Some say nothing's worse than mixing family and business, especially when it comes to the restaurant business. That said, some families do make an exception.
Meet Guy and Nir Liv, twin brothers who started cooking together at 14, served together in the IDF and now work together at chef Yuval Ben Neriah's high-end restaurant A. Ynet followed the two around on a day at work to see how they make it all tick.
Guy runs the kitchen and Nir is his sous chef, but they make it a point not to take the hierarchy home with them.
"Years ago, Yuval asked me if Nir would mind me being his boss, and I told him no way," Guy says.
"What are you gonna do?" says Nir. "It's a restaurant with hierarchy and someone should have the final word, but I don't call him boss or chef. Just Guy. Even if we have some disagreements, we never take them home with us."
The brothers say their love for cooking came from their grandmothers.
"Well, one of them," stresses Guy.
"It started with pasta and sausages with ketchup," Nir smiles.
Guy: "It continued with hummus, which was quite mediocre, to be frank."
Nir: "Suddenly, we began serving beef tartar on Shabbat dinners."
Guy: "We had a friend who worked in a kitchen since he was 15 and he took us on a trial, after which we both knew we wanted to work in food for a living. So we began at Herbert Samuel at 17 with zero experience. After the army, I went to work somewhere else and Nir worked at Taizo, and then began the whole talk about A. We both knew we'd end up here.
At Herbert Samuel, people would not distinguish between us. Our uniforms were the same and we didn't have tattoos back then. One day someone just wrote our names on stickers and made us wear them on our chests."
"In the morning, it takes a few minutes to figure out who's who," says chef Ben Neriah. "I've mixed them up before."
So how do people tell who's who?
"The tattoos," says Nir. "Even though to the untrained eye they look the same. Our facial features are a bit different."
"Yeah," Guy says. "We're not identical twins."
Is there a difference in your cooking style?
Nir: "I think Guy is more procedural, by the book, and my cooking is more primal, with more pronounced flavors. To this day, when I cook something and I want someone to taste it, I go to him first. There is no competition between us."
Ever thought about opening your own restaurant together?
Nir: "I think we're still a bit off of that point in our lives."
Guy: "You never know. Maybe something will happen."
Nir: "With us being twins, opening a restaurant together would be a great gimmick."