The Making of a Chef: Ori Menashe’s Road to Middle-Eastern Cuisine

Don’t ask Ori Menashe about his hummus unless you have time. He has given it some serious thought. With the memory of the famed Abu Hassan in Jaffa as his lodestar, Menashe has been working on his garbanzo dip since 2018, when he opened Bavel in downtown Los Angeles. Recently, when he had the time to tinker with the dish that former Los Angeles Times critic Jonathan Gold called “magnificent” he increased the cooking time and added a few tricks to deepen the flavor.

“Now it reminds me of Israel,” said a smiling Menashe, when we gathered with his wife and partner Genevieve Gergis at their new restaurant Saffy’s in East Hollywood. Located on a desolate strip of Fountain Avenue near the big blue Scientology compound, Menashe’s new upscale casual restaurant was a huge hit from opening day. Fans of his two highly-rated downtown restaurants Bestia and Bavel lined up to try the chef’s version of Middle-Eastern street foods like kebabs, falafel and shawarma served with the team’s usual finesse and Genevieve’s sophisticated desserts.

A fan of Menashe’s since 2012 when he opened Bestia, an Italian restaurant located on a dark street in the newly gentrified Arts District, I remember wondering why he wasn’t cooking something closer to his heart back then—something more Israeli. At the time, he said LA wasn’t ready. He said that Angelenos loved pasta and that Italian was a familiar, comfortable cuisine. I hoped he was simply waiting for the right moment. Ten years and several Ottolenghi cookbooks later, the complex foods of Turkey, Morocco, Israel, Egypt, Persia and Lebanon are woven into menus all over the world. And Saffy’s is a “blockbuster” according to the Los Angles Times.

“School was too slow,” says Menashe, who explained that learning on the job and not following the rules has served him well in terms of creativity. “As a result, our food tastes different.”

At 41, the LA-born, Israeli-raised chef is soaring, but it wasn’t always a straight shot. After completing his military service in Israel, while spending a sabbatical year in South America, he started cooking in order to feed his friends, a role he had seen his father play in a home that highly valued eating together. When he decided to pursue a career in LA he enrolled in culinary school but after two weeks he quit. “School was too slow,” says Menashe, who explained that learning on the job and not following the rules has served him well in terms of creativity. “As a result, our food tastes different.”

He learned on the job at La Terza, a popular Italian restaurant that would give him a mentor, Jason Travi, and a wife, Genevieve Gergis, whose roots are Egyptian. Genevieve, a French horn player, was the restaurant’s hostess. They fell in love over a steak dinner, served by Menashe in the restaurant kitchen the night before New Year’s Eve, a singularly crazy night for a first date.

Today, with three major restaurants to run and eight-year-old daughter Saffron to raise, the tasks are divided: Ori is the chef and Genevieve is interior designer and head of a pastry department of 16 pastry chefs. Like her husband, Gergis is self-taught and if you ever tasted her desserts, you’ll agree that school is overrated. Her husband kvells, “She is the real talent.”

In the notoriously difficult restaurant business, the young couple are riding a wave, but the last few years have been tumultuous. The lease for Saffy’s was signed three weeks into Covid, back when optimistic people thought that the pandemic would be a short blip. When the world stopped, their two upscale restaurants closed and then reopened with a fixed price dinner for takeout. Two years later, after delays in permitting and construction, Saffy’s opened just as pandemic life normalized and folks were eager to dine out again.

Menashe is upbeat about the current Los Angeles dining scene. “The culture changed here. Why do you think so many chefs are coming to LA? It used to be restaurants were for special occasions; now more people are dining out all week long.” Something you might notice if you try to get into his restaurants on a Thursday night.

As for the future, the couple has plenty of plans. They hope to have Saffy’s open for lunch soon—with a Tunisian tuna sandwich that I can’t stop dreaming about. Next door, a small café is already serving coffees, teas, breakfast pastries, cookies and two breads—a buckwheat sourdough and golden challah.

Meanwhile the chef keeps tinkering. Recently, when he set up a fermentation lab at home to work on his pita, he learned that by extending the fermentation time to 72 hours, he could make a moist, cakey, cloud of a bread that, when served hot at Bavel, is ethereal. The memory of it makes me want to toss out all those pale, store-bought imposters in my kitchen and drive downtown immediately.