Charcoal smoke lifts from a rooftop grill and drifts across the Williamsburg waterfront, carrying with it the ancient perfume of meat seared over open flame — a scent that has defined communal eating since long before any of us drew breath. Eleven stories above Wythe Avenue, perched atop The Hoxton hotel with the entire Manhattan skyline stretched before it like a canvas that never tires of its own grandeur, Laser Wolf has accomplished something exceedingly rare in this city of relentless culinary ambition: it has turned the Israeli shipudiya — the neighborhood skewer house, a cornerstone of Tel Aviv street culture — into one of the most coveted reservations in New York. Not through spectacle alone, though the panoramic views of the East River and Lower Manhattan at golden hour would justify a visit even without a kitchen. The magnetism of Laser Wolf is rooted in something far older and far more honest than scenery. It is rooted in fire, in the generosity of shared plates, and in a chef’s deeply personal mission to honor the culinary traditions of a homeland he nearly lost the will to celebrate.
That chef is Michael Solomonov, the Israeli-born, Pittsburgh-raised titan who has spent the better part of two decades reshaping how Americans understand and consume Israeli food. Laser Wolf Brooklyn, which opened in May 2022, represents the culmination of a journey that began not in a culinary school but in a Tel Aviv bakery, wound through the grief of losing a brother on the Lebanese border, and arrived at a rooftop in Brooklyn where the primal act of cooking meat over coals carries the weight of heritage, memory, and defiance (James Beard Foundation, 2019).
The Architect: Michael Solomonov and the CookNSolo Legacy
Few living chefs have altered the trajectory of an entire cuisine’s perception in America the way Solomonov has with Israeli food. Born in 1978 in Moshav Ganei Yehuda, Israel, to a family of Bulgarian-Jewish descent, he moved to Pittsburgh as a young child and returned to Israel at eighteen with virtually no Hebrew language skills. The only employment he could secure was in a bakery — an accident of necessity that ignited a lifetime’s vocation (Wikipedia, 2025). His culinary path hardened into purpose following the death of his brother David, who was killed by Hezbollah snipers on the Lebanese border on Yom Kippur in 2003, just three days before his release from mandatory military service. David had volunteered to replace a fellow soldier who wished to attend synagogue. He was twenty-one years old (ISRAEL21c, 2017).
That loss became the spiritual engine behind everything Solomonov has built. Alongside business partner and restaurateur Steve Cook, he founded CookNSolo, the Philadelphia-based hospitality group responsible for Zahav — the pioneering Israeli restaurant that in 2019 became the first Israeli-American establishment to win the James Beard Award for Outstanding Restaurant (Zahav Restaurant, 2024). Solomonov himself has accumulated five James Beard Awards, including Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic (2011), Cookbook of the Year for Zahav: A World of Israeli Cooking (2016), and Outstanding Chef (2017). The CookNSolo portfolio now spans Dizengoff, Federal Donuts, Goldie, K’Far, Abe Fisher, and — closest to Solomonov’s heart — Laser Wolf.
The original Laser Wolf opened in February 2020 in an Old Kensington warehouse in Philadelphia, modeled on the Israeli shipudiya where communal eating around charcoal-grilled skewers represents not fine dining but the most fundamental form of hospitality. Condé Nast Traveler named it one of the best new restaurants in the world, and in 2021, The New York Times placed it on its prestigious list of fifty restaurants across America that its editors found most exciting (The New York Times, 2021).
A Brooklyn Rooftop with a Tel Aviv Soul
Laser Wolf Brooklyn is the first formal collaboration between CookNSolo and Chicago’s Boka Restaurant Group, the powerhouse founded by Kevin Boehm and Rob Katz in 2002. Boehm and Solomonov are longtime friends, and Boka already operated several concepts within Hoxton hotels in the Midwest. When the opportunity arose to take over the underperforming rooftop space at The Hoxton Williamsburg — a venue that had served food widely regarded as unworthy of its staggering views since the hotel opened in 2018 — the partnership felt inevitable (Gothamist, 2022).
The transformation was immediate and total. With 225 seats, an open charcoal kitchen that sends plumes of aromatic smoke swirling through the evening air, strings of overhead lights, and a sonic backdrop of energetic music, Laser Wolf channels the boisterous energy of an Israeli street grill while offering a visual experience that belongs entirely to New York. The skyline view — spanning from the bridges to the Freedom Tower — operates as both backdrop and co-conspirator, intensifying the sense that you are participating in something celebratory, communal, and alive.
