In 2014, the government of Israel officially designated Nov. 30 as an annual day to commemorate the nearly one million Jews who were expelled or displaced from Arab and Muslim lands in the twentieth century.
Expounding on this poignant commemoration, a California nonprofit named JIMENA (Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa), brought forth an initiative known as Mizrahi Remembrance Month, which celebrates Mizrahi and Sephardic traditions and also honors the forgotten Jewish refugees who fled countries ranging from Algeria and Libya to Lebanon and Iran.
Perhaps because I am Iranian, every month is Mizrahi Remembrance month for my family and me, and that pride and heritage is often best expressed through food. Last month, I watched a short video featuring mouthwatering Middle Eastern spices and condiments made by a company called New York Shuk, and I was immediately hooked.
Maybe it was the name: New York isn’t known for shuks, those wonderful outdoor Israeli markets that offer a true feast for the senses, especially the massive mounds of colorful spices. But the city is known for food. The name of the company conjures an image of Israeli vendors in an outdoor market in New York, stuffing and selling heaping bags of fresh Middle Eastern spices such as sumac, shawarma, and my favorite, za’atar.
As it turned out, my imagined ideal wasn’t far from the truth. Ron and Leetal Arazi founded New York Shuk in 2013 in Brooklyn by creating what they called a “couscous booth” in a large, open-air market called Smorgasburg NYC. The couple, who met working in a restaurant kitchen in Israel in 2009, arrived in New York with “only two suitcases and a dream,” Leetal told me in a phone interview last week.
Ron, who grew up in Kfar Saba, and Leetal, who was raised in Rehovot, but later moved to Tel Aviv with her family, are both trained chefs. Leetal also has a background in art and design, having first earned a degree in Visual Design and Display from the University of the Arts in London. She then completed a nearly-year-long intensive course at the Estella Master Class in Pastry, Bakery & Chocolate in Tel Aviv. Ron, who has cooked in kitchens in France, New York City and Israel, attended Tadmor, one of the first culinary schools in Israel.
Ron grew up in a Lebanese-Moroccan family and his mother, Linor, makes a stellar harissa. Leetal’s paternal grandmother was born in Turkey and her grandfather was born in Iraq. Between them, the couple has an unbelievable passion for flavors and spices that is born out of familial heritage and personal stories. And for Leetal, cooking (and baking) remain close to her heart. Her maternal grandfather, Saba Manny, was a baker who lost his wife and children during the Holocaust.
Their company website has a family feel, in part thanks to many black and white photographs of their relatives, including a Passover seder that shows Leetal’s grandfather and his family in Iraq or Ron’s family gathering around a table in Morocco. Leetal designs the simple, yet beautifully artistic labels on New York Shuk products, and works with a graphic designer to create everything related to the company’s visual brand (she created a website “from scratch,” she said). In addition to Ron and Leetal, the company has two full-time employees and handles orders from a fulfillment center in Pennsylvania. “We are four, doing the work of 40,” quipped Leetal.
Ron, who is the co-founder, heads matters related to sourcing ingredients and is usually on the ground working with facilities, namely two co-packers/manufacturers that produce the products, which include an array of spice blends, ranging from shawarma and baharat, as well as condiments, such as their best-selling harissa, or their preserved lemon paste.
For Ron, the biggest surprise of over a decade of business has been seeing “that people in the U.S. actually really love the food we represent,” he told me. And the most rewarding aspect? “Seeing my family’s tradition get into other peoples homes,” he said. When I asked Ron how he maintains a passion for the foods he creates when they occupy his entire work day, he responded, “Being a chef says it all. If you don’t LOVE food and creating food you aren’t able to mentally survive how difficult it is. Do I ever get sick of those flavors? To be one-hundred percent honest? Never. This food is my comfort!”
