Amateur Hour

With Zahav Home, Michael Solomonov and Steven Cook adapt their flagship restaurant’s flavors for the harried weeknight home cook.

Broadly speaking, cookbooks come in two flavors. One looks great on a coffee table but can be a bear in the kitchen, be it because of impossible-to-source ingredients or intimidating techniques. Think of Thomas Keller calling for 1.5 kilograms of dried grapevine knots and 250 grams of “dark raisins, dried on the vine, preferably from Paradigm Winery” for his Per Se rendition of venison rack—which already likely necessitates a hunting license or a friend with one. And that’s before you even get into immersion circulators and agar-agar. The other variety stakes out the opposite end of the spectrum: The Easy 5-Ingredient Slow Cooker Cookbook; Jamie Oliver’s 5 Ingredients Mediterranean; Milk Street’s Cookish: Throw It Together.

Zahav Home, the latest volume from Philadelphia-based restaurateurs Michael Solomonov and Steven Cook W’95, manages to tick both boxes. Its soul resides in an opening Pantry section whose foundational ingredients include a decent number that require a trip beyond a conventional supermarket: preserved lemons, black limes, date molasses, Urfa pepper, a pickled mango condiment called amba. So the book is best suited to cooks with access to stores like West Philly’s Makkah Market and International Foods and Spices, or Kalustyan’s in New York (which ships nationwide). But the recipes that follow are simple, family-friendly, and frequently outperform expectations.

Weeknight cooks can thank the pandemic. When restaurants shut down in March 2020, Solomonov and Cook’s CookNSolo restaurant empire “went from more than four hundred employees to zero,” as they write in an introduction. As the founders struggled to keep their business afloat, they sought respite in their home kitchens, cooking for one another and their families. The busy fathers relearned what the rest of us know: “Some days are Tuesdays, and you get home after dark and the kids are melting down. And some days are Fridays when you will do almost anything to avoid washing dishes.” Their attempts to adapt their flagship restaurant’s flavors for the home setting paved the way for this book.

In place of the crispy lamb’s tongue or duck and foie gras kebabs that helped their 2015 Zahav: A World of Israeli Cooking win the James Beard Society’s Book of the Year Award, Zahav Home serves up three foolproof spins on a spatchcocked chicken, butternut squash baba ganoush that takes less than 10 minutes of active preparation, and Yemenite cauliflower wedges that a 12-year-old could carry off in half that time before stealing the show. Harder-to-find pantry items repay the shopping effort with depth charges of umami (like amba-inflected braised cabbage) and funky fruitiness (from preserved lemons in a crispy-garlic and pine nut dressing for broccolini; or the Urfa and date molasses glaze on oven-baked chicken wings). And the only thing better than a cardamom-scented pecan cake’s morning-after iteration alongside coffee was a set of directions featuring the repeated phrase “using the same food processor bowl (no need to rinse)…”

As my family’s default cook, I’ve been surprised by how often I’ve turned to this book since it came out in late 2024. Partly because I’m someone who already stocked tahina, sumac, pomegranate molasses, black limes, and many other ingredients—though not amba or hawaij, my new favorite spice blend—I was a little underwhelmed when I first paged through it. But Solomonov and Cook turn out to have a winning knack for simplification. Their recipe for Swiss chard and feta burekas convinced me that maybe rolling up phyllo dough cigars was less of a pain than I’d always assumed—and next thing I knew, I was cranking them out week after week almost as an afterthought. The same went for oven-baked chicken wings with three dead-easy but utterly delicious glazes, and a kale salad technique that dispenses with much fussy slicing and massaging. With flavor profiles that depart just enough from my usual fare to breathe new life into family dinner—even, or perhaps especially, during the winter doldrums, when a well-stocked pantry can make all the difference—Zahav Home hits the sweet spot. As handsome as it looks on a coffee table, it’s been spending more time in my kitchen.—TP