junctiongasil.blogg.se

• #EMA RESTAURANT PROFESSIONAL#

#EMA RESTAURANT PROFESSIONAL#

Jacobson, fresh off of a stint at the inaugural helm of LEYE’s rotating-restaurant concept Intro, spent time in Israel as a professional volleyball player. The city could use one-aside from Skokie’s Taboun Grill, a pious kosher spot that’s closed on Saturdays, and local small-scale fast-food chains Benjyehuda and Naf Naf Grill, Chicago is lacking a quality outlet for Israeli cuisine, a mashup of Middle Eastern staples and eastern-European fare brought over during the Jewish diaspora, with an emphasis on Israel’s bounty of fresh produce. But I was dying to eat there.īecause of its name, it’s fair to assume that Ema would be an Israeli eatery.

I texted my family in haste: They stole our idea! “We waited too long,” my brother wrote. The cuisine would be “Mediterranean.” There were pictures of hummus and fresh vegetables on the signs-the food looked Israeli.

So imagine my surprise when I turned the corner of Clark and Illinois and saw the announcements for a new restaurant from Lettuce Entertain You called, of all things, Ema. And we’d name the new establishment after the queen of our household, the Hebrew word for “mom”: ema. There’d be the “Get Out of Bed” chicken soup, the “Please Pray for Parking” schnitzel, and of course, the “Water the Garden” salad. We wanted to open a restaurant that would showcase my Israeli mother’s cooking, and we’d name all the dishes after her. My family and I used to have an inside joke.