Talking cuisine with Simone Shapiro

The young chef discusses her quick entree into one of Jerusalem’s most prestigious restaurants, and what she’s learned along the way.

By NATALIE CHETBOUN
Simone Shapiro in her chef’s uniform, on the Mamilla Hotel Rooftop (photo credit: SIMONE SHAPIRO)
Simone Shapiro in her chef’s uniform, on the Mamilla Hotel Rooftop
(photo credit: SIMONE SHAPIRO)
In 2015, 23-year-old Simone Shapiro arrived in Israel. Within two weeks, she was hired as the sous chef at the Mamilla Hotel’s Rooftop Restaurant, an impressive position given her young age and the eatery’s renown. This was due to her talent, but also to her strong work ethic.
At the age of 19, Shapiro enrolled in The Art Institute of California’s culinary school, but left a few months later to join the kitchen of legendary chef Thomas Keller. After exploring the cuisine in Los Angeles, New York and Paris, she settled in Jerusalem, which she describes as her “favorite food city.”
On a cool April morning, we met to discuss the struggles of women in the culinary world, the portrayal of chefs in pop culture, and the rabbinate’s kashrut inspectors.
How would you compare American, European and Israeli food culture? Whenever I think about different cultures, I think about breakfast. In America, breakfast is a meal. Everyone is eating together. It’s 20 different things: eggs, pancakes and waffles. In France, they have butter, bread and jam on the table. You have your coffee, you nibble a bit, and then you leave. And in Israel there is no such thing as breakfast. It’s a cigarette and espresso. Then at 2 p.m., everyone sits down and eats together.
Everyone here is too busy to think about waking up and making eggs. Or at least that’s how I’ve been living.
What do you love most about Israeli food culture? Israeli food is inspiring and people take it for granted. It’s crazy; the spices and the different ways of working with ingredients. Even the simplest things, like falafel and kebab, are techniques to master. In the States, I never seasoned my chicken with cumin and cinnamon and honey and silan. That just doesn’t exist. It’s more about classical ingredients and fresh things from the market.
But here it’s taken to another level. The spice markets are absolutely amazing. And when you wake up in Jerusalem on Friday morning, you smell the halla in the bakeries. It’s the culture of family and home and love. It’s a huge connection.
What is your favorite part of being a chef? What is most challenging? I’m really in love with feeding people.
As chaotic as the kitchen is, people are coming to get an experience and all that matters is if they were satisfied or not. If they were satisfied, I’m over the moon.
That’s really what it’s about for me, which is why I wouldn’t care if I was in a Michelin restaurant or a falafel shop.
Whether it’s being in charge in the kitchen or being a cook, there’s really no difference. It’s about pleasing people.
One of my mentors, Chef Colin Sako, always said, “You’re going to love what you do, but sometimes you’ll feel like a slave. Just know that you are a glorified slave.”
I think about that a lot. We are working in a hot environment and it’s not exactly the most sought-out profession, especially here. You don’t make a lot of money and the hours are crazy. But if you know you’re pleasing people, and if you love it, then it will please you.
The challenging part is finding time to have a personal life. You’re working with the same people for, let’s say, 300 hours a month, and it’s like they’re your family.
But then you have your real family, and it’s difficult to balance.
The culinary world is known to be a male-dominated industry. What is it like, as a young woman, working in a professional kitchen? I haven’t had any terrible experiences, but it’s always a challenge for a female in the kitchen, no matter how good you are. Here, I am the only female in the kitchen. In my other jobs, I was maybe one of two. I think that having all that testosterone in one place for all of those hours and then having a female standing there is difficult. It’s like, “Do I fit in? Is this clear?” I’ll laugh at their dirty jokes, but I’m also a girly girl. So it’s a challenge; lighting the charcoals at night and smelling like a barbecue when you go home, being in that environment the whole time.
How do you overcome the challenge? It helps that I’m close with my mother and I have sisters. It’s very female oriented in my personal life. In The Physiology of Taste, there is a quote saying how women were the start of food. Men came home from work to the women in the kitchen. There was no other way of living.
That’s how I grew up. Then I walked into my first professional kitchen and it was 30 men running around. I was this little 20-year-old Jewish nothing, and I was like, “This is going to be weird.”
Either you build up confidence and the ability to work around it, or it’s not for you. And I’ve realized that this is for me.
