‘Zahav’ Is James Beard Best Cookbook of Year
By Liza Schoenfein April 27, 2016
“Zahav: A World of Israeli Cooking,” by Israeli-born chef Michael Solomonov and his partner, Steven Cook, took top honors at the 2016 James Beard Foundation Book, Broadcast & Journalism Awards Tuesday night.
“Zahav” (Rux Martin Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) scored both the International and Book of the Year awards at the event, which was held at Chelsea Piers in New York.
Solomonov is the chef at Zahav, the flagship of Philadelphia-based restaurant group, CookNSolo, which also includes Abe Fisher, Dizengoff, Federal Donuts and Percy Street Barbecue. Solomonov won the Beard award for Best Chef-Mid Atlantic in 2011.
The “Zahav” cookbook was produced by Saveur founding editor Dorothy Kalins, who also produced another 2016 Beard winner: Michael Anthony’s “V Is for Vegetable,” which took the Vegetable-Focused and Vegetarian prize. (Interestingly, Kalins’ husband is filmmaker Roger Sherman, whose new documentary, In Search of Israeli Cuisine, features Solomonov eating his way across that country.)
Solomonov wasn’t the only Israeli to be honored: London-based Yotam Ottolenghi (with co-author Ramael Scully) took the Cooking from a Professional Point of View prize for “NOPI: The Cookbook.”
Eater editor and Forward contributor Helen Rosner won the Personal Essay award for “On Chicken Tenders,” which appeared on Guernica.
The 2016 Beard Awards Gala, where the restaurant and chef awards will be handed out, takes place at Lyric Opera of Chicago on Monday, May 2. Solomonov has been nominated in the Outstanding Chef category.
Liza Schoenfein is food editor of the Forward. Contact her at schoenfein@forward.com or on Twitter, @LifeDeathDinner
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
