About

Einat Admony grew up with a very different notion of the feminine mystique than the one most girls in America learned. This balaboosta exudes the bohemian spirit of someone who walked away from college after two months, traipsed around Germany as a gypsy, secured illicit rations for her kitchen as a cook in the Israeli Army, 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 (tay’·eem) in Manhattan’s West Village in 2007. Not long after, she launched Balaboosta in Nolita, where the manner of cooking is not so much Middle Eastern as Mediterranean. 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 as ”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 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.