ONE DAY IN 1983, AVNER SAMUEL GOT a call from his hometown of Tel Aviv. A doctor told him that his mother had 10 days to live. The news came just as Avner’s career was taking off. He had recently gone from making $25,000 a year as a chef in Boca Raton to making headlines (and $100,000 a year) with his tortilla soup at the Mansion on Turtle Creek. Still, he dropped everything and rushed to Israel to be by his mother’s side.
“When she lay dying, she told me, ’Go find your older brother and apologize for me,’” Avner says. “I didn’t have an older brother. I thought she was confused and it was the heavy drugs talking. But she went on about a boy that she had before me that she had lost.” Avner went to visit his grandmother, but the old woman denied the existence of any older brother. His mother died before Avner could learn whether her last request was a mere delusion or the revelation of a family secret.
He returned to Dallas and, over the next 15 years, made himself a star in the firmament of Dallas kitchens. He opened a dazzling series of restaurants—the Crescent, Yellow, Avner’s, Okeanos, Bistro A—and closed them just as quickly. Critics (this one included) took to calling him nomadic and mercurial if they were in a good mood, or simply hot-tempered and undependable if they weren’t. Although Avner’s highly episodic career became the butt of jokes in the Dallas food community, his cooking was always revered. His imaginative and energetic spirit encouraged the invention of Southwest cuisine, the food that put Dallas on the culinary map. He pioneered Pacific Rim and reached back to his roots to become the master of Mediterranean food.
Then, in 1999, 16 years after his mother passed away, Avner’s father Ezra gathered the whole family together once again in Tel Aviv, and he confirmed that their mother had indeed given birth to a boy before Avner. The child had been given away. “The guilt was catching up with him,” Avner says. “He was ready to make my mother’s dying wish come true.”
EZRA SAMUEL WAS 22 YEARS OLD WHEN HE met Yafa Amadi. Yafa’s father, a Kurd living in Israel, had hired the handsome young Iraqi Jew to do manual labor. Yafa herself was just 13, but that was close to marrying age in the Middle East of the 1940s.
One day during the hot Jerusalem summer, Yafa, which means “beautiful” in Hebrew, offered Ezra water, like a biblical Rebecca at the well. They fell in love.
When her parents forbade the couple to marry, Yafa and Ezra secretly became lovers, and, before long, Yafa was pregnant. Her father was shamed by what the community would think and locked Yafa in the basement of their house without food or water. For three days, she believed that her life was over. But Ezra scoured the city until he found her in the basement, and he helped her escape. The two lovers fled to northern Israel but survived on the lam for only two days before Yafa’s father noticed she’d broken free. The police eventually brought Yafa back home, while Ezra went into hiding in southern Israel.
Her father moved Yafa to live with an aunt in northern Israel, and there she had her baby. When the child was 3 days old, he was given to an orphanage in Israel; three weeks later, baby Oded was adopted by a Polish Holocaust survivor.
Yafa and Ezra continued to find ways to see each other, and, eventually, she got pregnant again. This time, though, her parents relented, and six months after Avner was born, Yafa and Ezra were married. Together they raised seven boys and one girl.
Growing up, Avner had a notion that he had half-siblings he’d never met. “My dad loved my mom, but it didn’t stop him from playing around,” Avner says. “I know of one daughter and one son that he had with other women. We always knew that we had other siblings out there, but there were so many of us and we were always so hungry that we didn’t care.”
Oded, meanwhile, grew up in Tel Aviv. He would wake up in the middle of the night with strange dreams about a family in Jerusalem. Sometimes he would get up and make the hour drive to Jerusalem and sit for hours in the city, searching for a sign. When his parents died in 1981, Oded learned from neighbors that he had been adopted, and he began searching in earnest for his birth family.
Avner was in the kitchen of Bistro A in Snider Plaza when the call came from his youngest brother. “He told me I’d better sit down,” Avner says. “I sat in the kitchen crying like a baby as he told me the story.”
Oded had located his adoption papers and found his mother’s last name. He then proceeded to call every Amadi listed in the Jerusalem phone book, eventually reaching Avner’s uncle. Stunned, the uncle contacted the family in Tel Aviv. One of Avner’s sisters went to their grandmother, who was then 90, and begged her to tell the truth. For days, the sister stayed with the grandmother, pleading with her, but the grandmother would offer nothing but denials. The grandmother waited until the third day to confess.
Within 48 hours, Avner was deplaning in Tel Aviv, where 30 members of his family—including Oded—were waiting at the gate. “The second I saw him,” Avner says, “I could see my mother’s face. He looks more like her than anyone else.” Avner took Oded to visit his mother’s grave at the Mount Olives Cemetery in the Old Town section of Jerusalem, and the two sat graveside as Avner re-introduced his mother to her eldest child.
A CHEF’S WORK, LIKE AN ARTIST’S, REFLECTS his life. Avner—no one, including himself, calls him anything but Avner—says his life has now come full circle. He’s moved and changed and grown so many times, for so long, that his mutability has metamorphosed into consistency. He has finally hit on a commercially viable, easily reproducible restaurant idea in his Cafe Med & Food to Go at Preston Royal, with a menu of Avner’s greatest hits from past restaurants.
A few months ago, Avner brought his brother Oded, now a computer programmer, to Dallas to work with him at Cafe Med, which sells the foods their mother taught Avner to make. Oded saw a chance to start a new life in North Dallas. “It definitely is better than dodging rocks being thrown at you by Palestinians,” Oded said days after Cafe Med’s opening.
Avner was hoping the cafe would become a venture of two brothers, but though the two men shared a family, it turned out that they didn’t share a love of the restaurant business. Oded quit Cafe Med after only a few months. “Our lives as brothers would be a whole lot different,” Avner says, “if we would have found him as a teenager.”
It wasn’t the first time Avner had offered jobs to his family. “None of them realize how hard it is for a foreigner to make it here,” he says. “They think America is an easy place. When I moved here, I took three jobs. Oded just couldn’t hack it. It’s sad.”
But now Avner has made peace with his family—and with his past. “I didn’t speak with my father for over 20 years,” he says. “I blamed him for making our lives so bitter. But the wheel turns. The passion is coming back. And so is the high blood pressure.”
And now Avner is about to embark on his least explicable move yet. He’s signed a lease on Oak Lawn Avenue and is opening what he calls “the crown jewel of 34 years in the kitchen.” Aurora will be a 50-seat, European-style, haute cuisine restaurant. It is scheduled to open later this month. As of press time, Avner didn’t know exactly what he would be serving, only that diners can expect to pay upwards of $100 a plate. To call it a risky move would be an understatement.
Maybe it’s his version of a midlife crisis. Or maybe Avner has just come to terms with what he is.
“I’m a chef first,” he says. “And I can cook as good as that guy at the French Laundry. I’m softer now. I can talk about my problems. You don’t hear the yelling in the kitchen. Now, I’m going to go through with what I do best—the art of cuisine. I’m putting Avner first.”
Avner, he says in third person, is finally ready to try to make his ultimate dream come true. And he’s realized that the dream isn’t about a chain of restaurants or making buckets of money. His dream is to be who he is.
“People will think that Avner went cuckoo,” he says with his signature shrug, palms up-turned. “But, hey, I’ve been opening two restaurants a year for the last 13 years. So why stop now?”
Mary Brown Malouf has been writing about Dallas dining for more than 15 years.
Photo by Lisa Means
