Einat Admony

Chef-owner, Taïm and Balaboosta
New York, New York

Chef Einat Admony named her restaurant Balaboosta for a

reason.

“Balaboosta is Yiddish for ‘perfect housewife,’” she explains to

me on a March morning at the restaurant. “It reflects a woman

who can multitask, raise kids. It’s a woman who can deal; she can

raise her family, she cooks all the time. It’s a hard-core woman.”

Admony herself is a hard-core woman. She wears an army cap

(she served in the Israeli army for two years and then in the Israeli

air force) as she commands her way around the kitchen. And when

it comes to one particular subject, Admony is more than hard-core;

she’s positively fierce. That subject is flavor.

“I hate when restaurant food is too fancy,” she says as she

begins wrapping eggplant in aluminum foil for her wildly flavorful

baba ghanouj. “I don’t get that. The most important thing is the

flavor!”

She places the wrapped eggplant in a skillet and places another

skillet on top. “Did you wrap the foil all the way around the

eggplant?” I ask, trying to figure out the method behind the

madness.

“You look like a smart guy,” she says. “You can figure it out.”