I first found New York Shuk spice blends at Whole Foods. Soon enough, I had collected half a dozen various varieties, including the fragrant Rosey Harissa, made with rose petals, the brightly green-hued Za’atar, which I mix into egg white omelets as they cook, and the Kafe Hawaij, a glorious combination of cardamom, ginger, cinnamon, and cloves which, when sprinkled over a glass of tea or coffee, feels like a warm hug from your Middle Eastern grandmother.
But the real test was in the bottle of ground sumac berries. Having developed a refined taste for sumac, which I often sprinkle on Basmati rice and meat kabobs, I was skeptical over New York Shuk’s version. Impressively, it offers a savory and fresh tartness that made it difficult for my very Persian family to resist.
New York Shuk offers events and pop-up kitchens, and to date, the company has been featured in outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bon Appétit, and Martha Stewart online. In a profile on their Signature Matbucha, The New York Times declared that the company is “putting the Middle East, with an emphasis on Jewish and Moroccan flavors, on the table.”
I asked Leetal to share her and Ron’s journey into the world of running a family-owned business that aims to offer accessible products that are nevertheless a true cut above your average Middle Eastern spice blends. The following was edited for clarity and length.
Jewish Journal: This is so much more than mere a business venture for you and Ron. Tell me about the soul behind New York Shuk.
Leetal Arazi: If you would have asked me this question a year ago, it would be different than how it is in a world-post on Oct. 7. When we started in New York, Jewish food was very one-sided, and, we felt, representative of Jewish Ashkenazi food. We felt it didn’t represent the food we grew up with, whether Ron’s homemade couscous that his mom made or harissa or delicacies that my Turkish grandmother would put on the table. No one in New York saw the food we grew up with as Jewish, but we asked, “Why is this less of a Jewish food than anything else?”
We set out to introduce more Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish food. But neither one of us had experience with manufacturing or developing products. When we came to New York, we didn’t have funding. We needed to survive, so we cooked. With the couscous bar, we wanted to change the perception of what is couscous, and Ron made and rolled the couscous himself. But we always sought a business that sold packaged products as the end of the line for us.
JJ: How has your business changed for you after Oct. 7?
LA: At the end of the day, we are celebrating who we are. Post-Oct. 7, our mission was heightened. We received backlash this year from people who had a problem with who we are. But it just made our mission way more clear. We’re standing behind our heritage and our story. Oct. 7 made us want to shout it louder. We’re a small business and daily struggles are always there, so we need to have a lot of koach (“strength” in Hebrew) to deal with everything. Unless our mission is crystal clear, it’s very hard to operate.
JJ: What is the manufacturing process behind New York Shuk products?
LA: When we came to the United States, we found lots of spice or condiment products that were made in Tunisia or Morocco, for example. But manufacturing in the U.S. was very important to us. We didn’t want to produce everything in another country, put a label on it and call it a day. We source ingredients from all over the world, but we want to make products in the U.S. The lemons in our Preserved Lemon Paste, for example, come from an organic family farm in southern California. We sourced over 100,000 pounds of organic lemons from our farm partners last year alone. For a product like that, we knew we needed the best lemons.
JJ: There are many Middle Eastern spices available in stores and online. What, in your view, was missing from this market?
LA: Our goal was to build a home in the Eastern pantry, a one-stop shop for the flavors of the Middle Eastern world. But we did everything from scratch. We started with one product (harissa), then created a harissa collection of two condiments and three spices. The goal was to show that we weren’t producing a trendy “hot sauce”, and that’s it. We wanted to bring the depth and meaning out of these products. That meant showing various spice levels and harissa products. We dove into learning how the product is made.
JJ: Speaking of harissa, Bon Appétit has called your harissa, “The Harissa Paste to end all Harissa Pastes.” What makes New York Shuk’s harissa so special?
LA: During development, we explored many different types of peppers. We use Ron’s family recipe. In Ron’s family, they discard the seeds and the skin of the peppers. It’s a very laborious process. There’s no putting the whole pepper into a meat grinder. But it’s not about which brand of harissa is good or which is bad. This is simply our family recipe and that’s what we’re representing. For us, the harissa is mostly about the flavor of the pepper, not necessarily about the heat. The point is not to numb your mouth. We treat our harissa like wine and try to bring different layers of flavor.
