On Friday nights at Mesiba, a lively Israeli restaurant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the scene is what you might expect at a hip, high-design restaurant: Bartenders are busy making cocktails, a DJ is spinning records and good-looking folks are clustered around booths, snacking on small plates like pickled vegetables and tableside-made hummus.
But take a closer look, and you’ll see that many tables also have a long, lit white candle. The tables are overflowing with Shabbat classics served family-style, including challah, salads and chraime, or fish served in a spicy Moroccan sauce.
Welcome to Mesiba’s new Friday night dinner series, which aims to bring a “Tel Aviv-style” Shabbat experience to its customers, according to Elad Zvi, the co-founder of Bar Lab, a hospitality company that operates Mesiba and a host of establishments in New York and Miami, including the upscale shawarma spot Spice Brothers in the East Village and Miami’s Margot Bar and Bistro.
Each Friday evening, Mesiba, with Israeli Executive Chef Eli Buliskeria at the helm, collaborates with a different chef, influencer or Jewish creative to create a unique Shabbat meal and experience. The series kicked off on Nov. 15 with a dinner hosted by Zvi and his wife, Masha, featuring family recipes; on Friday, Dec. 6, Buliskeria will partner with Jessica and Trina Quinn, the chef couple behind Dacha 46, a Brooklyn-based traveling popup that promises an “Eastern European Queer Jewish Experience.”
“The main thing is to create the kehillah, the community,” Zvi said about the Shabbat dinner series. “We have a lot of diversity between our friends — some of them are Jewish, some of them are not. But the one thing we all have in common: We like to break bread together. We like to eat, we like to drink, we like to party together.”
He added: “Especially after the crazy one year and a half that the community has had, people want something that keeps them together, right?”
To be clear, the Shabbat dinners at Mesiba — with a set price of $75 per person, though the regular dinner menu is also on offer — do not aim to provide a religious experience. There are no blessings or set start times, and though the meat served on Friday nights is kosher, and kosher wine is available, the vibe is designed to appeal to both Jews and non-Jews alike.
The single candle, instead of the traditional two candles that are typically blessed on Friday nights, was inspired by “a red sauce Sunday” event regularly hosted by a friend, said Zvi. One big candle and a tablecloth “makes you feel like you’re part of something.”
“We don’t want to have a religious component,” Buliskeria added. “I don’t want you to sit in the restaurant, and the table next to you is saying the blessing on the candles; you will say, like, ‘what’s going on?’ We want you to feel comfortable, and it doesn’t matter who you are.”
Each weekly host personalizes the Shabbat meal or event. On the November evening that Zvi hosted, the menu included two old-school family recipes: a “refreshing salad,” made of cucumber, dill and lemon that is a specialty of Zvi’s Israeli mother, and a potato and sour cream dish that Zvi’s mother-in-law makes.
“When we make food, we make it to be delicious — but on Shabbat dinners, we try to touch memories,” said Buliskeria, who adapted Zvi’s family recipes. “We are not necessarily trying to go with the most crazy technique; we are trying to touch memories and bring you to the moment when you were eating meatballs in your grandma’s living room.”
Another recent “Hot & Shabbat” dinner, hosted by Jewish influencer Liv Schreiber, was targeted to singles looking for both love and friendship. In order to maximize the mingling, the Shabbat meal was served buffet-style. At the Dacha 46 Shabbat this Friday, the meal will include pelmeni (Russian dumplings) and lamb borscht.
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“It depends on the host — it really depends on the Shabbat they want to create,” Buliskeria said of the evening’s endless permutations. “That’s why we are very excited about it. There are no rules, there are no regulations.”
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