How Zahav’s Lamb Shoulder Became One of Philly’s Iconic Dishes

Zahav’s pomegranate lamb shoulder / Photograph by Alexandra Hawkins

Welcome to Just One Dish, a Foobooz series that looks at an outstanding item on a Philly restaurant’s menu — the story behind the dish, how it’s made, and why you should be going out of your way to try it.

Dinner is a multi-course extravaganza at Zahav, Michael Solomonov’s famed Society Hill restaurant. Known for its modern Israeli cuisine, the meal begins with hummus, laffa bread, and salatim, followed by your choice of mezze dishes, a larger plate to split with your dining companions — if you order off the mesibah, or “party,” menu — and lastly, dessert. Along the way, it’s tempting to dunk a little more laffa bread in the hummus or revisit the salatim for seconds (especially if you’ve ordered the Moroccan carrots and twice-cooked eggplant). But you’ll want to save room for one dish on the menu: the pomegranate lamb shoulder.

It’s a humble yet spectacular dish, glistening with a lacquer-like pomegranate glaze and studded with chickpeas cooked in lamb stock. A bowl of amba-braised greens and crispy Persian rice is served on the side, and the latter — adorned with raisins and crumbled pistachios — looks so pretty and neat that digging a fork into it feels sinful. The lamb is easy to pull apart with tongs; the meat falls away at the slightest touch and practically melts as you eat it. Its unbelievably tender texture is the result of a two-to-three-day process that involves brining the meat with pomegranate juice (that’s then reduced to make a glossy, sticky sauce) before smoking and glazing the lamb. It’s a laborious process that pays off with a mind-blowing flavor that’s smoky, sweet, and sour.

Many people go to Zahav specifically for the lamb, which has been on the menu since the restaurant opened in 2008. These days, Zahav gets approximately 170 orders for the dish per week, according to a representative for the restaurant. But Solomonov says the lamb shoulder has always sold well. In the past, he’s credited the dish — along with his hummus — for putting his James Beard-winning restaurant “on the map.” And demand for the menu item is so high that Zahav sells a lamb shoulder meal kit on Goldbelly; for $300, the lamb is the centerpiece of a three-course dinner for six to eight people, including the hummus and salatim spread to start, plus an olive oil basbousa for dessert.

It makes sense that it’s sold this way and that it’s only available on Zahav’s mesibah menu if you’re dining in. After all, the lamb shoulder is a party dish — it’s designed to be shared and bring people together. In fact, it came to be after Solomonov made it for a holiday dinner.

“The origin of it was sort of accidental,” Solomonov says. It was the spring of 2008, and the chef’s family was in town for Passover. His house was too small to host their seder, so he set up a table in Zahav’s dining room. The restaurant was weeks away from opening, and “it was a construction site,” Solomonov says, but they made it work. “I had the charcoal grill, and I had these lamb shoulders that I was playing around with,” the chef remembers. “I barbecued the lamb after brining it and then braised it with pomegranate juice” before going through the rest of the process.

Zahav’s lamb shoulder, crispy Persian rice, and salatim with hummus / Photograph by Kae Lani Palmisano

Solomonov was inspired, in part, by a slow-cooked pork shoulder that he’d had at New York’s Momofuku Ssäm Bar. “The idea that you could be at a cool, hip, fancy restaurant and they would put down an entire pork shoulder and you rip it apart is great and almost nostalgic,” he says of the menu item, which came served with tongs. It was the type of dish that was perfect for eating with family. And when the chef presented the lamb shoulder to his relatives at their seder, it was a hit. “It ended up being delicious, and everybody was kind of blown away,” Solomonov says. It was then that he realized, “This could be a dish that we serve.”

But turning the lamb shoulder into a menu item at Zahav wasn’t entirely straightforward, especially as it became popular with diners. “It was such a pain in the ass,” Solomonov says. “Lamb shoulders are really big, and our walk-in at the time was basically a closet. It was the smallest walk-in ever, and so we would just have a limited amount of lamb, and then we would sell them all out, basically, the first seating of every Saturday night, and then just get the nastiest emails from people.” At one point, Solomonov says, “We had a bunch of rules,” remembering a time when the restaurant required diners to pre-order the lamb.

Things got easier when the restaurant ended up with a commissary kitchen where they could store — and smoke — the lamb. Originally, the meat was cooked low and slow over charcoal, but Solomonov soon realized that the process had to change. “There are only so many lamb shoulders you can put on a grill,” he says. What’s more, when the lamb fat is rendered on the grill, Solomonov says, it would result in flames. “You could very quickly incinerate every lamb shoulder that you are cooking,” he explains. “We used to do this at the end of service at Zahav,” he adds. “Oftentimes, we’d smoke out the dining room because it would just be too much charcoal, so everybody would leave smelling like barbecue.”

That’s when the kitchen pivoted to preparing the lamb shoulders in smokers — a move Solomonov says has improved the dish both in texture and taste, since it doesn’t dry out the meat and gives it a smoky flavor. Today, the lamb is cooked in a big smoker at CookNSolo’s Lilah in Fishtown, then brought to Zahav to be glazed and finished off. Otherwise, the dish has remained mostly the same over the years.

Part of the enduring appeal of Zahav’s pomegranate lamb shoulder lies in its homely vibe. Like the pork shoulder Solomonov had at Momofuku Ssäm Bar, the dish is nostalgic in a way, he says, “reminiscent of roasts or barbecue, things that are integral to childhood or family dining.” There’s a lot that goes into preparing the lamb shoulder, but when it hits the table, it’s not fussy. “It’s just really craveable,” the chef says. “It just looks like food. It doesn’t look like art. It looks like something that you would really eat.”

Even if Zahav’s pomegranate lamb shoulder looks and tastes better than any roast most home cooks could pull off, its simple presentation makes it feel like something that you might have at home on a special occasion — and that’s part of the reason diners have kept returning to Zahav for the dish over the last 17 years. They go for the lamb shoulder and return for the experience that comes with it.