About Me, Nino Shaye Weiss, aka The Foodnik

I’m Nino Shaye Weiss, and like many of the better pastries in this city, I come with layers.

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.

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 healthy vegan diet—almost whole-food, plant-based, and SOS-free, except for a little miso and a bit of raw extra virgin olive oil. I changed my eating not to make a point, but to stay well. I’m feeling better and my health markers agree. But the decision to eat that way wasn’t only medical. It was ethical, ecological, and yes—Jewish. At least, Jewish in the way I and many others understand the tradition: as a call to take responsibility for the world, to reduce harm, to cultivate empathy, to live without cruelty if you can help it. That doesn’t require God. Just conscience.

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.

More

• About This Site
• About The Logo
• My Photography
• Recipes & Stories

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