Fighting back with 'food and good energy': Israeli Druze man opens kosher restaurant in NYC after surviving Oct 7 Hamas massacre

Preparing food to be enjoyed by the Jewish community has become important to culinarian Raif Rashed (40), especially since Oct. 7, 2023.

“Kosher, everyone can eat, OK?” Rashed explained in an interview with the Times of Israel (TOI). “But not kosher, not everyone can eat.” Now on the other side of his own personal hell, Rashed finds comfort in the food of his youth and is determined to serve a wide clientele, including the Jewish community of New York.

Rashed was born and raised in the Arabic-speaking Druze village of Isifiya, near Haifa in northern Israel, before leaving to work as an engineer in New Jersey in 2019.

He returned to Israel in 2023 to help his brother, Radda, run a booth serving Druze food at the Nova Festival that October. What happened that fateful day changed his life forever. 

“I was in crisis [for] a year,” he recalled. “I looked middle-aged within hours.”

Rashed had joined Radda to serve food to the Israeli party-goers on Oct. 6, but early the next morning they witnessed horrors that would accompany them for the rest of their lives.

He was separated from his brother and, hiding behind a car, he saw his friend Erick with his wheelchair-bound 16-year-old daughter, who had cerebral palsy, burned alive by Hamas terrorists after taking refuge behind an ambulance.

“Until now I can’t forgive myself,” he said. The bodies of Erick and Ruth Peretz were identified almost two weeks later. Rashed’s brother had mercifully survived.

The two brothers own a catering company, “Taboonia,” which has also survived, albeit in an evolved form. With his passport stolen, Rashed couldn’t leave Israel for months. During this time, he reconnected with the food of his childhood.

When he returned to the United States, he found cooking Druze delicacies was a great comfort to him. He eventually decided to leave his career as an engineer and turn to full-time catering.

“For me to sell the food from our culture, and especially my mother’s recipes, this is my baby,” he told TOI.

Taboonia originally served traditional Druze food, including manakish, Druze flatbread served with toppings such as za’atar and labneh, the paper-thin Druze pita filled with classic fillings like hummus, feta, tabouleh, salad and chickpeas.

Rashed’s new restaurant now bears the same name, however, the menu consists of traditional Druze specialties with a New York twist, for example, his ‘everything bagel’ borekas.

Taboonia USA is strictly vegetarian so it can pass the kashrut certification more easily. Rahed explained that Rabbi Zev Schwarcz of the International Kosher Council (IKC) is expected to certify the restaurant within weeks.

Serving the Jewish community has been especially meaningful to Rashed, as he shared in a viral interview with Noa Tishby.

“We’re here to fight back with food and good energy,” he told Tishby. “This place is going to hear Arabic, Hebrew, English,” insisting that his establishment will be open to all. 

“My community is Jewish,” he said, explaining that he had been raised and attended school with Israeli Jews from a young age. He said his Hebrew is even better than his Arabic or English.

Rashed launched the first new version of the Taboonia food stall nearly one year after the massacre, on Oct. 5, 2024, selling Druze food and coffee in New Jersey on Saturdays, and the Upper West Side of Manhattan on Sundays.

Soon after venturing into the catering business, he met Ray Radwan, another Druze man with roots in Lebanon and experience with the restaurant business. The two decided to partner and open a permanent restaurant together.

“Me and other Druze, Lebanese Druze, we [are] all of us all together [in the] middle of the war, in the middle of New York, to show the world we can make it a different way, and maybe we can make a change for some people, yes?” Rashed told TOI.

Though theirs is not the first Druze restaurant in New York, it will be the first kosher restaurant of its kind. Gazala’s in the Upper West Side of New York is a Druze restaurant run by Gazala Halabi but it serves meat and also shellfish, making a kashrut certificate out of the question.

However, when her restaurant was attacked by anti-Israel vandals in February 2024, and again when 12 Druze children were killed in Hezbollah strikes, the Jewish community rallied around her in support. “It really feels like a family,” she said at the time. “I really feel, again, like I’m not alone.”

Taboonia, on the other hand, has the double blessing of being kosher while also being Gentile-run. This allows it to serve the religious Jewish community while also having the flexibility to remain open on Shabbat and holidays. "See, to be Druze is a plus," Rashed remarked.

Taboonia is located at 832 Sixth Avenue in New York City.