
“The category is one that we, just a few kids from Finland, established in the United States three years before Americans had ever even heard of a long drink. As long drinks continue to expand and gain notoriety, The Finnish Long Drink is continuing to pave the way for brands looking to get into the category. With the category of long drinks dating back to the 1952 Summer Games in Helsinki, Americans were first introduced when The Finnish Long Drink established the category in the US in 2018. News of the long drink category has been making headlines in recent weeks as a Danish and an American billionaire conglomerate have announced their own versions of long drinks.

“But I find there is freedom in breaking the rules.” And it promotes a distinctly Tel Aviv lifestyle: dancing in between bar stools and long nights lingering at the dinner table, well into the wee hours -whether it’s a Saturday or a Tuesday. “The difference between New York and Tel Aviv is that there are a lot more rules in New York restaurants,” he says. With this month’s opening of Port Sa’id, which is an offshoot of Shani’s decade-old Tel Aviv restaurant of the same name, the chef is further shattering the notion that elevated dining must be formal. Trading white tablecloths for butcher paper and often forgoing plates altogether, his restaurants (currently totaling eight in New York City) reflect a playfully irreverent attitude, injecting a frisky vibrancy into the city’s oft-stringent-and all-too-Michelin-obsessed-scene.

The Israeli chef has been slowly dismantling fine dining’s rigid rubrics since even before he opened his first US project, the pita-focused Miznon in 2018 in Chelsea Market. It promises to be a little bit frenetic, totally unscripted and wildly fun. And yes, a restaurant, where the chefs skewering meat kebabs and dousing veggies with Levantine spices in the open kitchen will be the entertainment as much as the DJs that alternate between the Notorious B.I.G.

A music lounge, vinyl library and performance venue. Eyal Shani’s new 4,000-square-foot establishment in Manhattan’s Hudson Square will have many more identities than that: It will be a listening bar and record store. It would be a mistake to call Port Sa’id a restaurant.
