Shaya: An Odyssey of Food, My Journey Back to Israel

The beautiful, huge book Shaya is filled with exotic recipes, profusely illustrated with gorgeous, professional photos and cute watercolor sketches. It’s the production of New Orleans chef/restaurateur Alon Shaya. The flavor is predominantly Israeli with strong accents of Italian. Having a large population of immigrants imprinting their own cuisines into the Arab flavors of Israel is a fact that clearly shows in many of Shaya’s recipes. Unlike many professional chefs, Shaya was successful in scaling his recipes down to home kitchens. This book is far more than a cookbook—it’s filled with story after story from Shaya’s life and his career as a chef, written with good storytelling skill. The recipe headnotes are extensive, informative, and interesting. The recipe writing is also good, but the recipes are not meant for beginners or even intermediate cooks. Most are complex with many ingredients (such as chicken liver pâté and puff pastry) that only the more dedicated cooks would undertake. The recipes have one major fault: their layouts. Since the recipes are long and the instructions extensive, most are continued on overleaf pages—a huge inconvenience for the cook that the book designer could’ve remedied. The index is good and conveniently cross-referenced.