“I wish there was a more romantic story,” Amy Dell says with a laugh. “But we actually met on an app. It was my first dating app date ever.”
It was 2015, and Jake Dell was in the midst of the busy season at Katz’s Delicatessen, the historic Jewish deli on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where he is the fifth-generation owner. On the day of their planned first date, Amy told her coworkers she was excited, and they asked where she was going. She realized that it was almost 5 p.m., and he still hadn’t let her know the plan.
“I’m like, I’m done with him. He hasn’t texted me, I don’t even know where we’re going,” she recalls. Later that night, he texted her to apologize, explaining that he had been busy at the restaurant. Luckily, she understood: She grew up with a restaurateur father who owned the Midtown kosher restaurant Mr. Broadway. A few weeks later, Jake reached out again, and Amy’s roommate encouraged her to meet him.
“One drink turned into two drinks, and five hours of chatting, and walking her home like 20 blocks in the wrong direction,” Jake explains with a laugh, thinking back to their first date at a bar in Gramercy. “The chat was just effortless, and we had so much to connect on.”
“And when I hugged him, he smelled like pastrami, and I was like, this is familiar,” Amy says.
They bonded over memories of growing up in their family restaurants, and the important role the businesses played in their lives. “My parents got married there, my brother’s bris was there, it was always part of my life,” Amy says.
“For me, it was just the store, right?” Jake says. “It’s the place that my father worked, the place where my grandfather worked. It was so a part of my childhood, every birthday party here, I had my bar mitzvah here.”
Suffice it to say that meeting up was the right call. After their first date, Amy says, “I literally came home that night, and was like, yeah, we’re probably gonna get married.”
Food went on to play a central role in many of the couple’s milestone moments. The first time Jake met Amy’s family, it was at one of her family’s Friday night Shabbat dinners. “One of the things we laughed about was how different the food is on both of our sides,” Amy says.
Her father is from Israel, and her grandparents are from Tunisia and Morocco, while her mother is American, Amy explains. She always had Sephardic and Israeli-influenced food in her life, and grew up with vats of her father’s tomato-based sauce. At her family’s Shabbat dinners, she says, “My dad’s making hummus. He’s making tahini from scratch. He’s making baba ganoush. I mean, my mom, too, is a phenomenal cook, but just very different foods. My dad is making harissa. And I remember Jake just like sweating through our first Shabbat dinner, because we like things very spicy,” Amy says.
With Jake’s family, who are Ashkenazi, they would have bagel brunches, which introduced Amy to pickled herring and more.
When Jake proposed in 2018, he assembled a feast of Amy’s favorite dishes from New York restaurants (including chocolate babka from Breads Bakery, stuffed meatballs from Bar Primi, and Cereal Milk soft serve from Milk Bar). “When she came home, I had tried to time it all in the oven so that it would all be a coursed meal, which also totally failed because neither of us ate after that,” Jake recalls. “As soon as she walked in the door, she was like, What’s going on here? We were excited. I blacked out, I don’t remember what the hell I said. We just started calling our friends.”
When they got married in 2019, it was also a marriage of their respective family restaurants; they held their rehearsal dinner at Amy’s father’s restaurant at the time, an Upper East Side place called Eighteen. And to complete the weekend’s festivities, they had brunch at Katz’s.
More recently, in fall 2025, they revamped a dish on the Katz’s menu that embodies the blend of Jake and Amy’s culinary traditions: the chili, which uses Amy’s Saturday Sauce, a tomato-based sauce inspired by her father that she sells through her company, Sababa Foods.
“As we talked about blending food cultures, blending her family tradition with my family tradition, blending Sephardic cultures and Ashkenazi cultures, the chili here is that,” Jake explains. “It’s the epitome of that, it’s the symbol of that, right? It’s Saturday Sauce and meat from Katz’s, put together in chili form. That’s something that lives at my restaurant now as an everlasting symbol of that in a lot of ways.”
When it comes to celebrating the holidays, they go to each of their families’ seders, and then typically host their own. At Amy’s parents’ place, it’s a smaller event where they’ll read the full seder. At Jake’s family’s seder, it’s “a hundred people, it’s crazy,” he says. “It’s not like everybody’s even Jewish. There are all sorts of different people there, and they make it kind of silly and fun where they print out their own songs—it’s like a full Katz’s menu,” adds Amy.
At home in Jake and Amy’s Manhattan apartment, with their two kids (who are five and two and a half), they’ll usually host a seder that combines all of their family’s different food cultures, with the intention of building their own traditions. Last year, Amy made a jeweled rice dish that was a big hit. “Being Sephardic, rice is a yes on Passover,” Amy says, before Jake adds: “But we also started with gefilte fish, so it’s a little bit of both.”
It’s no surprise, then, that the recipe they’re sharing with Vogue this Passover is something of a hybridized dish. “I came up with this recipe that honors a little bit of my Moroccan heritage with this rich spice—not spicy, because I use the mild for this one. But it’s a spiced tomato sauce with chickpeas, the lamb gets super tender, and then you put it over the rice.” As for the dried apricots, currants, and raisins in the rice? “I just think lamb and fruit are just best friends,” she says. (And the secret ingredient to the dish is Amy’s Saturday Sauce, which was inspired by her father’s sauce recipe and which she sells through her company, Sababa Foods.)
Below, Amy shares the recipe.
Passover Lamb and Jeweled Rice
Serves 4–6
Slow-cooked, tender lamb in a rich tomato sauce with chickpeas pairs beautifully with jeweled rice studded with nuts and dried fruit. It’s elevated enough for a special occasion, yet comforting and easy to make (exactly what you want on your seder table).
- ~2 lbs. butterflied leg of lamb
- 2 tsp. Kosher salt
- 2 tsp. ground black pepper
- 24 oz. jar of Saturday Sauce
- 32 oz. chicken bone broth
- 15 oz. can chickpeas, drained and rinsed
- Tbsp. of silan (date syrup)
Pat the lamb dry and season generously on both sides with salt and pepper. Heat a Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Sear the lamb until browned on all sides (about 3–4 minutes per side).
Place your Saturday Sauce in a pressure/slow cooker and add in your lamb, along with chicken consomme, chickpeas, and silan. Slow cook on high pressure for seven hours.
Once complete, boil for 30 minutes (valve open) to reduce the sauce. Serve & enjoy.
- ¼ cup + 1 Tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
- 2 cups basmati rice, rinsed
- 3 cups hot water
- 1 Tbsp. chicken consomme powder
- 2 tsp. Kosher salt
- ½ tsp. Turmeric
- ½ cup sliced almonds, toasted
- ½ cup dried apricots, chopped
- ½ cup golden raisins
- ½ cup dried currants
Heat 1 Tbsp. of extra virgin olive oil in a pot on medium-high heat and toast rice for 5 minutes until fragrant. Add water and chicken consomme. Stir and cover with a lid (wrap lid in a dish towel, or parchment paper followed by aluminum foil) and cook over medium-low heat for about 15 minutes until all the water is absorbed. Fluff with a fork.
Remove the rice from heat and transfer it to a large mixing bowl. Gently fold in the remaining ingredients—dried fruit, almonds, kosher salt, turmeric, and extra-virgin olive oil—until evenly combined. Serve and enjoy.
