New York City’s only Ethiopian-Israeli restaurant has closed its doors for regular dining, citing the backlash it faced during the war in Gaza.
Beejhy Barhany, who opened Tsion Cafe in Harlem in 2014, recently announced that she is reimagining her restaurant as an event venue for culturally immersive experiences. That means no walk-ins, only group bookings made in advance.
Barhany sees the new model as a prime opportunity to educate New Yorkers about her culture. But she said the change represents a sad concession to the realities of Jewish life in the city since Oct. 7, 2023.
“Everything kind of changed — so much animosity,” she said. Things got even worse, she said, when she dropped meat from the menu in February 2024 to go fully vegan and kosher — a move that drew plaudits from Jews in the city but also raised Tsion’s profile among critics of Israel.
“I was proud to be Jewish. I wanted to illuminate that,” she said. “But from the moment we pivoted to be kosher, it became worse and worse.”
People would call the restaurant and harass whoever picked up the phone, Barhany said. One day, she recalled, a server at the restaurant was standing outside and “a bunch of Gen Z’s” passing through said, “Don’t ever come to this place. It’s owned by Israelis. By Zionists.”
While some Israeli restaurants that faced harassment drew public attention and support, Tsion, located off the beaten track in Harlem, did not. Barhany said she did not seek to publicize the incidents, hoping that they would recede in prominence. But they took a toll.
“It’s kind of tiring,” she said. “You’re here to nourish the community and it feels like you are perceived like the enemy.”
Hosting groups of Jewish visitors had offered a respite. So when Barhany recently took part in “StoryCourse: Diaspora,” in which she and three other Jewish chefs shared their recipes and their stories of how they made their way to New York, she realized it pointed toward a model of dining as a cultural experience, rather than a traditional restaurant.
In Tsion’s new model, guests will register in advance for “curated, culturally immersive and experiential events” that, at least at first, will focus on Barhany’s own culture.
“You will come and be immersed in the culture,” she said. “You will have a hand wash, Ethiopian-style, and we will bring frankincense. We will have a coffee ceremony and I will talk about Jewish Ethiopian cuisine, culture and history.”
Guests will be served Ethiopian foods like messer wot (red lentil stew), gomen hamli (braised collard greens) or qey sir (braised beets).
“I am calling it The Gursha Experience. Gursha is the Amharic word for nourishment, feeding, story telling,” said Barhany. It is also the name of her recently published cookbook, named by The New York Times as one of the best cookbooks of 2025, that showcases recipes in the context of her life story.
Chef Beejhy Berhany of Tsion Cafe attends the Grand Tasting: Daytime Edition hosted by Sofia and Manolo Vergara during Food Network New York City Wine & Food Festival, Oct. 18, 2025. (Rob Kim/Getty Images for NYCWFF)
Born in Ethiopia, Barhany she spent three years in a refugee camp in Sudan, before moving to southern Israel and then Kibbutz Alumim, near the Gaza Strip, during her teen years. After serving in the Israel Defense Forces, she traveled the world and, in her early 20s, settled in New York City, where she has raised a teen daughter.
Tsion had hosted quite a few special events over the years, most of which were held at the same time that regular restaurant service was taking place.
“People were very engaged,” said Barhany. “We had time to talk to them about history. They could ask questions. It was very personalized. I felt like I was able to educate them and engage with them on a personal level. It’s a lot more fulfilling than the walk-in, the regular model of coming in and you don’t know who you are dealing with.”
When Bella Smorgonskaya, the cultural director of the JCC of Staten Island, learned about Tsion Cafe, she was determined to visit.
“I immigrated to Israel from Russia and I was in Israel during Operation Solomon, an Ethiopian aliyah,” she recalled. “Everytime I am coming to Israel, I go every year, I see Ethiopian people and I see how they flourished.”
As the cultural director of the JCC, Smorgonskaya tries to introduce different cultures to the people who attend the organization’s events, so she decided on a group trip to the restaurant. The group visited this past November, right before Thanksgiving.
She and 23 attendees, ranging in age from 58 to 85 years, took a two-hour bus ride to Harlem. The participants came from a panoply of backgrounds — Irish, Italian, children of Holocaust survivors. It was an experience unlike any other they had had in the past.
“Beejhy talked about her family and their trip to Israel from Ethiopia,” said Smorgonskaya. “She wasn’t just serving food. She was talking about the roots of this food. I learned about the story and the history of Ethiopian Jews.”
The members of the group were not familiar with Ethiopian food or the manner in which the Ethiopian flat bread called injera is used to scoop up salads and stews, eschewing silverware. “They ate with their hands. Nobody complained,” she said. “Beejhy was so warm. It felt like we came to her house, not her cafe.”
Erica Frankel, the co-founder of Tzibur Harlem, a neighborhood Jewish community group, has held a number of events at Tsion Cafe over the years, the first being a fireside chat held at the restaurant in February 2023 during Black History Month that was titled, “Blacks and Jews in Harlem: Lessons from the past, a vision for the future.”
In 2025, when Frankel and her husband and Tzibur co-founder, Rabbi Dimitry Ekshtut, decided to hold a series of events in Harlem celebrating Hanukkah, the first person they contacted was Barhany. She said she would be delighted to host an event in her space.
“We lit Hanukkah candles. Beejhy offered us a framing of her own experience of Hanukkah. Interestingly, in the Ethiopian Jewish community, Hanukkah is not a holiday that they have traditionally celebrated because they left the Middle East before the Hanukkah story took place,” Frankel recalled. “But she shared her own experience of Hanukkah and more powerfully the experience of light and darkness and so many of the themes that underlie this holiday.”
The Hanukkah celebration with Tzibur Harlem was a transformative moment for Barhany, too.
“We celebrated Hanukkah here at Tsion and we had our hanukkiah by the window and I could see the reaction,” she said. “‘Are you serious? You’re putting your menorah right there?’ Yes! This is what I have to do. I am true to myself.”
Barhany knows the new model could be an uphill climb in an unforgiving industry. But she imagines Tsion Cafe as ultimately expanding beyond the Ethiopian Jewish experience to showcase the history and culture and food of other Diaspora Jewish communities.
“If I find someone with a Yemenite or Polish community, we could do that, too, with a particular chef,” she said. “How can we enrich Jewish diversity through food and storytelling in one place and specifically in Harlem? We’ve been around for 11 years and we would like to continue.”
