Alon Shaya’s Safta’s Table, an Israeli-inspired neighbourhood café in New Orleans, has been awarded a Bib Gourmand in the 2026 Michelin Guide American South, just seven months after opening.
The award recognises restaurants offering high-quality food at moderate prices. It is separate from Michelin’s coveted stars, but represents an important endorsement of the restaurant’s cooking and value.
The announcement was made at a ceremony in Nashville on October 21, where Michelin named 14 new Bib Gourmand recipients across seven southern US. The regional guide now features 59 restaurants in the category.
For Shaya, the honour celebrates more than a successful restaurant. His cooking is deeply rooted in his Israeli childhood, Jewish family traditions, and the memories of meals shared with his grandmother.
“My safta is the one who taught me to cook,” he told Garden & Gun magazine.
Shaya, who moved from Israel to Philadelphia with his family when he was four, recalled struggling to adjust to his new surroundings.
“We immigrated to Philly when I was four, and I felt like a fish out of water. I didn’t speak English,” he said. “It was a totally new place.
“But when my grandparents came to visit, the house smelled like home again.”
His grandmother’s schnitzel, served with tomato and cucumber salad, became a defining childhood dish. It now inspires one of the signature sandwiches at Safta’s Table, where traditional Israeli flavours are served in a relaxed, affordable setting.
“I’ve always wanted to do an all-day cafe, something more approachable and affordable,” he went on, describing a place where customers could stop for breakfast, buy cookies or collect dinner to take home.
“I just connected the smell of food with my family being back together and feeling like life was going to be okay for a little bit,” he added in a separate interview with The Washington Post.
The Michelin inspectors highlighted the restaurant’s Israeli character, particularly its hummus topped with spiced lamb ragù and freshly baked sourdough pita, alongside crispy chicken schnitzel with pickles and lemon.
Other dishes include green falafel with amba and tahini, spinach and feta bourekas, harissa-roasted chicken and Israeli salad. Desserts include Nutella babka and tahini chocolate-chip cookies.
Michelin described the restaurant as serving Middle Eastern favourites in a bright, welcoming space, concluding that its cooking was the sort of food diners could enjoy “every day of the week”.
Safta’s Table is the second of Shaya’s New Orleans restaurants to receive a Bib Gourmand. His restaurant Saba, whose name means grandfather in Hebrew, retained its distinction in the 2026 guide.
Shaya’s route to becoming one of America’s best-known Israeli-born chefs was not straightforward. After struggling at school as a teenager, he found encouragement from his home economics teacher, Donna Barnett, who recognised his cooking talent and helped him pursue professional training.
He graduated with honours from the Culinary Institute of America and won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: South in 2015. The following year, his restaurant Shaya was named Best New Restaurant in America by the James Beard Foundation.
Yet his work has increasingly extended beyond the restaurant kitchen into preserving Jewish history.
His latest book, Memories of a Good Meal: Recipes of Resilience Inspired by Stories of World War II Survival, co-written with food historian June Hersh, brings together recipes and personal accounts from Holocaust survivors and others affected by the Second World War.
The project grew from his collaboration with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Steven Fenves, a Holocaust survivor whose family recipe collection was saved when the family was deported from Yugoslavia in 1944.
Shaya recreated dishes from the collection so Fenves could taste food from his childhood again, more than seven decades later.
“To send him food and have him be able to taste those things for the first time in 75 years, that was one of the most moving things I have ever done,” Shaya told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“Food is such a big part of everything I do,” he said in an interview about the project. He added that the memories of food had reminded him of “the power of food”.
The cookbook also explores Jewish life before the Holocaust, including the recipes that prisoners secretly recorded while facing persecution and starvation. Its wider collection includes stories of Jewish partisans, children hidden during the war, and Japanese-Americans incarcerated in the United States.
In a recent interview with PBS, Shaya explained why he wanted the book to convey more than the suffering of its subjects.
“How do you see past this darkness into something that is more humane?” he asked, describing how shared meals can help people understand history and one another.
Safta’s Table is now the second of Shaya’s New Orleans restaurants to hold a Bib Gourmand, adding international recognition to a menu that brings Israeli home cooking to the American South.
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