Also, I really work hard. If I were to stand in the kitchen and not do a lot of work, I wouldn’t get the respect that I do. But I just get going, to the point where sometimes I don’t even take a break. Just give me coffee.
What makes a great chef? Other than talent, you have to have a personality that makes people want to follow you. A chef is nobody unless he has a crew behind him. If your crew doesn’t come back then you have no food and then you have no guests and then you have nothing. So it’s really important to have a sense of how to deal with people, how to make them feel like they’re important. I’m working so hard.
I’m working all these hours to meet the expectations of my chef. So the recognition really motivates you. If you’re not good at motivating people, you have nothing.
In pop culture, chefs are often portrayed as egotistical, aggressive and unstable. For example, the characters in Hell’s Kitchen, Burnt, and even Ratatouille.
Where does this stereotype come from? The kitchen is a brigade system. You have the dishwasher and the prep cook, then the line cooks, then the sous chef, and then the chef. It reminds me of the army. You have all this hierarchy, and at the end of the day you’re following the commands of the leader. Everyone has to play their part and do what they’re told. That’s really how it is. So I guess, in order to be a leader, you have to have a strong presence, a strong command.
And it became this whole thing where guys started having egos. I’ve met a lot of those kinds of people. But you always have somebody who’s just as good and way less of a personality. It’s really important to have balance: fear in the kitchen, but also that gentle side. People can feel comfortable, but also feel like they need to do a good job.
When does cooking reach the level of art? When it comes to plating it. Anyone can cook and throw something on a plate, but when it comes to presenting, you really eat with your eyes. Before you put it in your mouth, you have to see what it looks like. I actually got really nerdy about cooking at home, making it look nice, and then taking pictures. I would think to myself, “If I could Photoshop this and put it in a frame, I would.”
It’s an art form. But the most fun is to come up with something that tastes amazing and then make it look beautiful. When you go to a Michelin restaurant, the food doesn’t even look like food. But it is. That is the ultimate art.
Do you prefer cooking someone else’s recipe or creating a recipe yourself? When I’m cooking somebody else’s recipe, it’s a challenge. Can I make it how they made it or to their standards? I love pictures because I can look at the ingredients and automatically do my own thing. I’ve made food from other chefs’ cookbooks and all of a sudden I’m not even looking at the recipe anymore.
I’m just making the dish. I almost wish the chef was there to taste it, to be like, “Is this what you envisioned?” Still, I can’t tell you how much I love cooking my recipes. I have three or four recipe books and there’s nothing I like more.
How, when and what we eat are central components of Jewish life. How does food help us connect to religion? You can’t live without food. Everything in this world revolves around eating.
So once you understand holidays and religion, it becomes a beautiful thing. Everyone leads these crazy lives, and no matter what, when it’s a holiday, everyone’s there. Specifically, Passover is all about food. The whole Seder is sitting around a table talking about history, about all these things that you really don’t think about on a day-to-day basis. It’s really cool.
Describe your experiences working with the rabbinate’s kashrut inspectors.
It was almost culture shock for me. I grew up in a kosher household, but that just means making sure there’s an OU on the package before you bring it home. You’re not working with the mashgihim. And I’ve always worked in non-kosher restaurants. I even came here with my knife roll. But you’re not allowed to come with anything. You buy a knife, give it to the mashgiah, and he kashers it. You can use it just in the kitchen. They imprint your name on it.
It’s very organized.
It even comes down to little things.
Green asparagus is sprouty and open.
Ants get into it, so we aren’t allowed to serve it in the restaurant. We always get angry because the tops of green asparagus are so beautiful and we want to put them on the plate. But if the inspector sees it, it’s not kosher. One day, I turned to him and said, “This is crazy. We wash it! This is okay.” And I kid you not, he hit the asparagus on a paper towel, and I saw a tiny white thing move out of it.
It changed my life. I was like, “OK, maybe I shouldn’t be eating this.”
What are your professional goals? Every cook’s dream is to have a cookbook.
Although I was sitting with my sister, smoking a nargila in her living room, and because she doesn’t want to ruin her table if the coal falls, the nargila is sitting on a really old cookbook.
We were actually brainstorming the name of my cookbook when she turned to me and said, “Don’t worry, Simone, I will never use your cookbook as an ashtray!” It was hysterical. But yeah, I would love to write a cookbook, to be able to share.
