Einat Admony

Einat Admony is chef and owner of the Balaboosta, Bar Bolonat, and Taïm restaurants in New York City and author of Balaboosta: Bold Mediterranean Recipes to Feed the People You Love. Her life has been an adventure. After growing up in Tel Aviv, she secured illicit rations for her kitchen as a cook in the Israeli Army, walked away from college after two months, traipsed around Germany as a gypsy, then packed up her life to move to New York City and work at “a million venerable kitchens around the city,” according to The New Yorker. Then things got interesting. Inspired by the street food of her native Tel Aviv, Einat opened the falafel joint Taïm (tah·eem) in Manhattan’s West Village in 2005. In 2010, she launched Balaboosta in Nolita where the manner of cooking is not so much Middle Eastern as Mediterranean. Her most recent venture is Bar Bolonat, a West Village eatery named one of the best new restaurants of 2014 by New York Times critic Pete Wells. Her way with ingredients has been lauded repeatedly by The New Yorker, The New York Times, and New York Magazine, among many others, and her way with people was noted by The New York Times’ critic Sam Sifton: “Admony…runs Balaboosta exactly as if she’d invited a room full of strangers for dinner, then told her family to be nice to them.” Einat is married to Stefan Nafziger. Together they own and operate Balaboosta, Bar Bolonat, and Taïm. They live in Brooklyn with their two young children, Liam and Mika. When Einat is not at the restaurant she can be found at home, cooking for the crowd of family and friends continually gathered around her dining table.