The heritage and warmth of Mizrahi cooking, fresh in Olney

Mizrahi means “Eastern” - the Jews of Iraq and Iran, Yemen and Syria, Morocco and Tunisia, Egypt and Kurdistan. These Jews have lived in those communities for millennia, long before the modern state of Israel was established. In the span of a single generation, in the mid-20th century, nearly a million Jews left, fled, or were forced from the land that their families had called home.

This sudden exodus scattered communities to France, the US, and Canada, though the vast majority chose to resettle in Israel. Whether out of convenience, financial limitation, the urgent need for safety, or a deeper desire to remain in a familiar place, this migration quietly helped shape the culinary landscapes of their new homes. Yet, in the rush to assimilate and rebuild, many of the distinct flavors and heirloom recipes passed down through centuries began to fade.

At Sharav, we cook to reclaim those ancient traditions. We seek to reaffirm this branch of Jewry as co-owners of the foods of the desert, in peace, just as these communities have always shared in the heat of the Sharav wind. The vibrant ingredients of this cuisine belong to no single people; they are an enduring, deeply rooted legacy.

We believe that cultures bound by the same geography are also bound by the same table. Recognizing these familiar spices and shared dishes is a gentle reminder that people can live together in harmony. Food - especially when shared - has the profound ability to guide us toward common ground.

I’m the founder and chef behind Sharav, a Mizrahi-Jewish food project based in Gaithersburg, Maryland. My love of this cuisine started before I can even remember it: as a small kid at a Persian-run daycare, I was fed plate after plate of extraordinary food, and it never let go.

That early spark grew into something deeper than appetite. I spent years studying the Middle East, its history, its politics, and the peoples who have shaped and been shaped by the region. That grounding is why I approach this food the way I do: through the specific communities it comes from, with real attention to nuance and history, never flattened into a generic “Middle Eastern” label.

I reignited a serious passion for cooking after meeting my wife in 2024 and, true to form, chased it all the way down. A deep dive into my own genealogy, sparked by a family legend of an ancestor “buried between two boards in the sands of Algeria,” had me wondering whether Mizrahi or Sephardic roots explained the pull I’d always felt. A DNA test settled it: 100% Ashkenazi.

By then it didn’t matter. I’d fallen for the food and culture of Mizrahi Jews, the cuisine of North Africa, Yemen, and the Levant, and for the story it carries: communities displaced from their homelands who brought their food with them when they lost nearly everything else.

October 7th affected all Jews differently. For me, beyond the obvious profound sorrow and pain, I felt an ever-rising desperation for peace. Cooking a cuisine born of coexistence, food shaped over centuries by Jewish and Arab neighbors who shared space and ingredients, feels, in a small way, like my insistence that shared humanity, and a shared meal, can be the first step toward peace.