Running the Brooklyn kitchen daily is Executive Chef Andrew Henshaw, who previously served as Chef de Cuisine at Zahav for five years, and Chef de Cuisine Mike Mayo, a veteran of critically acclaimed kitchens including David Burke Kitchen and Guard & Grace in Denver (Laser Wolf Brooklyn, 2024). Their combined fluency in Israeli technique and American fine-dining precision keeps the cooking at a level that justifies the restaurant’s relentless demand.
The Shipudiya Experience: How Dinner Unfolds
The word shipudiya derives from shishlik, the Hebrew term for skewered meat, and defines a category of Israeli restaurant where the charcoal grill is the undisputed center of gravity. At Laser Wolf, every dinner follows a structured prix fixe format that manages to feel both generous and elegantly restrained.
Upon ordering a single grilled item — skewers range from shawarma-spiced cauliflower and grilled eggplant to lamb and beef koobideh, chicken shishlik, tuna shishlik, and BBQ short rib — a procession of eleven silver bowls of salatim (the Israeli term for composed salads and dips) descends upon the table. At the center sits what the MICHELIN Guide has called a “flawless” hummus, its olive oil surface catching the light like burnished gold, flanked by warm, pillowy pita baked to spongy perfection (MICHELIN Guide, 2025). The surrounding bowls rotate seasonally but typically include babaganoush, gigante beans with harissa, mushrooms with Swiss chard and sour cherry, Yemenite potato salad, Turkish celery root, green beans with matbucha, snap peas with amba and grapes, and cabbage dressed in fennel and fiery schug. All of it is unlimited — refills arrive without request or surcharge, embodying the open-handed hospitality that defines Israeli table culture.
The grilled mains follow, each fired over the restaurant’s substantial charcoal setup. The lamb and beef koobideh — a finely ground kebab with wonderfully integrated spice and aggressive char — has emerged as a signature. The trout, rubbed with a complex spice blend that crisps the skin to a crackling lacquer, rivals anything coming off grills in restaurants twice the price. The tuna shishlik arrives with its center deliberately left raw, drenched in chili oil, a nod to the Japanese-Israeli fusion sensibilities that Solomonov wears lightly but deploys deliberately. The meal concludes with Laser Wolf’s now-legendary brown sugar soft-serve ice cream, a dessert that Gothamist’s Scott Lynch once described as among the finest ice cream experiences in New York City.
Accolades, Acclaim, and the Hardest Reservation in Brooklyn
Within weeks of opening, Laser Wolf Brooklyn established itself as what Brooklyn Magazine called “the restaurant of the summer” in 2022, with reservations reportedly vanishing within minutes of becoming available. The restaurant was named to Condé Nast Traveler’s list of the world’s best new restaurants, selected by The New York Times as one of the most exciting dining destinations in the United States, and earned inclusion in the 2025 MICHELIN Guide USA — a recognition that places it in the company of New York’s most scrutinized and celebrated kitchens (MICHELIN Guide, 2025). Time Out New York awarded it a glowing review while cautioning readers that walk-in waits could stretch beyond two hours.
The Infatuation, one of the city’s most trusted dining voices, praised the restaurant for refusing to squander its rooftop location on uninspired luxury fare, calling it a genuine summertime staple that earns its devotees through food first and views second (The Infatuation, 2025). Resy — the reservation platform through which Laser Wolf exclusively books — has featured it repeatedly in curated guides to Brooklyn’s essential dining. On Yelp, the restaurant holds nearly 500 reviews and over 1,600 photos, a testament to its sustained cultural moment long after the initial buzz should have faded (Yelp, 2026).
Peter from The Heritage Diner knows what it means to operate a restaurant that endures. Twenty-five years of feeding Mount Sinai from behind a griddle teaches you that a restaurant’s survival depends not on novelty but on consistency, generosity, and the willingness to treat each plate as a personal commitment. What Solomonov has built at Laser Wolf reflects that same discipline — the charcoal is lit fresh every service, the salatim are prepared from scratch daily, and the pita hits the table warm because cold pita is a betrayal of the form. These are the unseen details that separate restaurants that last from restaurants that merely trend.
The Hoxton Ecosystem: K’Far, Jaffa, and a Culinary Village
Laser Wolf does not exist in isolation at The Hoxton. CookNSolo and Boka have effectively transformed the hotel into a multi-level Israeli culinary campus. K’Far — meaning “village” in Hebrew — occupies the lobby level as an all-day café and bakery led by Chef Katreena Kanney, serving everything from pistachio sticky buns and chocolate rugelach to savory borekasim from morning through late night (Brooklyn Magazine, 2022). In the summer of 2023, the team added Jaffa Cocktail & Raw Bar, an indoor-outdoor seafood lounge with a contemporary Israeli twist, completing a three-pronged takeover that offers guests the option to eat Israeli food from breakfast through the final cocktail of the evening without ever leaving the building.
