An Israeli Chef Looks to the Landscape

MATTAT, Israel — The winding path to the chef Erez Komarovsky’s home, overlooking a village here in the Upper Galilee in Israel, is lined with a wild mix of pomegranate and olive trees, fennel and chickpea plants. It is fragrant with lemon, quince or apple blossoms, depending on the season.

There, in a stone house about a quarter-mile from the Lebanese border, Mr. Komarovsky, 55, tinkers with his latest culinary creations: a whole-eggplant dish roasted in his pizza oven, or a free-form babka with quince plucked from his garden. This summer, it was a festive torte of tiny fresh grape leaves encasing lamb and rice, topped with a pomegranate-fennel relish; the dish is just as good with Swiss chard in the fall.

Until the early 1990s, Israeli chefs were still looking to Europe for inspiration for their restaurants. Mr. Komarovsky was instrumental in changing that, incorporating techniques he learned abroad into local recipes at his Lehem Erez bakery-cafe in Herzliya, near Tel Aviv. In doing so, he influenced the next generation of chefs — like Meir Adoni, who opened Nur restaurant in New York this year — to look with pride to their own ethnic culinary backgrounds.

“Erez is the prophet of new Israeli cuisine,” said Janna Gur, the editor of Al Hashulchan, a popular food magazine in Israel. “The general public doesn’t know him. But he is so connected to the seasons, to the produce, to the local gastronomy. This is what Israeli food is all about.”

These days, Mr. Komarovsky is concentrating on the cooking of the Upper Galilee, incorporating Lebanese, Druse (a religious and ethnic group in the region) and hyperlocal ingredients into his recipes.