Book offers guide to Israel’s ethnic groups through family restaurants
Ron Diller’s ‘Savory Flavors’ explains the history of the communities behind the country’s multicultural cuisine: ‘I really wanted to tell their stories’
Jessica Steinberg, The Times of Israel's culture and lifestyles editor, covers the Sabra scene from south to north and back to the center
Author Ron Diller has always loved ethnic, family-owned restaurants.
His grandparents owned Diller’s Strictly Kosher Restaurant in the 1920s in the San Francisco Bay Area, which served Austro-Hungarian Jewish cuisine.
The restaurant was a defining experience for Diller, whose latest book, “Savory Flavors,” tells the diverse stories of ethnic cuisines served at family restaurants and bakeries throughout Israel, offering a kind of culinary reading adventure.
“I had this in my blood,” said Diller.
The 280-page tome isn’t a cookbook, but more of a coffee table guidebook about the food, culture and history of the Jews who came to Israel from the Balkans and the countries of the Middle East and North Africa.
Always a scholar of different cuisines, Diller researched the book by making his way around Israel’s plethora of family restaurants, tasting the family recipes, and hearing the stories of their countries of origin and their favorite dishes.
“When I came to Israel, I immediately liked the food,” said Diller, who moved to Israel in 1993.
“I didn’t want these people sharing their recipes with the public,” he added. “I really wanted to tell their stories, these people who had to flee their countries and came to Israel.”
Each section of the book includes a short history of an ethnic group, dating from the First Temple period until its members emigrated to Israel. A range of color and black-and-white photos detail the various parts of the journey.
It delves into the personal narratives of the family restaurants, and takes a close look at their specialty dishes, crafted from family recipes passed down through generations.
It isn’t the first time that Diller has embarked on this kind of project.
As a student many years ago at San Francisco State University, he wrote a guidebook about small, ethnic, family-owned restaurants in San Francisco titled “A Cab Driver Guide to Gourmet Dining,” describing off-grid, hole-in-the-wall restaurants, ranging from Chinese and Peruvian to Nicaraguan and Salvadoran cuisines.
It was never published but it eventually led Diller to research the foods and histories of each of Israel’s Sephardic and Mizrahi ethnicities, both in university archives and in the kitchen of each establishment.
Diller wanted to give readers a sense of Israel’s multicultural, multiethnic cuisine.
“I went to any restaurant of anyone who defends our country,” said Diller, including the Druze, Bedouin and Circassian communities, where owners of restaurants and bakeries fed him their specialties and shared images of their families and foods.
“Savory Flavors” is available on Amazon and at Jerusalem’s Pomeranz Bookseller.
