After 30 years in restaurants, Moti Sofer speaks about his mother’s kitchen, the pain of closing La Repubblica after October 7, fatherhood at 46 and his new Shefayim restaurantWhen chef Moti Sofer was 15, he walked into the kitchen of his mother, Yvonne, and began learning the secrets of cooking from her. His father, David, a building contractor who immigrated to Israel from Tripoli, was not thrilled to see his youngest son among the pots.“My late father didn’t like seeing it,” Sofer recalls. “He really hated that I went into the kitchen. In his chauvinistic view, it made no sense — a man doesn’t cry and a man doesn’t cook. My mother, on the other hand, loved that I was receiving her knowledge.”6 View gallery Moti Sofer (Photo: Galya Aviram)When Sofer speaks about Yvonne, who died 22 years ago at 67, his expressive eyes begin to fill with tears.“She was a beautiful woman, amazing, brilliant, cynical, funny. A woman of spirit,” he says. “Almost every two days, at 5:30, before service, I would speak to her on the phone. When my mother died in 2004, a few months after my father, my world collapsed. I felt I was alone in the world and that there was no one protecting me. No one I could turn to. To this day I am connected to my mother. She is still with me: her voice, her stories, her guidance, her knowledge. Her sentences still echo in me.”Then, suddenly, he declares: “By the way, I have the heart of a woman.”How does that show?