What happens when a chef born in Israel, raised in Philadelphia, and rooted in New Orleans for nearly two decades finally gets to cook exactly what he wants? You get Saba, and you get a room full of people wondering why they haven’t been coming here their whole lives.
Chef Alon Shaya opened Saba on Magazine Street in 2018 after a messy and public split from the restaurant group he’d built his career inside.
He could have played it safe. Instead, he went deeper into the food that meant something to him personally, the Israeli and Middle Eastern cooking he grew up with, and built a menu around wood-fired pita, long-simmered hummus, and local Gulf seafood treated to flavors from Bulgaria, Yemen, Morocco, and Greece.
The name means “grandfather” in Hebrew, and the whole place carries that energy: generous, unhurried, and deeply personal.
The pita is where it starts and where most people get stuck. It comes out of awood-burning oven at the back of the room, blistered and puffy, made with custom-milled flour from Bellegarde Bakery right here in New Orleans.
You’re meant to tear it and drag it through the hummus, which is silky and clean-tasting in a way that makes the grocery store stuff feel like a different food entirely. The blue crab hummus adds Louisiana lemon butter to the equation, which sounds like it shouldn’t work and absolutely does.
TheMichelin Guide called it out specifically, and they’re not wrong.
The rest of the menu follows the same logic: familiar on paper, surprising on the plate. The falafel has a crackling crust and a bright green center. The salatim, small vegetable salads served at the start of the meal, arrive in little dishes and set the tone for everything that follows.
Chef de Cuisine Cara Peterson sources produce, meat, and seafood from local farms, so what you’re eating is Israeli technique applied to Gulf Coast ingredients, which turns out to be a natural pairing in a city that has always known how to cook fish.
Shaya won “Best Chef: South” from the James Beard Foundation in 2015, and the restaurant he opened before Saba took “Best New Restaurant” the following year. The accolades followed him here.
Saba holds a Michelin recommendation and has quietly become one of the harder tables to get on Magazine Street. It’s worth the effort. Saba is at 5757 Magazine St. and is open Wednesday through Sunday, with brunch on weekends.
Call ahead or check eatwithsaba.com for current hours before you go.
