A “Strange Request”: Wolt Blocked Me Forever, and It Changed My Career
4 different dishes from one pot. Oren Barzilai / Walla system, private collection
It all started with a wedding. I was living then in the Eshkol region, what was once called the Gaza envelope, and I was excited for the upcoming wedding of a pair of friends. I spent the day before the wedding in an empty apartment in Tel Aviv, a place that was all mine, and planned to celebrate 24 hours with all the apps that do not exist in the south, Gett Taxi, Pango, and Wolt. A paradise of options. When I got home drunk and with hunger beginning to simmer, I opened my phone and, to my amazement, discovered that no restaurant was willing to accept my order. I did not know that this was the first domino stone that would eventually lead to an interesting twist in my career.
So how do you even get blocked on Wolt? First of all, you need to make sure that is what happened. In my case, it took quite a few hours. Remember when we used to think Wolt was some kind of hi-tech company? Well, after moving from one customer service rep to another, I managed to reach the shift supervisor, let’s call him Yaniv Wolt. Yaniv Wolt informed me that the credit card a friend had entered into a shared order we all made had been declined. A bad movie in which the star is me.
Wolt courier / Wolt
Forced disconnection from the life of the average Israeli
Yaniv Wolt and his business colleagues offered me an easy and simple course of action in which I am the star: just speak with the friend, whom I have not seen since, explain the situation, make it clear to him that he must transfer money to the bank account number Wolt gave me, and from there it is really not complicated at all. I just need to wait again for hours on the line, find the specific shift supervisor, tell him the transfer was made, and then he will get back to me within 3 to 300 business days and confirm that everything is fine. Hi-tech.
Until then? Like Moses outside the Land of Canaan, I can enter the app, look at the restaurants and beautiful dishes, fantasize about a bag full of paper packages stained with oil, and do nothing about it. Blocked, locked, talk to us after the holidays.
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Honestly? I did not even argue. What was supposed to turn into a titanic battle against the impermeable corporation became a clear realization: anyway I live in Eshkol, and the closest thing to a restaurant with delivery service is “Sushi Ta’imushi” in Kibbutz Gevulot, so I told them thanks but no thanks, I will manage on my own.
That is where my disconnection from the life of the average Israeli began, the one who orders delivery once or twice a week, the one who spends 300 to 500 shekels a month on orders, and on the other hand is exempt for days from the endless daily labor of feeding yourself and your family.
From peels to gourmet salts.
Oren Barzilai / Walla system, private collection
A slap from a previous life
At first it felt insignificant. Anyway, in my area there is one pizza place, which accepts deliveries four days in advance and operates 28 minutes a week. But then October 7 came, and evacuation, and displacement, and resettlement in the world capital of delivery, the queen of Israeli cuisine, Kiryat Ono.
So what do you do when you cannot use the simplest solution and silence family hunger with the press of a button in an app? Excellent question.
Luckily, I acquired some useful skills during my time as a cook at the legendary Nanuchka restaurant. And when I tried to apply them in the home kitchen I realized that in fact no one had taught me, or any other parent I know, culinary literacy. I am not talking about the knowledge of how to lift a cut in a smoker or how to make a one-off project with puff pastry, but about that important, basic thing we once called “household economics”: making sure there is not only food on the table, but that you are always one pot away from a meal for the whole family.
Building a pantry, scheduling cooking, making sure there is basic, functioning equipment, doing prep whenever possible, being creative with leftovers, and doing all of this in front of an audience much more demanding and tougher than most restaurants have to face.
Yes, there are all kinds of methods: you can prepare one pot of mujaddara a week and eat from it for a whole week. You can freeze ready-made meals as if you were at Tasty. You can plan every meal of the week in advance as if a family household is not the most chaotic thing in the world. Hello and goodbye, comfortable life.
Wolt courier / public relations, Wolt
Of all of these, what worked best for me was a combination of techniques from professional kitchens: using cooking time to prepare something else along the way, reducing the number of pots and pans, and accordingly the piles of dirty dishes, using leftovers, fermentations, and focusing on recipes that can last four days, but require only a quarter of an hour of net work, flavored salts, homemade cream cheese, granola.
Another thing that turned me into a satisfying culinary parent was preparing and freezing a cooking base in advance, spice cubes, stock, and even shawarma. All of this was adapted to the home kitchen meant to feed picky children: conservative flavors, involving the children in the cooking process, and blind-tasting games that make them disgusted, but also get them used to it, and in the end make them love things they never imagined.
The final goal of all this agenda is to allow parents, lazy in the kitchen as they may be, to take a pot of pasta, or rice, or potatoes, and turn it into 4 to 5 different dishes. Almost without adding preparation time. Household economics, but of our time.
Oren Barzilai / Walla system, private collection
From a Headstart to a new career
And all this idea that blew my mind, and started out as a perk in some Headstart project I launched, received warm responses. The great interest that followed surprised me: families like mine and yours, working people, smarter, more successful than me, who always remain in shortage and spend much more money simply because they were not miraculously disconnected from the life-support machine of food delivery.
Then, like a butterfly that created a motivational wave, I started giving “culinary literacy” workshops, met with parents, groups of friends, communities that liked the idea, and taught them how to get much more out of the kitchen without wrecking it along the way. I taught them how to save money, turn leftover vegetables and fruits into gourmet salts you can find in delicatessens, and above all, get much more out of one pot.
Is this a recommendation to delete the apps and live like a monk? Heaven forbid. There is still no happier sound than a knock at the door from a courier. And still, if you want to turn the endless cycle of cooking, eating, dishes, shopping into something more efficient, you can dare and do it. Do not wait for Yaniv Wolt to force you.