JJ: What are some of your favorite memories of food relating to your Jewish identity?
LA: When we lived in Israel, we took our Jewishness for granted. Living in Israel, we never thought we would need to do something actively Jewish. In Israel, Shabbat dinner just happens because that’s what you do. Same with the holidays. We understood very quickly that in New York, we need to choose Jewish traditions every day, especially now that we have small kids.
We actively need to bring those traditions to the forefront, because otherwise, they just die away. The holidays are very special for our families. For Rosh Hashanah, Ron likes to do an entire seder and go through the whole process. I had that growing up and it was special. For Rosh Hashanah, my grandmother had a specialty we looked forward to: quince jam. The Turkish food she made is also very unique because it’s different from other Turkish food; it’s Jewish-Turkish food, and it’s hard to find and research (Leetal’s grandmother, Rika, is 93 and lives in Israel. For her eightieth birthday, her family made a cookbook for her with all of her Turkish family recipes).
JJ: All of your spice products are O-U-certified kosher. Any similar plans for the condiments?
LA: It’s frustrating because there’s no reason why all of our products shouldn’t be kosher. But financially, it’s a burden we basically can’t afford right now. As much as we want it, we also need to stay in business. Hopefully, we will be able to do that. It’s actually super annoying because Ron’s family keeps kosher and we want them to be able to enjoy the condiments as well. All of our spices are kosher because the manufacturing is different and the facility is kosher. The facility for condiments is not. We would need to spend the funds to make it kosher. The barrier to [kosher] entry is very high. But believe me, no one wants our products to be kosher more than us. Hopefully very soon.
JJ: What are your go-to flavors when cooking at home for your family?
LA: We use our shawarma products a lot at home. Those are the ones that people use when they want a real Middle Eastern-Israeli flavor, the one that goes “POW!” in your mouth. Both Ron and I like the underdogs of Hawaij and Baharat spices. In the winter, I like to add Hawaij to soups and Kafe Hawaij to coffee and desserts, even to eggnog.
JJ: How can Middle Eastern spices be incorporated into Thanksgiving staples?
LA: I actually created a post on how to “Middle Eastern-ize” your Thanksgiving. Add harissa to mashed potatoes or shawarma spice to turkey. Make green beans lighter with matbucha. Add za’atar to potatoes, sumac to cranberry sauce and Kafe Hawaij to pumpkin pie. It’s Thanksgiving, but our-style.
For the first time, New York Shuk (@NYSHUK on Instagram) has launched a gift package set: including an option filled with their kosher spices. To learn more about the company, see recipes, receive a special 15 percent holiday discount code (SHUK15) or to sign up for newsletters, visit www.nyshuk.com/
Tabby Refael is an award-winning writer, speaker and weekly columnist for The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. Follow her on X and Instagram @TabbyRefael
Chicken Shawarma (Courtesy of New York Shuk)
This dish is a staple in our weekly meal prep. Serve with onion-sumac salad (finely-sliced red onion and chopped parsley tossed with olive oil, Preserved Lemon Paste and sumac), tahini swirled with Harissa plus fresh pita bread. In the summertime, we skip the caramelized onions, fire up the grill and keep the chicken thighs whole—it’s a fantastic and easy way to feed a crowd!
—Leetal Arazi
Serves Two
1½ lbs boneless, skinless chicken thighs
6 tbsp neutral oil
1 tsp salt
4 tbsp New York Shuk Shawarma Spice
1 large yellow onion
Cut chicken into small pieces. Toss with 3 tbsp oil, ½ tsp salt, and Shawarma Spice.
Thinly slice the onion. Sauté in a pan over medium-high heat until caramelized, adding 3 tbsp oil and ½ tsp salt midway.
Add chicken to the pan in a single layer. Sear for 1 minute without stirring, then cook, stirring occasionally, until cooked through. Adjust salt to taste.
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