My Story: Nino Shaye Weiss, aka The Foodnik

I’m Nino Shaye Weiss, the foodnik behind Jewish Viennese Food, where my family, friends, and I kibbitz about and cook the stories and recipes from this city. Like many of the better pastries in Vienna, I come with layers. This page explores the layers of my biographical and intellectual journey, providing the core context that led to the creation of this blog. (For a deeper dive into the blog’s mission and scope, visit my About This Site page. For the philosophical story of my journey, read How I Became an Atheist in a Shtreimel and Found Salvation in this Jewish Viennese Food Blog: The Cynical Gaze.)

I live in Vienna, a city that has learned to live with its ghosts—often by ignoring them. But I write and cook in their company. Vienna wasn’t always home. I spent over a decade studying art history, philosophy, and film in Paris at Vincennes (Paris VIII), that famously revolutionary university once haunted by Deleuze, Foucault, Badiou. I also cooked in a Jewish-Berber bistro in the 20th arrondissement, with friends who taught me more about hospitality, resistance, and dignity than any lecture hall.

On the morning of 9/11, I was eating French toast on a rooftop in Crown Heights. History arrived like smoke across the skyline. You remember where you were.

Later came seven years in Bnei Brak, the ultra-Orthodox suburb of Tel Aviv. I was sincere. I was searching. I still am.

I used to be Hasidic. I used to be a meat eater. I’ve changed. Some of that change is what this blog is about. Not always directly, but still—like a pantry full of substitutions, the past is in everything I make. (The philosophical and personal process that led to this blog is detailed in my essay: $\text{How I Became a Haredi Atheist and Found Salvation in Jewish Viennese Food}$).

I no longer cook the meat recipes from this site. I still leave them online because of the stories and for the people and places they carry, and because I once believed in them. Some are tied to specific people, cities, and years. Some are just the memory of how things tasted when life was different. I believe recipes are a form of memory. And I believe that Jewish food—like Jewish life—is always about more than what’s on the plate.

Now I eat a whole-food, plant-based diet. The shift was prompted by a health crisis, but it quickly revealed itself to be ethical, ecological, and deeply aligned with Jewish values. (For the full story, see Why Vegan.)

And no, I still don’t like sports. But obviously, I do exercise every day now. It somehow starts to grow on me… slowly, and awkwardly. Like a habit you didn’t expect to survive.

But I do like changing—like a kugel recipe passed from one aunt to another, with mysterious edits along the way, each version insisting it’s the original.

More recently, I started painting again. That’s become another way of thinking through color and composition, another kitchen of sorts. If you’re curious, you’ll find my work at ShayeWeiss.com.

What else? I grew up in Budapest and Vienna speaking Hungarian, not German. I had to learn Austrian German in school, at six. That linguistic split—between home and outside—shaped everything. My mother didn’t like to cook (and she’ll forgive me for saying she wasn’t very good at it). My father didn’t cook at all, but he rowed real Venetian gondolas in Vienna, to feel connected to his family’s history.

This blog isn’t religious, but it’s shaped by Jewish time, Jewish humor, Jewish memory. And Jewish food, of course—not as simple nostalgia, but as a dynamic site for understanding historical perseverance, fostering critical reflection, and consciously shaping contemporary identity. Ultimately, this entire project functions as an art project and a personal notebook—a way to give shape to things that might otherwise remain unspoken, ensuring that I, my family, and my friends don’t lose these stories and recipes to forgetting.

More

• About What This Site Is
• About The Why Of This Site
• About The Logo
• On My Photography
• On My Paintings and Drawings
• Recipes & Stories

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Readers are welcome to contact me at [email protected].

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