Erez Pinhas
About Erez Pinhas
An acclaimed chef, a generous host, an engaging storyteller, a trusted leader, and a family man: Erez Pinhas is all of the above. He’s also a true global citizen, whose appetite for roaming our world informs his cooking and all his endeavors.
Born in Israel, Erez grew up in a bustling apartment complex in Rehovot. The food he ate at home drew on the culinary treasures brought back from the Jewish Diaspora. On Shabbat, neighbors would share pots of food, a tradition especially strong in Erez’s extended Yemenite Jewish family. Those home-cooked meals — including dishes from the Middle East, Persia, North Africa, Europe, India, and the Far East — gave him a global palate. An early love of maps honed his taste for travel.
After completing his service as a captain in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), commanding a combat parachute unit, Erez indulged his wanderlust for several years, exploring far corners of Asia, Central America, and South America. Everywhere he went, he sought out delicious, authentic food, also seeking to learn where it came from and how it was prepared. His adventures took him from a fishing boat on the Amazon to the streets of Bangkok. In Santiago, Chile, he met his future wife, American Christina Bratberg. “She bought me a Julia Child cookbook, and wanting to impress her, I cooked a terrible dinner of boeuf bourguignon,” Erez recalls. “My interpretation was inedible.”
Far from being discouraged, Erez resolved to master the culinary arts and apply them to creating his own contemporary Israeli cuisine. So after tasting the world, he returned to Tel Aviv to enroll in culinary school. His first kitchen job was at the pioneering restaurant Keren, where he worked with its renowned owner-chef Chaim Cohen and other budding chefs from varied ethnic traditions. Keren occupied a historic dwelling built by missionaries from Maine and “looked like a New England house transported to the Middle East.” Perhaps a sign of things to come!
Three years on and ready for a new adventure, Erez and his young family moved to the States, aiming to open his own place. He had experienced the beauty and peace of Cape Cod during earlier visits and, despite his kosher upbringing, had become a devotee of the Cape’s native seafood. Seeing an opportunity in Orleans — a hub for summer visitors as well as “year-rounders” — he created ABBA, a pan-Mediterranean restaurant with Asian overtones, showcasing the bounty of the sea and fresh vegetables and herbs grown in the ABBA gardens. Opened in 2001 and highly regarded until its closure in 2019, ABBA consistently won praise from the food press and quickly became a destination restaurant for its creative menu and cocktail program, wide-ranging wine list, and casual-elegant ambiance.
“I wanted a place to express and share my passion for food, my ideas about flavors from my childhood and those encountered on my travels,” Erez says.
Traveling back and forth between his lives here and in Israel, Erez often brought along friends and customers. He discovered that he loved sharing his native land and its fabulously diverse cuisine with visitors. Over the past decade, Erez notes, Israel’s food scene has vastly grown in sophistication and worldwide influence, and its ancient wine culture, long dormant, has re-emerged to produce some of the best wines found anywhere in the world.
He was excited to realize that visitors, instead of resigning themselves to ordinary hotel food, were eager to seek out adventurous new restaurants serving contemporary and regional dishes. And rather than be taken around to the standard destinations, they sought vibrant, personal experiences of Israel’s people and their distinct heritages. His traveling companions quickly found that a dream of visiting Israel could become a delicious reality with Erez as guide.
Following his closure of ABBA restaurant and move back to Israel, Erez was the founding chef of Cafe Asif at the Asif Culinary Institute of Israel located in Tel Aviv from 2021-2024. At Asif, Erez faithfully represented classic dishes from the home kitchens of the Jewish Diaspora and those local to Israel, and expanded further his relationships with Israeli growers, artisanal producers, purveyors and chefs.
Thus, all of his life’s winding paths converged for Erez in the concept of a travel company designed to offer custom tours of the old and new cultures of Israel, accessed mainly by the magic carpet of food. Learn more about ABBAGO Travel and its magical journeys.