"This is the bar, you sit on it eating and drinking, here will be the tables, and there the toilets, people go there, do their needs and come back."
This is how Chef Oren Asido opened his remarks when he gave me a tour of the large and impressive space of his new "Ola" restaurant.
While this was said with humor about his previous workplace, Poppa Restaurant which has a luxurious and colorful restroom, it was already at this point that it was understandable how different the direction the chef was aiming for his new restaurant, which he had been working on in recent months.
"I do not want bombastic settings," he says.
"Everything that happens outside is the same lady in a change of coat starting from the exaggerated design that is repeated in lots of places, the lavish toilets and of course the food itself. At some point I said 'enough', I decided I was going to do what I like, how I like."
During our conversation, Asido repeats the phrase "I go back to cooking" quite a few times.
Completely not obvious for those who until just 29 years old had enough, take a deep breath, work in luxury restaurants around the country, win the cooking reality "Chef Games", "get kidnapped" by Assaf Granit's Mahniuda group, leave it and stand in front of "Pupa" restaurant A moment before the corona and leaving it in favor of a place of its own, when in the middle it found itself as a (very successful) full-fledged tenant in the reality show "Big Brother", at an entrance that surprised many.
Last March, a few weeks after finishing fifth in the "regular" season of the reality show and being one of the favorite contenders, inside and out, Asido announced the departure of "Pupa" which had just reopened after another closure, in favor of what he then defined as rethinking and opening his own future venue.
The same future location is the restaurant complex where we now stand, at the Selena Hotel in Neve Tzedek, which is 180 degrees different from the French restaurant.
"Welcome to the Ola restaurant," he declares with a smile.
"We're seasonal Mediterranean cuisine. I bring with me everything I grew up on - but not only. I consider seasonality first and she will determine everything, but also where I grew up, in Spanish - Moroccan cuisine, everything to do with the food I grew up on and the area we all grew up in, Which is actually a grouping of postcards on the Mediterranean. "
"When I had to give character to a restaurant I decided to look inward and not outward, and that's the upgrade I made on my personal level. In fact, this place is me, I want people to come eat and enjoy. The thing I love most, more than cooking, is hospitality. This place is the essence of wishes. "There are no filters here, I am most exposed, for better or worse."
In "Popa" you left you were also in the front, kind of a chef and host, no?
"It's important for me to emphasize that I have nothing against this restaurant, on the contrary if already, I very much want them to succeed," says the chef.
"I had culinary independence there but the place was defined from the beginning as a place with a French touch. It is a kitchen that I have a lot of love and respect for, some would say he is the mother and father of the culinary world, but not my mother and father. In a career.
"The person here is not the restaurant, as mentioned, but me and the stage I am in my life, my comfort zone, the stable ground, the woman and the child. This is what affects me the most and hence also affects me professionally. 'Ola' is the product of this situation.
"I am calmly in love"
At this point, Asido called me to leave the restaurant and go out with him. And the unbearable and somehow with us - quiet. Absolute silence of the good kind, such peace. Asido inhales from the cigarette and tells me "you see, this is what I wanted and I was missing in life".
"I'm in love with this calm, I start the morning by drinking espresso and looking down from the bridge. There's something powerful about it and a lot of calm. It's quiet I've been missing in life for a long time. ', This structure inside and out - reflects exactly that.
"Everyone I would talk to would see the bouncy and devilish pine who wants to devour and devour. Friends from home and colleagues tell me 'we feel like we're talking to the other person," it starts from the comfort zone you have at home, continues to the partners I have here, who understand and give me the place To express oneself as a chef, understand that hospitality here is first and foremost, just like me want it to become an institution.
They give me all the tools and backup to succeed here, and I only have to cook.
I'm back to cooking, that's the point here and this is the title you should give to the article.
Do you know how long I have not cooked?
I'll be renting food again, it's crazy! "
How will this come to me in terms of the atmosphere in the place?
"Once you arrived at the restaurant, for me you came to my house, and for me the guest house is a top value," Asido emphasizes.
"This restaurant is me, the whole experience that the guest goes through is me, it excites me on levels I can not explain. In terms of atmosphere, let's say so - they will not jump on the bar here but they will not sit and hear Vivaldi either.
We stand in the most perfect place to explain what this restaurant is - on the right Florentine, on the left Neve Tzedek, we are neither like this nor like that, we are in the middle.
This bridge that we stand on (Neve Tzedek Bridge, LA) is also a metaphorical bridge between the approaches.
I see the person first, and not if he is wearing a tuxedo or jeans and sandals. "
The price you pay
Despite the calm and serenity that Asido conveys, everyone knows that in every process of starting a new business, all the more so opening a restaurant, which many define as an "ongoing nightmare", there are also prices, sometimes not simple, and especially in personal life.
"Opening a place is not an easy thing," agrees Asido.
"And think I went through three openings with my wife Anal while we were together - the palm, Popa and now Ola. We did not really have relaxation. Not everything is glittering but my family knows what the establishment takes from me and I was in the profession when we started dating. We are looking longer term, not near term. .
"Tell you that everything is easy and perfect? No, there are difficulties, but as long as we give each other the place to express themselves, each in his own field, everything is fine. For example, I will say do not give up in the morning the ceremony of taking the child to kindergarten.
In the long run, what are the aspirations of the 'mature pine' for the future?
I'm not dealing with that right now.
If you had asked me a few months ago or two or three years ago about moving abroad say, this would definitely have been an option along with lots of other types of wishes in all sorts of categories. I have in the space of the place, both physically and metaphorically, an amusement park of things that I have not yet begun to take advantage of. "
"If there's anything I've learned in life it's the importance of the phrase 'you caught a lot you didn't catch', so I take my time and stay patient. Obviously there are things I want to accomplish and I will fulfill in another five years or a decade "Just to stop the race I was in, to stay out of the spotlight in favor of the flames and fluorescents of the kitchen, that's all."
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