Joseph Allaham

Joseph Allaham, also known as Joey Allaham, is an entrepreneur who owned several well-known kosher restaurants and eateries in Manhattan, which introduced a new approach to kosher dining.

Early life and Syria

Allaham was born in Damascus and grew up in a family of four generations of kosher butchers who served Syrian aristocracy. The name Allaham means "meat" in Arabic. His family left Syria in 1992, when the travel ban from 1948 was finally lifted. They retained their Syrian customs in the United States.

He would return to Syria only in 2010, when he helped set up a meeting between Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, in an effort to foster ties between Syria and the American Jewish community. As Assad supported them, Allaham visited Damascus with Hoenlein and toured the synagogue in Bab Touma.

Restaurant owner

Allaham moved to New York City in 1993 and began working in the restaurant business. His first enterprise was a wholesale business for caterers in Brooklyn. He opened The Prime Grill, a steakhouse on Madison Avenue, in 2000. It was regarded as the city’s first high-end kosher steakhouse. He moved to Manhattan in 2005 with his young family.

Prime at the Bentley was Allaham's glass-enclosed rooftop restaurant in a hotel. Its sukkah in 2013 was designed by Elie Tahari. Allaham also opened a Mediterranean-Asian fusion restaurant called Solo and a Japanese steakhouse called Prime KO. In 2013, the Solo was transformed into Solo Dairy Italian Kitchen. Together with the Japanese owner, Allaham converted Butterfish, a sushi restaurant, to kosher Japanese in 2014. They started offering the city's first kosher omakase. Prime at Canyons, opened in 2015 in Park City, a ski town in Utah, was the only kosher slope-side restaurant in the US.

In 2012, Allaham opened Prime Butcher Baker, a Sephardic gourmet food market where the kashrut of all products was controlled by a mashgiach tamedi (a rabbi who is a kosher supervisor) at all times. Differently from a standard kosher butcher, it offered dry-aged USDA Prime specialty cuts, duck, veal, and even venison.

Allaham's glatt kosher restaurant and catering company, Prime Hospitality Group, partnered with luxury resorts around the US for Jewish holidays. The travel program, called the Prime Experience, offered all-inclusive packages with kosher dining and alcohol, activities and accommodations.

Allaham's guests included pop stars (Madonna, Bono, Ricky Martin), politicians (Michael Bloomberg, Benjamin Netanyahu), actors (Alec Baldwin, Billy Crystal), and professional athletes (Amar’e Stoudemire, Evander Holyfield).

The Prime Grill Cookbook was written by Allaham and his chef David Kolotkin. Subtitled Redefining the Kosher Experience, it was published in 2013.

Recognition

Zagat named Prime Grill the top New York kosher restaurant for eight straight years, from 2004 to 2012. Allaham's restaurants, "both hip and kosher," were perceived as having "significantly changed expectations about kosher dining."