There is a photograph on my phone of a round of warm laffa sitting next to a spread of small dishes. I’m Harry Hayman, and I have eaten at a lot of terrific restaurants, here in Philadelphia and around the world. Zahav still knocks my socks off. We took a dear friend there to celebrate her graduation. She had heard all about Zahav and had never actually been, so naturally we had to do something about THAT. The hummus came, then the laffa, then the salatim, and then dish after dish, right up to the moment you think you cannot eat another bite and something else arrives that you have to try. It was a great night. I also left with a question I want to work through here, because I have spent years in the restaurant business and it keeps coming back to me: how does a place stay this good for this long?

The Night, in the Order It Happened

The whole evening felt like it had already been planned for us, which of course it had. Somebody planned the pace, somebody planned the order, somebody planned who would be standing near our table when the next plate was ready.

It began the way every Zahav meal begins. CookNSolo describes the start of the meal as laffa bread baked in the taboon, served with hummus and salatim. On the restaurant’s own current menu, that opening course is called “For the Table”, and it lists hummus tehina with laffa alongside a run of small dishes: beets with tehina, twice cooked eggplant, pickled napa cabbage, Moroccan carrots, marinated cauliflower and spicy fennel. That is the spread in my photograph, and it is the part of the night I will describe for the rest of my life.

Later came a grilled fish fillet resting on yogurt, topped with ribbons of shaved carrot. I am describing it exactly that way on purpose. I did not want to guess at a name and get it wrong, and the current menu on Zahav’s site does not list a dish that matches what we were served, so I am sticking with what was on the plate.

The Graduate

The real reason for the dinner was our friend. I am keeping her out of the details, and she knows exactly who she is. All I will say is that I am proud of her, and that there were plenty of laughs.

That is the other thing I have always loved about restaurants. Years later you may not remember every dish you ate or every bottle you drank, but you remember who was at the table and what you were celebrating. A restaurant that gets out of the way of that is doing something harder than it looks.

Where Zahav Sits in Philadelphia

Zahav is an Israeli restaurant that, according to its own site, has operated since 2008 at 237 St. James Place. Visit Philadelphia places it in a prime Society Hill location near Second and Walnut streets, and notes that its flatbreads are baked in an authentic Arabic taboon, a wood burning oven. So the thing I ate at the start of the night comes from a specific piece of equipment that sits in a specific spot in a building that has been in the same neighborhood for about eighteen years. I find that more interesting than most menus.

The restaurant is part of CookNSolo, the group run by Michael Solomonov and Steve Cook. Zahav’s chef page says Solomonov owns CookNSolo Restaurants together with Cook, and the group’s own family page shows a long list of other places built around Israeli food, from a hummus counter to a skewer house to a donut and fried chicken shop. Zahav is the anchor of all of it.

What the Awards Actually Tell You

I am not usually moved by trophies, but the Zahav trophy case reads like a timeline of staying power, so it is worth laying out.

In 2016, Solomonov and Cook’s book Zahav: A World of Israeli Cooking won Book of the Year at the James Beard Awards. In 2017, Solomonov was named Outstanding Chef in America, which PhillyVoice reported when the restaurant won again two years later. In 2019 the James Beard Foundation named Zahav Outstanding Restaurant, and PhillyVoice noted it was the first time a Philadelphia restaurant had won that award. Zahav’s chef page adds that Solomonov now has five James Beard Awards and that Zahav was the first Israeli American restaurant to take Outstanding Restaurant.

Notice the spacing. A cookbook in 2016. A chef award in 2017. A restaurant award in 2019. And the restaurant itself opened in 2008. None of those is a one night story. They are a decade of nights, stacked up and counted.

Why Consistency Is the Hardest Thing

Here is the part I really want you to take from this, and it comes from standing on the other side of the pass for a long time. Running a restaurant is HARD. I don’t care how talented your chef is or how beautiful your dining room looks. Getting the food, the service, the timing, the atmosphere and about a thousand other little things right on any given night is no small accomplishment. A great meal once is luck plus talent. A great meal on a Tuesday in February, with a new server and a dishwasher out sick, is a system.

What strikes me is how little of Zahav’s reputation seems to rest on novelty. Philadelphia Inquirer critic Craig LaBan wrote that the thrill of discovery at Zahav, even for longtime repeat customers, is as fresh and vivid as ever. Read that as an operator and it is a startling sentence. People who have already been there ten times still feel it. His review also mentions the warm laffa fresh from the taboon oven and the many little dishes of salatim, and that is almost exactly the same bread and the same small plates we sat down to on our night.

That sameness is the point. A restaurant can change its mezze every season and still keep a signature rhythm: bread out of the fire, hummus, a spread of small dishes, then the main event. The menu today is a prix fixe with one shared opening course and then a choice for each guest of a mezze, a dish off the fire, and a dessert. That structure is a form of discipline. It makes the kitchen’s job repeatable and the guest’s night legible, and it leaves room for the cooks to be creative inside it.

I can’t see inside Zahav’s kitchen and I won’t pretend to. But I can see the evidence from the dining room, and it is the same bread, arriving warm, to a table of people who have no idea they are being looked after by a system.

The Team Behind the Table

So, a big shout out to Chef Michael Solomonov, to Steve Cook, and to the entire CookNSolo team, and especially to the folks working in the kitchen and the dining room who make the whole thing happen night after night. Customers see a chef’s name on a book cover. They don’t see the person at the taboon, the person running food, the person refilling water at exactly the right second. Philadelphia is damn lucky to have you.

I would also point out something small that tells you how this place thinks. Zahav’s site notes that reservations are released four weeks ahead at 11 am Eastern, one day at a time, and that the 14 seat bar takes walk ins. Four weeks out, one day at a time, every day. That is a restaurant that expects to be full on a random Wednesday in December and has decided to run itself that way.

Why Harry Hayman Writes About a Dinner Like This

Most of what I write is about local economies, food systems and what Philadelphia could build next. It might seem odd to put a graduation dinner in that pile. I don’t think it is. A restaurant that holds its standard for eighteen years is a small business running an extraordinary operation and giving a city something to point at when it is trying to explain what it is good at. When people ask whether Philadelphia could do something world class, I now have a very specific address to give them.

And here is the question I can’t stop turning over. If a kitchen can learn to be reliably excellent, night after night, with a hundred moving parts, what else in this city could we run that way? Our friend left with a story about her graduation dinner at Zahav. I am still asking myself what it would take to run a food market, or a school lunch program, with the same stubborn refusal to have an off night.

We will be back, you can count on that. Reservations open four weeks ahead, at 11 am. I have a feeling a few of us will be watching the clock.

Zahav, Society Hill, and the Hardest Thing in Restaurants