About Lévana
For nearly thirty years Lévana has owned and operated a catering business, a bakery and a successful Manhattan restaurant – while raising a family. She understands that even gourmet chefs don’t want to spend all day in the kitchen. With this in mind, she keeps the recipes simple, insisting that using fresh, natural ingredients will yield fantastic results without a lot of fuss.
When Lévana opened her eponymous restaurant with her two brothers-in-law twenty five years ago, all Kirschenbaums were perfectly aware they were facing a hard sell: introduce fine kosher dining to the Kosher public, who until then was content either eating at home or grabbing a bite in the rare joints that served institutional old world treats. The general prediction was that the presumptuous idea would fall flat on its face.
Undaunted by being the trailblazers of the trend, they surrounded themselves with the best chefs, developed the most delicious dishes and waited patiently until the idea of gourmet kosher caught on. The rest, as we all know, is history: kosher food and wine has experienced a veritable explosion and has its place among the most prestigious competitions. Many luxury kosher restaurants have opened and thrived since Levana’s pioneering days, bearing out the dictum that imitation is the greatest form of flattery.
With over 25 years of experience in professional cooking, recipe development, catering and teaching, celebrity chef Lévana makes the preparation of nutritious and exotic gourmet cuisine easy. She gets countless devoted fans for her fearless, practical and nutritious approach to cooking and spreads the good word on simple, streamlined, elegant and wholesome dining in her classroom on the Upper West Side - where she gives weekly demos - and around the country.
Watching her in action as she prepares fabulous meals, seemingly effortlessly and with great humor, often with the most rudimentary appliances and utensils in the makeshift kitchens she is offered as venues for her demos, and hearing her exhorting the crowds about using nothing but the real thing has been a real source of inspiration to thousands of admirers. Lévana's warmth, enthusiasm and expertise keep her demonstrations lively and rewarding in every way – going beyond cookery into significant byways of nutrition, kitchen tools, food shopping and personal experiences.
Fine dining that is also contemporary, nutritious and easy to prepare is a way of life that Lévana instills in her classes. Lévana’s unfussy, straightforward approach utilizes fresh, all natural ingredients to create international flavors from her native Morocco and other wide-ranging culinary influences.
She teaches on every imaginable culinary theme yet scorns all culinary trends and diet fads, instead urging her students to express their personal style and let their cooking and entertaining be an emanation of them: This generosity in sharing the philosophy of her craft well beyond the recipes could well be the secret of the timelessness of her cooking.
Lévana has published two cookbooks "Levana's Table: Kosher Cooking for Everyone" and "Levana Cooks Dairy-Free!” and a book/dvd set based on her demo series called "In Short Order". She is at work on her next cookbook on Superfoods.
