The Tamesis
Amy explains that her father is from Israel, her grandparents are from Tunisia and Morocco, and her mother is American. She always ate Sephardic and Israeli food and grew up with her father’s ketchup. At her family’s Shabbat dinner, she said, “My dad was making hummus. He was making tagine from scratch. He was making baba ganoush. I mean, my mom is a great cook, too, but just very different food. My dad was making harissa. I remember Jack sweating it out at our first Shabbat dinner because we like really spicy things,” Amy said.
Jack’s family, who are Ashkenazi Jewish, would have bagel brunches, which introduced Amy to pickled herrings and the like.
When Jack proposed in 2018, he prepared a feast of Amy’s favorite New York restaurant dishes (including chocolate babka from Breads Bakery, stuffed meatballs from Bar Primi, and cereal milk soft-serve ice cream from Milk Bar). “When she got home I tried to time the oven so that it would all be one meal, but that also completely failed because neither of us ate after that,” Jack recalls. “As soon as she walked in, she felt, What’s going on? We are very excited. My eyes went dark and I couldn’t remember what I said. We just started calling our friends. “
When they got married in 2019, it was also a marriage between their respective families’ restaurants; they held a rehearsal dinner at Amy’s father’s restaurant, called “Eighteen” on the Upper East Side. To cap off the weekend’s festivities, they had brunch at Katz’s.
Most recently, in fall 2025, they revamped a dish on Katz’s menu that reflects Jack and Amy’s culinary heritage: chili, which uses Amy’s Saturday Sauce, a tomato sauce inspired by her father that she sells through her company, Sababa Foods.
“When we talk about a fusion of food cultures, a fusion of her family heritage and my family heritage, a fusion of Sephardic and Ashkenazi, that’s what the chili here is,” Jack explains. “It’s the epitome of it, it’s a symbol of it, right? It’s Saturday sauce and meat from Katz’s, put together in the form of chili. That’s what’s in my restaurant now and is a timeless symbol in a lot of ways.”
When it comes to celebrating the holidays, they attend each family’s seder and then often host their own seder. This is a smaller event at Amy’s parents’ house where they will read the entire Seder. At Jack’s family’s seder, “there were a hundred people, which was crazy,” he said. “It’s not even like everyone’s Jewish. There’s all kinds of people there, printing their own songs, making everything silly and fun — like a whole Katz menu,” Amy added.
At home in their Manhattan apartment, Jack and Amy, with their two children, ages five and two-and-a-half, usually host a seder that incorporates all of their family’s different food cultures, with the goal of establishing their own traditions. Last year, Amy made a gem rice dish that was very popular. “Being Sephardic, rice is a must for Passover,” Amy said, before Jack added: “But we also start with fish balls, so it’s a little bit of both.”
