Food coverage is supported by a generous donation from Susan and Moses Libitzky.
Chef Yair Luria began thinking of writing a cookbook years ago, but it was the death of his father in 2024 that finally pushed him into action.
“I’m not going to leave this world with nothing left behind,” he remembers thinking while sitting shiva. He began working on the book soon after.
“Private Chef: My Recipes and Stories from Israel to Silicon Valley” is the result, a cookbook he published through Spines, an AI-assisted publishing platform. Luria wrote all of the text himself in Hebrew, his first language. AI software translated it into English, before it was edited by Luria, two other humans and AI. The 230-page book also features images by photographer Aviv Tal, who flew to the U.S. from Israel to shoot the dishes.
Luria, 56, has worked as a private chef for the past four years for a Palo Alto attorney power couple, Boris and Robin Feldman, whom he first met through their children. They keep him busy with their frequent dinner guests, especially on Shabbat, and they host other events as well.
They hosted me for dinner, too, so I could taste Luria’s food. On the Wednesday of Hanukkah, I was treated to a feast of a Moroccan cigar phyllo pastry with a spicy fish filling as an appetizer, creamy celery root soup, chicken piccata, quinoa with vegetables, kale and pear salad, roasted cauliflower and potato and leek latkes — Luria made a different latke variation each night of the holiday.
Boris Feldman often accompanies Luria to the farmers market on Sundays to select produce, but the couple’s input stops there. They like the element of surprise, which works for Luria, who prefers his recipes to emerge on the spot. “I want to fly,” he said.
“Yair’s food is better than any restaurant,” Robin Feldman told me. “We haven’t eaten out in years because it’s always better at home.”
The book title was her brainchild. When batting around ideas, she argued that “everyone wants a private chef,” and that’s how the title came to be.
The Feldmans’ house manager, Ian Starr, told me that he’s worked with a lot of chefs for various celebrity clients and that Luria and his food are special.
“A lot of Hollywood chefs just shop and put their uniform on, but there’s no thought in it,” he said. “They don’t make the food with the love that he does. You can tell that his food is deep-rooted and ancestral.”
Luria also worked as a private chef for Israeli basketball player Omri Casspi, who played for the Sacramento Kings and a number of other NBA teams.
The 76 recipes and the stories, which Luria calls the “spice of the book,” come from throughout his life, starting from his childhood growing up in Ashdod in an Ashkenazi household. All four of his grandparents came to the British Mandate of Palestine in the pre-state period, so both his parents were born there. He recalls one grandmother’s krautfleckerl, or Austrian noodles with cabbage, and other Ashkenazi staples like chopped liver and stuffed cabbage.
Given Ashdod’s large Moroccan population, most of Luria’s childhood friends were Moroccan.
“I love that culture. The people are so warm,” he said. “I also love their food.” Perhaps it was no accident that he married a woman of Moroccan descent, and he counts his late mother-in-law as one of his greatest culinary muses.
“There was no greater teacher,” he writes. Her authentic Moroccan cooking “would influence the style and flavors of my cooking for the rest of my life.”
The book includes many Moroccan dishes, like harira — a traditional soup with vegetables, legumes and sometimes meat — as well as more well-known Mediterranean dishes, such as stuffed grape leaves.
One of Luria’s favorite tricks, he said, is to take a well-established dish, like sabich, the Iraqi eggplant pita sandwich, and serve it in a new way. His “Open Sabich Plate” is deconstructed, without the pita, on a platter with the usual components — fried eggplant, hard-boiled egg, chopped salad, etc. — so that diners “can prepare their own unique perfect bite,” he writes. The dish appears on the cover of the book.
Luria came to the Bay Area in 2000 when his wife started a postdoctoral program here. He had earned a college degree in Israel and also attended a short culinary program, figuring that that would make him more employable in the U.S. as his English improved. Across his first two decades, he ran a catering business and served for 13 years as chef at the Albert Einstein Residence Center in Sacramento, a housing complex formerly run by the Jewish community for low-income seniors.
Besides their personal connection with Luria through their children, the Feldmans got to know his cooking skills through events he catered.
The most memorable story in his book comes from his work at the Einstein center.
An Einstein resident once baked tahini cookies for him. He only found out after trying them that they were laced with a high dose of marijuana, and possibly something else. He ended up being taken in an ambulance to the hospital with extremely high blood pressure and didn’t feel normal for nearly two days. (The woman was offered the chance to move out or face criminal charges.)
Another story in the book describes a major food faux pas. Alongside his smoked turkey breast recipe, he tells of the time he asked for mayonnaise — practically the national condiment of Israel — to go with his pastrami sandwich at New York’s famed Second Avenue Deli, making him the laughingstock of the restaurant.
He appreciates his current work for the Feldmans not only because of the creativity afforded him, but because he is no longer relegated to the kitchen when clients are eating.
While the Feldmans treat him like family, he said, the greatest satisfaction comes from being out of the kitchen when they dine.
He said, “I like to see how people react to my food.”