Mutra: A Jerusalem Grandmother's Recipes, Rebuilt at the Counter

The kubaneh arrives torn rather than sliced, still carrying oven heat, and the counter in front of you fills with small bowls: tomato foam, olives, a slick of herb oil the kitchen calls green gold, a blistered Anaheim pepper. Roughly twenty four people sit along a U shaped counter watching this happen, close enough to hear the tongs land. Behind the pass, the walls are lined with jars of pickled vegetables in reds and ochres and the floor is weathered tile. It could be a kitchen off a Jerusalem lane, except for the strip plaza parking lot outside, on the stretch of NE 123rd Street that runs from Biscayne Boulevard east toward the bay. This is Mutra at six in the evening, the hour the room decides what kind of night it will be.

Chef Raz Shabtai learned to cook by watching his grandmother, first from the kitchen counter as a small boy and later beside her. Her name was Mutra, which he translates as rain of blessings, and the restaurant carries it. He worked his way up from dishwasher through busboy, server, cold line, hot line and bar, then into senior kitchens in Israel and New York, Alenbi and Basta and Raphael and Le Relais Jaffa among them, before a private chef job brought him to Florida. Asked to name his own cooking, he credits Levantine, Galilean and Baladi influences, which is a precise way of saying Jerusalem, the city that absorbed all three.