prisoners in the camp were fishermen in Japan, and sometimes guards would let them crawl under the fence to catch fish, often rainbow trout.

• 33:03Dan Pashman?

  So Alon created a recipe for rainbow trout shiawaki. Some of the dishes in the book are based on actual recipes, like with the Fenvez cookbook. Others, like this rainbow trout, are Alon's interpretation, inspired by the stories. There's a chapter on the partisan resistance fighters in Europe, and another on an American POW who saved hundreds of American Jewish soldiers imprisoned with him. One chapter I really wanted to dig into in more detail with Alon is the story of John Kinsel, a Navajo code talker. Maybe this is my own ignorance, but I had no idea that Native Americans played a crucial role in World War II. During the war, the Americans would send encoded messages to troops around the world. The problem was it could take three hours to encode a message, send it, and decode it on the other end. So they enlisted Navajo men who created a code based on their native language.

• 33:48Dan Pashman?

  Because the Navajo have no written language, it would be nearly impossible for non-speakers to figure it out. The code talkers could call each other, speak in code, and have the message understood immediately.

• 33:58Speaker 02

  It was the only code that the German and Japanese couldn't decode. It changed the trajectory of the war in the Pacific Theater. And these Navajo men, after all of the atrocities that they had been through, their land being taken away, their sheep being slaughtered, having to mine for uranium in the mountains on the Navajo Reservation without any protection and being exposed to all this radiation. They create this code, they help win the war. They go back to their home and they can't say a word about it because it's 100% classified until the 1960s.

• 34:42Speaker 02

  And so they gave so much to the country while so much was being taken from them.

• 34:50Dan Pashman?

  John Kinsel was one of the code talkers. When Alon and June went to visit him, he was 107. His son Ronald told them about John's experience in the war.

• 34:58Speaker 02

  He brought corn pollen with him from Arizona out to Guadalcanal and all of the different areas in the Pacific Theater that he served. It's a sacred blessing that they use corn pollen for. And that was this kind of like little reminder of where he was from and allowed him to connect to his family and his ancestors through this corn pollen.

• 35:26Dan Pashman?

  And you talk in the books about how they would cook. They found a way to make fry bread, like Native American dish.

• 35:32Speaker 02

  They did, yeah. They would actually cook fry bread in their helmets over fire. They would melt fat, they would make the dough, and they'd roll it out, and they'd press it into their helmets and cook it over the fire. And also, John taught his company how to cook these coconut crabs in Guadalcanal. These are crabs that climb coconut trees and crush coconuts with their claws. They're massive size and super strong. And they would also like lasterate soldiers in the foxholes. And then they would get infected, and it was kind of like a death sentence. And so John taught his company how to capture them and cook them, and they would eat them.

• 36:12Dan Pashman?

  Inspired by this story, Alon created a recipe for coconut crab and spicy chilies. There's another recipe in this chapter that's especially meaningful.

• 36:20Speaker 02

  Blue corn mush, which is a very classic Navajo dish of like this blue corn polenta that is fortified with juniper ash, which adds a lot of nutrients to the corn. And we top it with crab meat that's braised in coconut milk, which is very untraditional. But this dish as a whole really, I think, brings his history into one dish.

• 36:46Dan Pashman?

  When Alon visited, John was bedridden and not able to talk, but Alon still wanted to feed him.

• 36:51Speaker 02

  We lit a fire out in the desert outside of his house and made the blue corn mush, brought it in to the house. And he would take a spoonful, and then he would kind of smack his lips and like gesture for more. And he ate three bowls of it. Ronald, his son, who was like 80-something, was like, he hasn't had an appetite. He hasn't been eating much. Like, this is the most I've seen him eat in a really long time. He passed away 23 days after we were there. We're like losing this time where we can meet these heroes

• 37:36Speaker 02

  and hear their stories and share their lessons. We have to make sure that they become embedded into our values of who we are. And I think by eating together and sharing these meals, we're putting it into our memory in a way that just hearing the story doesn't do.

• 37:56Dan Pashman?

  So we talked, Alon, about your growing up, troubled youth and trying to kind of figure out your own identity and finally kind of making the turn to food. How do you see this cookbook fitting into that narrative?

• 38:13Speaker 02

  I find this cookbook just to be extremely rewarding. And I find it to be a way to reinforce the power that food holds. I've always, from that age of seven where I smelled the peppers and the eggplants in my home, I've understood what power food has. And I've used food every moment of my life to get from one place to another, to get out of that life that I was living as a teenager where I was getting into all of this trouble, to cooking for my wife Emily to impress her so she would go out on a date with me,

• 38:57Speaker 02

  and then cooking for her mom so her mom would accept me, and cooking for Stephen Fenvez just to build a relationship with him, which then had a massive impact. And I think that this book is really just an extension of that. And more than anything, it's just been easily the most rewarding thing that I've done. It's just brought me so much personal joy, and I hope that it brings everyone else joy when they read it.

• 39:34Dan Pashman?

  That's Alon Shaya. His new book is Memories of a Good Meal: Recipes of Resilience Inspired by Stories of World War II Survival. It's co-authored with culinary historian June Hirsch. Alon also runs Pomegranate Hospitality and three restaurants, Safta, Safta's Table, and Saba. And if you subscribe to our newsletter by November 23rd, you'll have a chance to win a copy of Alon's book. Just head over to sporkful.com/newsletter. Once you're on the list, you're automatically entered to win this and all of our other giveaways you want to be on this list. Contest is open to US addresses only. Again, sign up at sporkful.com/newsletter. Next week on the show, I'm talking with Alexis Nicole Nelson, aka The Black Forager, about her new book, Happy Snacking: Don't Die. That's next week.

• 40:19Dan Pashman?

  While we wait for that one, check out last week's episode about the New Jersey whiskey mystery. This one, this one's an odyssey. You're gonna love it. That one's up now. Check it out. And hey, if you want to hear new episodes of The Sporkful ad-free, subscribe to SiriusXM Podcast Plus on Apple Podcasts or visit siriusxm.com/podcastsplus to listen with Spotify or another app of your choice. This episode was produced by me along with managing producer--

• 40:45Speaker 05

  Emma Morgenstern.

• 40:46Dan Pashman?

  And senior producer--

• 40:47Speaker 06

  Andres O'Hara.

• 40:48Dan Pashman?

  It was edited by--

• 40:48Speaker 05

  Camille Stanley.

• 40:49Dan Pashman?

  Our technical director is--

• 40:50Speaker 04

  Jared O'Connell.

• 40:51Dan Pashman?

  And our intern is--

• 40:52Speaker 05

  Maya Franz.

• 40:53Dan Pashman?

  Music help from Black Label Music. The Sporkful is a production of SiriusXM Podcast. Our executive producer is Camille Stanley. Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.

• 41:01Speaker 06

  And I'm Andy Liddell from Austin, Texas, reminding you to eat more, eat better, and eat more better.

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