Lior Lev Sercarz

Lior Lev Sercarz Much like a “nose” in perfumery, Lior Lev Sercarz uses his fine-tuned palate to create memorable flavors. Lior is a chef, spice blender and owner of La Boîte Biscuits & Spices, a spice shop and art gallery in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen. He enjoys a biography that includes over thirty years of travels, encounters, stories, and long hours in front of the stove all of which somehow find their way into his pungent spice blends, French biscuits and books including The Art of Blending and the forthcoming The Spice Companion. Lior has helmed La Boîte since 2006, where he creates scores of innovative and evocative spice blends, each a reflection of a place, a moment, or cultural influence. He also bakes two seasonal biscuit collections each year, each featuring a different blend of spices, engages artists to create original works that adorn the limited-edition biscuit tins, and exhibits their work in the shop. Lior and La Boîte have been profiled in national publications including The New York Times, Vogue, In Style, Food & Wine and the Saveur magazine 100. Traveling His Own Spice Route Lior grew up in Israel at a time when the country boasted some seventy different ethnic groups, from Moroccan and Persian to Lebanese and Druze, and these cultures greatly impacted his meals at home. His earliest memories include picking fresh thyme, oregano, and rosemary that grew wild in nearby fields. It was working on a Kibbutz fish farm harvesting trout, carp, and tilapia, where he crafted his first spice blend with chile flakes, salt, paprika, garlic, and fresh za’atar leaves. His first significant experience with cooking for others came while he was a sergeant in the Israeli Defense Forces. He recalls sautéing 200 chicken cutlets on a propane stove in Lebanon while Hezbollah rockets whooshed overhead. Later travels to South America introduced him to endless mounds of chiles, merkén spice (a blend of smoked pepper and coriander), and Chilean Chiloé berry, none of which he’d encountered before. He visited family-run farms in Peru and Ecuador to witness the chile harvests and ventured to Colombia to see firsthand how cardamom was grown. His “graduate studies” in spice continued in Europe and the U.S., working for renowned French chefs Olivier Roellinger and Daniel Boulud with whom he shared a burning passion for spices. With Roellinger he exchanged thoughts and concepts about spices and stories relating to their personal narratives in Israel and France, and learned how to source from small producers and farmers around the world. While working with Boulud in New York, he honed his culinary skills while simultaneously developing a line of spice blends that were not only innovative, but also commercially viable. Here he came to think beyond the creative aspects of blending to consider costs and budgets. It was a great exercise that helped him when he founded La Boîte. Today, with La Boîte and his books, Lior believes his mission is to inform people about where spices come from, how they grow, what they look like in their natural environment, and, ultimately, how to be inspired by them in the kitchen. Lior says he is happiest when he and a client can engage in dialogue and explore their cooking styles so he can make the right spice recommendations. “The growing demand for spices and interest in global fare keeps pushing me to learn and innovate,” adds Lior.