Eyal Shani. Credit: Good People Group

Eyal Shani: The Philosopher-Poet of Israeli Cuisine

12 Minute read

09 Mar 2026

Paul Feinstein

Journalist

Copy link

From Miznon to HaSalon, the Israeli chef has built a global restaurant group while championing a deeply personal philosophy of ingredients, creativity, and flavor.

“I woke up knowing I would cook.”

Chef Eyal Shani still describes the moment with quiet certainty. More than forty years ago, after finishing his military service, he retreated to a remote farm in northern Israel to live alone. Heartbroken after a failed relationship, he spent his days harvesting food from the land, cooking over open fire, reading, and singing to himself. “I lived like a priest,” he says, trying to understand the pain of the separation that had brought him there.

One night, friends arrived carrying six freshly hunted porcupines and several bottles of red wine. They roasted the animals over a fire and drank late into the night beneath a full moon. At some point Shani collapsed into sleep in the open field. When the sun rose the next morning, he woke with what he describes as a complete clarity about his life. He would become a cook. “It was not a decision,” he says. “I decided nothing.”

Today Shani presides over a global collection of restaurants that stretch from Tel Aviv to New York, Paris, Melbourne, and Singapore. Yet his approach to food still sounds less like the language of business than the language of philosophy. For Shani, every ingredient carries its own identity and purpose. A tomato is not simply produce. It is a singular presence that cannot be replaced. The work of the cook, he believes, is not to control ingredients but to listen to them.

The Blank Page of Israeli Cuisine

When Shani began cooking in the early 1980s, he says Israel had almost no public culinary identity to speak of. The country was still young, and many of the immigrant traditions that people brought with them from Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East were largely confined to private homes.

“The policy was to create a new Israeli man and a new Israeli woman,” he explains. In that process, he believes something essential was lost. Families continued to cook the foods of their origins behind closed doors, but those traditions rarely appeared in restaurants or in public life.

What existed outside the home was limited. Street grills served skewers of meat with a few salads. A handful of restaurants attempted versions of French or Italian cuisine, often loosely interpreted. For Shani, the absence was striking. “I realized it cannot be a country without its own cuisine,” he says. “A country without cuisine is like a family living in a house without food. Nothing is holding it together.”

At the time, Shani had almost no formal training. He had learned to cook a bouillabaisse by carefully following a recipe from Julia Child, but beyond that he describes himself as starting from a completely blank page. “I knew nothing,” he says. “I did not even know that if you mix flour with water you will get dough.”

That lack of knowledge, he believes now, became one of his greatest advantages. Over time, that instinctive approach would help shape what many now recognize as modern Israeli cuisine.

Listening to Ingredients

In the early days of his first restaurant in Jerusalem, Shani often found himself improvising in the kitchen. He had little formal training and few reliable techniques to fall back on. Many nights he simply tried things and hoped they would work.

One afternoon, while peeling a tomato, something shifted.

As he cut deeper into the flesh, a thick piece of tomato slipped into his hand. He paused and studied it. The texture, the weight, the way it held together between his fingers. In that moment, he says, he stopped thinking of it as a vegetable.

“It looked like meat to me,” he recalls.

At the time, the idea would have sounded absurd. Four decades ago, he says, no one spoke about vegetables with the same reverence reserved for meat or fish. But Shani was starting from what he calls a position of total ignorance, and that ignorance allowed him to see things differently.

“If it is meat,” he remembers thinking, “then I can make sashimi.”

The dish that followed was startlingly simple. Thin slices of tomato, treated with the same care and respect typically reserved for raw fish. For Shani, the moment marked the beginning of a philosophy that would define his cooking for decades.

“Nothing is like a tomato,” he says. “Nothing can replace a tomato.”

From that point forward, ingredients became the center of his thinking. Each one, he believes, carries its own identity and its own will. The role of the cook is not to dominate an ingredient but to understand where it wants to go.

“I listen to them,” he says.

That philosophy would eventually shape not only his cooking, but the restaurants he would go on to build around the world.

An Empire Built on Instinct

Today, Eyal Shani’s name is attached to a growing constellation of restaurants that stretch far beyond Israel. Concepts like Miznon, known for its exuberant pita sandwiches, and the theatrical fine dining experience HaSalon have spread to cities including New York, Paris, Melbourne, Vienna, and Singapore. Across the group, the number of restaurants now reaches well into the dozens.

Managing that kind of expansion might suggest a highly structured organization. But Shani insists the system behind it looks very different from the traditional hierarchy of professional kitchens.

“A kitchen is usually like an army,” he says, describing the classic brigade system with chefs at the top and cooks working their way down the chain of command. Shani rejects that model. In his restaurants, he says, every cook is meant to function as a creator.

“I want my team to be creators. Each one of them is unique.”

At the same time, he admits that the freedom he offers comes with a paradox.

“It’s an illusion,” he says, laughing. “I’m a big dictator.”

The balance he tries to strike sits somewhere between the two. Shani provides the vision, the stories, and the philosophy that guide each kitchen. Within that framework, his chefs are encouraged to interpret ingredients for themselves. The result is a constantly evolving ecosystem of dishes that change from restaurant to restaurant and even from night to night.

It is a system built less on control than on influence. When a new restaurant opens, Shani spends weeks working closely with the head chef. They cook together, eat together, and talk for hours. Over time, he says, something begins to transfer.

“The chef becomes hypnotized by the way I think,” he explains.

Once that happens, Shani believes he can step away. The chef will continue working within the same mental framework, asking the same questions about ingredients and flavor.

For a chef who once controlled every detail of a single kitchen, the shift required a new kind of discipline.

“You cannot manage fifty restaurants,” he says plainly. “So you must learn how to lose control.”

Eyal Shani. Credit: Good People Group

Cooking Through Crisis

For all the scale of his restaurant group, Shani still thinks first about the people sitting in the dining room each night. In Tel Aviv, where many of his restaurants remain rooted, that relationship has taken on a different emotional weight since the attacks of October 7.

“Everything is completely changed,” he says.

Life in Tel Aviv continues. Restaurants are open, tables fill, and the rhythms of the city persist. But Shani believes something deeper has shifted beneath the surface.

“The shapes are the same as before,” he says. “But there is emptiness inside them.”

For a chef who has always spoken about food in terms of energy and connection, that absence is difficult to ignore. Cooking, he says, has become both more challenging and more meaningful at the same time.

In moments like this, Shani returns to the role he believes restaurants have always played. A meal is not only nourishment. It is a way of gathering people, restoring a sense of normalcy, and reminding them of the life that continues beyond the crisis.

“I try to come to the restaurant with optimism,” he says. “To create new things and to be happy with my customers, because they choose me under this situation to be their host.”

For Shani, that responsibility remains simple, even now. Every night, the goal is the same as it was when he first began cooking decades ago. To put something meaningful on the table and let it speak for itself.

“I do my best,” he says.

It is the same instinct that first appeared decades ago on a quiet hillside, when a young man woke up and simply knew he would cook.

The Chef

Israeli chef Eyal Shani is the creative force behind restaurants including Miznon and HaSalon, known for his poetic philosophy of ingredients and his influence on modern Israeli cooking.

View profile