José Andrés Opens Zaytinya, Mediterranean Restaurant At Ritz-Carlton NoMad In New York

It’s arduous to imagine {that a} chef as skilled as José Andrés, who began cooking in his teenagers, felt the necessity to seek the advice of with anybody previous to opening a brand new restaurant. However this previous summer season, earlier than he launched New York-based Zaytinya, a Mediterranean eatery inside The Ritz-Carlton, New York, NoMad, he labored with Aglaia Kremezi, the Greek cook dinner and scholar specialised in Mediterranean delicacies.

A lot of the information protection that features Andrés nowadays is filed from the frontlines the place World Central Kitchen, the catastrophe reduction group he based in 2010, operates that week. Currently it has carried out work on the Poland/Ukraine border, in Gaza and in Panama. Clearly, this hasn’t prevented him from persevering with to increase his ThinkFoodGroup restaurant roster.

Seems the chef and Kremezi met greater than twenty years in the past when the chef was creating the primary Zaytinya, that means olive oil in Turkish, in Washington D.C. “I wished to look past Spain, discover and study in regards to the historical past and connectivity of the meals of the Jap Mediterranean, one of many richest components of the culinary world,” mentioned Andrés.

“José known as me and mentioned, ‘I’m coming to Athens to see you,’” Kremezi mentioned lately, from her dwelling in Greece. “And I responded, ‘I don’t reside in Athens, I reside on the island of Kea.’ So though he had no concept the place that was, he switched to ‘I’m coming to Kea to see you.’”

Earlier than he arrived on the northern Cyclade island Andrés had already eaten his manner by Turkey and Lebanon, however it was the delicacies of Greece that spoke to him probably the most. Kremezi labored for 35 years as a life-style journalist in Athens till she realized she’d quite be cooking and writing about Greek and Mediterranean culinary traditions.

“We cooked collectively, we ate out, we spoke for hours,” she mentioned. “I had lastly met somebody who went to mattress and wakened the subsequent day devising recipes in his head. Identical to I do.”

Kremezi believes all of the cuisines of the Mediterranean are related, even when the dishes don’t essentially look alike or style considerably totally different from nation to nation. She reminds us that Greece lived beneath Turkish rule for 400 years and that over time currents of immigration flew by the Balkans.

“It’s a delicacies formed by the ladies who needed to make do,” she mentioned. “Rising up we couldn’t afford a lot meat. As soon as on Sunday, after which maybe kofta on one other day, a meatball containing half meat, half bread.” Mezze or small plates are eaten all through the Mediterranean, she added, and so they include totally different breads, however each dish is ingredient based mostly.

She explains that Andrés intimately understands this as a result of his mom cooked this manner as nicely. In actual fact, in his cookbook, Greens Unleashed, the chef options inexperienced beans with onions cooked in tomato sauce, a dish each his mom in Spain and Kremezi’s in Greece used to make.

Kremezi didn’t study to cook dinner from a ebook although, and nobody advised her what to do. “I cooked alongside my mom,” she mentioned. “We by no means wrote down recipes.” In fact that modified when she began writing cookbooks such because the award-winner The Meals of Greece. Within the low season, she and her husband arrange cooking holidays on Kea.

On the menu at Zaytinya in New York, she’s notably eager on htipiti, an expansion made from roasted purple peppers, feta and thyme, the hen soup avgolemono, the crispy brussels sprouts afelia, her grape leaves dolmades and the kebabs. Quickly, somebody will probably be added to the staff to make her recipe for phyllo, by hand.