MILWAUKEE – Amilinda, the downtown restaurant serving Spanish– and Portuguese–inspired cuisine, is offering a Sephardic-inspired menu for Chanukah.
The dining room, at 315 E. Wisconsin Ave., is closed for now because of the pandemic, but pick up and take out at that location can be ordered at Amilinda.com.
Chef and owner Gregory León said he offers the Sephardic-inspired menu every year around Chanukah, to honor his mother’s side of the family, which is Ashkenazi. The Sephardic style menu this year will be available through Dec. 12 and Dec. 16-19.
“We do a bunch of research on Sephardic cooking and come up with some dishes inspired by that,” León said.
León’s mother is from Superior. His father is from Venezuela, where he grew up. He’s been doing the Sephardic-inspired menu for Chanukah for four years, he said, but he only learned about a month ago that one of his forebears was Sephardic in Spain.
The pandemic has been hard on restaurants and Amilinda has been no exception. León posts to the Amilinda Facebook page about the struggle and asks his customers for their support.
His culinary research often consists of poring through paper cookbooks.
“I’m one of those weird chefs that doesn’t use the internet for a lot of research,” he said.
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