This vertical integration of concepts — each distinct in personality yet unified in culinary philosophy — mirrors a trend that Peter and his wife Paola, Broker, have observed from their vantage on Long Island’s North Shore: the consolidation of experiential offerings within singular locations. As Maison Pawli prepares for its 2026 launch as a boutique real estate venture serving the communities between Cold Spring Harbor and Port Jefferson, the Hoxton model stands as an instructive case study in how multiple complementary businesses can share a footprint without cannibalizing each other’s identity.
The Deeper Story: Grief, Heritage, and Charcoal
Strip away the skyline views and the reservation frenzy, and Laser Wolf reveals itself as something profoundly intimate. Solomonov has spoken openly about his struggles with addiction and the devastating impact of his brother David’s death — how the loss forced him to confront whether his cooking could serve a higher purpose than mere employment. The answer arrived in the form of Israeli cuisine itself, in the conviction that the foods of his homeland deserved a platform of serious ambition in America. Every subsequent restaurant — from Zahav’s refined multicourse offerings to Laser Wolf’s deliberately stripped-down grill house format — has been an extension of that conviction.
There is a philosophical kinship here with the Marcellino NY approach to English bridle leather. When Peter hand-saddle-stitches a briefcase in the Huntington workshop, each pass of the needle through vegetable-tanned leather is an assertion that the traditional method — the slower, harder, less profitable method — carries more meaning than the expedient one. Solomonov’s charcoal grill operates on identical principles. In an era when sous vide circulators and molecular gastronomy dominate the avant-garde conversation, he returned to the most ancient cooking technology available: open flame. The Resy editorial team captured this succinctly when they quoted Solomonov recalling his travels to Israel: he would arrive, sit down at a casual neighborhood shipudiya, watch the salads and bread and charcoal-grilled meats appear, and wonder why he was not doing exactly this back in America (Resy, 2022).
The name itself carries literary weight. “Laser Wolf” is a phonetic playfulness derived from Lazar Wolf, the butcher in Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman — the source material for Fiddler on the Roof. In the story, Lazar Wolf is the widower who wishes to marry Tevye’s eldest daughter; he is a man of trade, a man of the neighborhood, a man whose livelihood depends on the daily act of transforming raw material into sustenance. It is difficult to imagine a more fitting namesake for a restaurant that honors both the butcher’s trade and the communal table where the fruits of that trade are shared.
Essential Information
Address: 97 Wythe Avenue (at North 10th Street), Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY 11249 — Rooftop of The Hoxton Hotel
Telephone: (718) 215-7150
Website: laserwolfbrooklyn.com
Reservations: Available exclusively via Resy at resy.com/cities/new-york-ny/venues/laser-wolf-brooklyn. Reservations open 21 days in advance at 10:00 AM. Book early — this remains one of the most competitive tables in the city.
Hours:
- Monday–Wednesday: 5:00 PM – 11:00 PM
- Thursday–Saturday: 5:00 PM – 1:00 AM
- Weekend Lunch (Saturday & Sunday): 11:30 AM – 3:00 PM
Cuisine: Israeli shipudiya (skewer house) — charcoal-grilled meats, fish, and vegetables served with unlimited salatim, hummus, pita, and brown sugar soft-serve dessert.
Price Range: Prix fixe format — individual grill selections range approximately $43–$55, which includes all salatim, hummus, pita, and dessert. À la carte options also available, including a dry-aged T-bone for two and whole branzino.
Delivery: Available via DoorDash at doordash.com
Email: info@laserwolfbrooklyn.com
Social Media: Instagram — @laserwolfbk
Accessibility: Wheelchair accessible, elevator access from The Hoxton lobby.
Seasonal Note: In winter months, the rooftop is enclosed with plexiglass and equipped with overhead heaters, maintaining year-round operation.
Sister Restaurants at The Hoxton:
- K’Far (lobby level) — Israeli bakery and all-day café
- Jaffa Cocktail & Raw Bar — contemporary Israeli seafood and cocktails
Peter from The Heritage Diner — 275 Route 25A, Mount Sinai, NY — has spent twenty-five years learning that the restaurants worth writing about are the ones where someone cared enough to get the invisible things right. Peter holds a graduate degree in Philosophy from Long Island University and The New School in NYC. He is also the founder of Marcellino NY, a bespoke English bridle leather workshop in Huntington, and co-founder with his wife Paola of Maison Pawli, a boutique real estate venture launching in 2026 on Long Island’s North Shore.
