Amy Dell is bonafide New York Jewish food royalty, so it may have been inevitable that she’d enter the business, too.
Dell’s father, Haim Dadi, is a chef and former owner of Mr. Broadway, the super-sized glatt kosher deli in midtown. Meanwhile, her husband, Jake, is the third-generation owner of Katz’s Deli, arguably the city’s most famous purveyor of pastrami and other Ashkenazi Jewish delicacies.
Now Dell, 33, is hoping to take her own place in the Jewish food pantheon, with a bit of an Israeli spin. Last month, she launched her company, Sababa Foods, and its first product, Saturday Sauce, hit grocery store shelves that same day. Known in the Middle East as matbucha, Dell’s sauce is made from crushed tomatoes, garlic, hot pepper and cumin. It’s designed to be used as a marinade or a base for a stew, soup or shakshuka, a North African dish of eggs poached in a spicy tomato sauce, which is very popular in Israel.
Dell’s Saturday Sauce joins other Middle Eastern jarred sauces on the market, like New York Shuk’s Signature Matbucha or Mina’s Shakshuka Sauce. Dell told the New York Jewish Week that her verison is spicy, heavy on the cumin, made with largely organic ingredients and “closer to a jam versus what is out there now.”
And yet, despite the proliferation of Israeli cuisine in and around New York City, Dell was surprised to realize how many of her non-Jewish friends and colleagues were unfamiliar with matbucha.
Before launching Sababa Foods, Dell spent a decade working in the world of marketing, hospitality and event planning. Last spring, when she first toyed with the idea of jarring her spicy sauce, she turned to a coworker and asked him if he had ever heard of shakshuka. He said no.
“I thought to myself, am I just living in a bubble where this is so obvious to me what this is,” Dell said, “and it’s not to most people, especially if you’re not Jewish?”
Dell said matbucha was a staple of her childhood growing up in Forest Hills, Queens and Great Neck, Long Island. “My dad made vats of matbucha that he would freeze,” said Dell, whose father was born and raised in Beersheva, in southern Israel. “We had shakshuka every Saturday in our home.”
Hence the product’s name, Saturday Sauce — Dell sees it as the Jewish equivalent of the time-honored Italian-American tradition of Sunday Sauce.
Dell said she always wanted to do something professionally related to food. “I really wanted to own my own restaurant, but both my father and my husband pleaded with me not to,” she said. “In my career doing hospitality and events, I always enjoyed the food-adjacent aspects most, like planning dinner parties and cocktail parties.”
Her focus on launching a Jewish food business — specifically, recreating and selling her father’s signature sauce — gained urgency post-Oct. 7, while she was on maternity leave after having her son. “I have been leaning into the whole Jewish food world thing, and being Jewish, and celebrating that, especially now,” she told the New York Jewish Week. “I’m not going to allow my culture to be erased. I want to celebrate it now more than ever.”
And so, Dell sat down with her father and began the process of recreating his sauce. It was a challenging process because, like many family recipes, it had never been documented. Haim Dadi, too, had been eating matbucha since he was a child — his mom, the family cook, was from Morocco and his dad from Tunisia.
“We have to weigh every single thing because we are going to commercialize this and make it on a large scale,” Dell told her father. “He said, ‘ehh, just a little bit of this and a little bit of that.’”
Through a long process of trial-and-error, Dell landed on what she felt was a pretty good approximation of her father’s recipe, though some tweaks were made. Her father uses canola oil in his matbucha; Dell uses extra virgin olive oil in hers. Dadi cooks with fresh tomatoes; Dell prefers Muir Glen organic canned tomatoes because she doesn’t want the tomato skins in her sauce.
Despite the changes, Dadi approves of the final product. “When two people make the same food, it is never going to be 100% even if they use the same recipe,” he said. “I think it’s good.”
Her husband, Jake, is also a fan. The pair met on a dating app in 2015 and married in 2019; they connected immediately, Dell said, because of their shared familiarity with the Jewish food world. (“When I hugged him goodbye at the end of our first date, I thought he smells like pastrami — just like my dad did,” she said.)
Jake Dell professes topping his schnitzel with Saturday Sauce, in lieu of ketchup – quite the statement from a man who is 100% Ashkenazi, both personally and professionally. Family lore has it that Jake sweated his way through his first Shabbat dinner at his wife-to-be’s home after tasting the harissa (a North African hot sauce) on the table.
For her initial production run of the sauce, Dell had 30 cases — with 12 16-ounce jars per case — made, and she gave it out to friends, family and influencers. Given her contacts in the Jewish food world, she sent jars to Jewish foodies-in-the-know like Rachel Simons, the founder of tahini company Seed & Mill; James Beard Award-winning restaurateur Michael Solomonov; cookbook author Jake Cohen and spice merchant Lior Lev Sercarz whose restaurant, Spice Brothers, was named by The New York Times as one of New York’s 14 best new restaurants of 2024.
Sercarz featured the sauce in a social media post and plans to offer it in his schnitzel pita.
“I think the name is great, the product is great,” Sercarz said. “Trying to sell matbucha to people might be a bit more challenging because, a. How do you say it and b. What do you do with it? It’s a smart move on Amy’s part to introduce something that she grew up eating and making it more modern, easy and approachable.”
Dell grew up eating matbucha. Her father, Haim Dadi, learned the recipe from his parents, pictured here, who hailed from Morocco and Tunisia. (Courtesy)
Looking ahead, Dell said she hopes to expand Sababa Food’s product line to include dukkah, a Middle Eastern spice mix, made from ground nuts, seeds and spices; an instant mujadarra, made from rice, lentils and fried rice; and green tahini, a sesame paste infused with herbs. The idea, she says, “is to have a bunch of different Middle Eastern pantry samples.”
“I have people on Instagram who say that this is appropriation — ’you’re not Arab,’’ said Dell, pointing to a photo of her Tunisian great-grandparents, dressed in traditional Tunisian garb, on her phone. “These are my great-grandparents in North Africa. It’s all the more reason to lean into being Jewish and celebrating our culture and heritage.”
For now, Dadi, who together with businessman Sidney Cohen also founded the kosher restaurant 18 on the Upper East Side and was its chef, has high hopes for the Saturday Sauce.
“People today want convenience, they want service, they don’t want to work anymore,” Dadi said. “People are going to use it and they see that, in 10 minutes, they can make shakshuka or Moroccan fish. They can do many things with it. I think it will catch.”
“It’s a matter of time before Americans discover that Middle Eastern food has a kitchen that is very healthy,” he added. “Will it be 100% [as popular as] hummus? We don’t know. But if it’s 70%, it’s a big success.”
Meanwhile Dell’s mom, Kitty, whom Dell describes as a “Southern Belle” because she hails from Atlanta, told her, “You know what your sauce would go really well on? Grits!”
One month post-launch, Saturday Sauce is available for sale in several locations around the city including Pop-Up Grocer on Bleecker Street; Orchard Grocer, the all-vegan store on the Lower East Side and the Upper East Side’s Butterfield Market. California’s upscale organic grocery Erewhon hopes to stock its shelves with the stuff, too.
For now, Katz’s Deli has no plans to carry Saturday Sauce — but Jake Dell said he hasn’t completely ruled out the possibility.
“I think if we can figure out a way that makes sense for the tradition and story of this place, then of course,” he said. “But it has to make sense in the context of Katz’s deli food tradition and heritage.”
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