Eventually, I want to go into private cooking or catering because you can create your own schedule and have a normal life. But I’m really young and I have all this adrenaline for cooking all the time. So for now, my goal is to keep learning and experiencing, to take things day by day.
What is your advice for people who lack confidence in the kitchen or are too busy to cook? Confidence in the kitchen comes with experience, no matter what. But it’s really hard if you’re busy. There’s no way around that. It’s a difficult question because some people really hate to cook. I have a couple of friends who can’t step foot in the kitchen. And I feel like my whole world is the kitchen, so I can’t relate to that. For me, it’s all I ever want to be doing. But I always find that walking through the markets and buying things that you like or that look interesting and then coming home and trying to whip it up, is the ultimate.
If you could offer readers one message about cooking, what would it be? Definitely cooking from the heart. I know that sounds cheesy, but if you’re having fun, I feel like it will automatically taste good. This might just be in my head, but I feel like if I’m really angry or not going into the service happy, I will have food come back.
Cooking with love, as much as people joke about it, is really true.
When I make something and then ask my chef what’s missing, he’ll taste it and be like, “What did you put in?” And I’m like, “Salt, pepper, lemon juice, and hamon ahava [a lot of love]!” I take that home.
Simone Shapiro’s makloubeh recipe
The chef elaborates upon an ethnic dish close to her heart, in honor of Mimouna (the day after Passover ends, which Moroccan Jews celebrate with ethnic foods): Our kitchen staff at The Mamilla Hotel is half Jewish-Israeli, half Israeli-Arab, and me. We are always discussing our food traditions, and I’ve been introduced to many different ethnic dishes. One of my favorites is the famous Arabic dish makloubeh.
Makloubeh, or “upside down,” refers to the way the dish is served. It’s arranged in a cold pot, cooked, and then flipped upside down on the serving plate. When I asked my cook for a recipe, he was hesitant. “An American making this Middle Eastern dish? Are you sure?” His reaction made me determined to make the dish amazing. He gave me the basics and I tweaked it to my liking.
What’s great about this dish is that you can choose the vegetables and meat. It’s even possible to make without meat, and is a fun meal to serve at family gatherings. Make sure you have extra hands when it’s time to turn it over. At my house, it was a three-man job! The most important ingredient, in my opinion, is the spices. I was told specifically, “Be generous.” After I wrote down the recipe and shopping list, my cook came over with a large bag of spices mixed together. I keep it in my kitchen, marked with a big “M.”
So we will start with the spices that you need.
Spice mixture:
2 Tbsp. ground black pepper
2 Tbsp. salt
2 Tbsp. cumin
2 Tbsp. ground coriander
2 Tbsp. cardamom pods
2 Tbsp. ground cloves
2 Tbsp. nutmeg
2 Tbsp. cinnamon
2 Tbsp. paprika
Ingredients:
Canola or olive oil
2 cups white rice
1 head of cauliflower, cut into florets
1 medium onion, chopped
2 medium carrots, sliced
1 small eggplant, peeled and sliced
2 potatoes, sliced
3-4 pieces of chicken (thighs or breasts)
Chicken broth (optional)
Chopped parsley and tehina (for garnish) Salt (for seasoning)
Soak rice for 15-20 minutes.
Season vegetables with spice mixture.
In a pan, sauté vegetables individually in oil. Start with onions, then cauliflower florets.
Continue until all vegetables are fried. Once each vegetable is cooked, set it aside to cool.
Fry chicken and set aside.
Arrange half of the chicken at the bottom of a cold empty pot.
Fill the gaps with half of the rice. Season with salt.
Continue to layer cauliflower, carrots, potatoes, eggplant, and the rest of the rice and chicken. Season with salt.
Once the dish is firmly packed, add chicken broth (or water), submerging the ingredients about 1-2 cm above the rice. Pour into the pot slowly, so as not disrupt the beautifully arranged vegetables.
Cook on very low heat for 30-40 minutes. Do not allow the liquid to boil.
Once cooked, let cool for 10-15 minutes.
Set the serving dish on top of the pot. Flip it over! You may have to tap the bottom of the pot to help the makloubeh slide out.
After flipped, garnish with chopped parsley, tehina, and sea salt.
Serving size: 6-8