The madness of Miznon (is good)

Ten minutes after opening for the first time, Miznon, a restaurant on Broadwick Street in Soho, is packed. Mike (from the Partners team) and I count more than 20 members of staff – 13 or 14 in the kitchen, and the rest on the floor. A woman is walking around carrying a large green vase, and a delivery of Villeroy & Boch crockery is being placed down in the corner next to an empty cardboard box bearing the name ‘Craig’.

There are cauliflowers lining the front window, presumably in homage to one of the Israeli chef-owner Eyal Shani’s signature dishes in which he roasts one whole. A large rib of beef is nakedly on display on the bar next to a series of broccoli trees and falafel-filled pita breads are pouring out of the kitchen as Rodriguez’s I wonder, a searing classic, plays through the speakers.

This is Soho but could well be Tel Aviv. It is a sort of organised chaos. I’m told there’s a Hebrew word for this: ‘balagan’, which loosely translates as ‘mess’. The service is charming and relaxed. Eyal divides his time between cooking and nonchalantly wandering around.

The menu? Completely and unashamedly ridiculous. It begins with a note on the pita bread and reads: ‘With each of our pita we are dividing the world into two hemispheres: tahini and sour cream. Half of the creatures that we eat are believing in sour cream, the other half in tahini. On that we are adding our fresh field vegetables and we are getting a new taste in the world: the Mediterranean…’

This ode continues: ‘Each of our pita is getting her birth mark… it’s about recreation, not an assembling. Each of them is creating a precise address, and it is always you. Just the divine pleasure that is coming out of it is the same.’

Then everything gets confusing. The menu first meanders between ratatouille, but ‘not the French one’ – it contains chopped egg – ‘magic mushrooms’, and ‘hot potato’.

A second section talks of pairing crystal shrimps with ‘tomato’s ovaries’, cottage pie is reimagined as some sort of kebab, and another dish is described as: ‘In between nose-to-tail: female chicken livers roasted with scallions’. If you’re not intrigued, I am bewildered.

Don’t worry, there’s more. Next comes talk of a ‘feast that paints on your table’. This is not about pita breads but about layers of yoghurt, charred onions, rib-eye steaks and lamb, fresh greens and radishes, and more of those tomato ovaries, only ‘squeezed’ this time, and probably more abundant.

Might the menu desist, now, and calm down? No. ‘Our best drugs’ headlines section number four: ‘A plate of four spicy maza that will swirl your mind’. I find this notion enjoyable. Tomatoes would be ‘slaughtered in front of my eyes’ for £8. If I were to order a ‘roasted whole broccoli tree, dripping on your shoes’, I would be asked to part with £9. A ‘run-over baked potato’ costs £8. It is mixed with garlic, green onions, and sour cream and is served paper-thin. Nothing is over £20 and most things are about £12.

There are many peculiarities at Miznon, the first UK branch in a growing international group. Eyal, a regular on MasterChef in Israel, opened his first site in Tel Aviv in 2011. He’s since conquered Paris, New York, Melbourne, and Vienna, where the menu is said to be much less garrulous.

Apparently Eyal’s uniqueness and his strange take on street food proves divisive in the countries in which he is famous. He has been called ‘Israel’s most celebrated chef’ and a ‘genius’; he has been labelled ‘a joke’ and a ‘scammer’. These takes, however, are more often in reference to his fine dining-cum-party restaurant group HaSalon, a branch of which is opening in Lancaster Gate in West London in March.

His colourful language might have been dubbed pretentious. I think it is more likely to be welcome irreverence.

As I write this, the lunch time rush has relented. I am still full. My folded burger pita was thick with garlic and delicious, and a hemisphere of tahini and another of sour cream blanketed the pita bread, the beef, and the Saturn-like crown of cheddar with all the grace of a box called Craig.