Michael Solomonov opened Zahav in Philadelphia in 2008 with his business partner Steven Cook, and the restaurant took about a decade to become what it is now: the most decorated Israeli restaurant in America, winner of the James Beard Outstanding Restaurant award, with a reservation queue that reliably fills within the first hour it opens each month. Two dishes are responsible for most of that reputation. The hummus you have already read about. This is the other one.
The lamb shoulder runs on the menu every day, consumes roughly two full days of advance preparation per batch, and sells about 170 orders a week according to the restaurant (Philadelphia Magazine, 2025). It is ordered by almost every table that comes in for the full experience, and it arrives looking unlike most braised lamb you have seen: dark, glossy, pulled partly from the bone, surrounded by chickpeas that have spent five hours absorbing pomegranate and lamb fat, in a pan glossy with reduced braising juices. There is a bright bowl of tehina alongside for dipping.
The recipe appeared in the 2015 cookbook Zahav: A World of Israeli Cooking (Chronicle Books), which Solomonov and Cook wrote together. The home version differs from the restaurant in one significant way: the restaurant smokes the shoulder before braising. The cookbook version skips smoking and compensates with the longer brine — 48 hours versus overnight — which drives the brine aromatics deeper into the meat and produces enough complexity that the result stands on its own without smoke.
What you’re actually making
This is a two-day recipe. Day one: make the brine, start the lamb soaking, soak the chickpeas. Day two: pull the lamb, set up the pan, braise for 5 hours at 300°F, then blast at 475°F for 30 minutes to build the crust. Total hands-on time is under an hour across both days.
The braise itself is extremely low-maintenance: you open the oven every 60 minutes to baste and that is all. The 475°F finish requires attention — you are building a lacquered crust, and the margin between caramelized and burnt is about 5 minutes at that temperature.
The three things that make it
The pomegranate molasses. Not as a marinade or a glaze applied at the end, but as the braising liquid itself — diluted into 8 cups of water, so the lamb braises in it for 5 hours. By the time the foil comes off, the liquid has reduced and concentrated; what gets basted back onto the lamb in the 475°F oven is dense with pomegranate tannins and sugar, which caramelize almost immediately. The pomegranate connection is deliberately Persian: pomegranate has been a primary ingredient in Iranian cooking for several thousand years, and the dish traces that lineage directly. Solomonov grew up eating the flavors of his Israeli grandmother’s cooking, which was itself shaped by Persian and North African Jewish traditions.
The chickpeas braising in the same liquid. They go into the pan raw (soaked overnight, but uncooked), and spend the full 5-hour braise absorbing rendered lamb fat and pomegranate braising liquid simultaneously. By the end, they are soft, deeply savory, stained a rich reddish-brown, and taste entirely unlike plain chickpeas. They are not a side dish. They are part of the dish.
The brine. The combination of fennel seeds, allspice, peppercorns, and garlic does not produce a strongly spiced lamb — you do not taste fennel or allspice specifically. What you taste is lamb that is evenly seasoned through its entire depth and that has a complexity of background flavor that you cannot achieve by simply salting the surface before cooking. The 48-hour window is the most important single variable in the recipe.
Serving
Zahav serves the lamb shoulder directly in the roasting pan — no plating, no garnish beyond flat-leaf parsley. The lamb is already pulled partly from the bone; you finish pulling it at the table with two forks. The chickpeas and braising juices stay in the pan and get scooped alongside the meat. The tehina sauce is in a small separate bowl, for dipping and drizzling as you eat. Warm laffa (the large, chewy flatbread used throughout the meal) is passed for scooping.
If you are serving this for a dinner party, this is the right approach: bring the pan to the table, set the tehina alongside, put out a basket of warm flatbread. It looks and feels like the restaurant.
A note on the chickpeas
If your chickpeas come out under-tender after 5 hours, it is almost always because they were not soaked long enough or the water was too hard for the baking soda to do its work. Longer-soaked chickpeas (12 hours in soft baking-soda water) consistently braise to tenderness in 4.5 to 5 hours. Chickpeas that were soaked in unsoftened very hard water can take 6 hours or more. If you are in an area with extremely hard tap water, use filtered water for the chickpea soak.
