Shukette vs. Shuka: How Ayesha Nurdjaja’s Two Restaurants Compare

Chef Ayesha Nurdjaja is the executive chef and partner at both Shuka in SoHo and Shukette in Chelsea, and the naming makes the connection obvious. Shukette even translates loosely as “little Shuka.” But the two restaurants aren’t the same menu in two locations, and understanding the relationship between them helps explain why each one has its own identity.

How the two restaurants started

Shuka came first, opening in SoHo in 2017 as a collaboration between Nurdjaja and restaurateurs Vicki Freeman and Marc Meyer, built around Eastern Mediterranean cooking drawing on Italian, Moroccan, and Tunisian influences. Shukette followed in 2021 in Chelsea, giving Nurdjaja room to push further east into Levantine cooking, with a menu centered more tightly on Israeli, Syrian, and Lebanese flavors. Shukette opened to enough attention that it landed on The New York Times’ list of the ten best new restaurants of 2021, and Nurdjaja has since been recognized as a James Beard Foundation Best Chef: New York State semifinalist.

Where the menus overlap and where they split

Both restaurants share a point of view built around shared plates, bread as a central component of the meal, and Mediterranean and Middle Eastern flavors rather than a single national cuisine. Where they split is in specificity. Shuka’s menu draws more broadly across the Mediterranean, while Shukette narrows the focus to the “Al Ha’esh” charcoal-grill tradition and a more explicitly Levantine “Shuk” market menu, along with the rip-and-dip format built specifically around its bread and dip station.

The difference in atmosphere

The bigger difference for most diners is the room itself. Shukette is built around an open kitchen with a 23-seat concrete counter, designed to be loud, high-energy, and interactive, closer to a neighborhood hangout than a quiet dinner spot. It’s a deliberate design choice meant to put the fire and the cooking on display rather than tucked into a back kitchen.

Which one to choose

If you’re deciding between the two for a specific visit, the choice usually comes down to what kind of evening you want rather than which menu is better. Shukette makes sense for a livelier night out, a group dinner, or anyone who wants to watch the charcoal grill in action from the counter. It’s the newer, louder, more Levant-focused sibling of the two restaurants, built by the same chef but with its own identity in Chelsea — one we cover in more depth in our look at Chelsea’s Mediterranean dining scene.