Ran Shmueli

The Climb

The route through hotels, then into sous chef and head chef posts, is what shaped Ran Shmueli’s method: service pressure, scale, and repetition, translated into control and timing. The progression is steady rather than abrupt, with each step adding a clearer read on what a kitchen demands. That discipline culminated in his work as chef and founding partner, and in opening the original Claro (since 2014), a point where experience and identity meet in one operation.

Today

At James’s, London, the work remains grounded in the earlier hotel years and the managerial demands that came with them. Ran Shmueli also opened the original Claro in Tel Aviv in 2014, a role listed from 2014 to present. The continuity matters: keeping a project running over time requires the same practical attention as building it, and that is what this span suggests.

In Their Words “Over the years, my style evolved into something much more local and Mediterranean—fresh, seasonal, and full of soul.” “My earliest memories in the kitchen are of watching my grandmother cook traditional Austrian dishes.” Read together, those lines place the craft between two poles: a present-day style shaped by locality and seasonality, and an early kitchen education formed by watching traditional Austrian dishes being made at home. The first line points to a way of cooking that privileges freshness and timing. The second shows where the sense of care started: in observation, in family cooking, and in the repetition of domestic technique. Ran Shmueli’s work sits between those two registers, with the older memory still audible inside the newer vocabulary.

Recognition

“Over the years, my style evolved into something much more local and Mediterranean—fresh, seasonal, and full of soul.” That line works here as the clearest public account of the kitchen’s direction: local in scope, Mediterranean in reference, and built around freshness and seasonality. For Ran Shmueli, it also reads as the summary of a career that moved in sequence from hotels to sous chef and head chef roles, then into chef and founding partner. The recognition is not about scale for its own sake, but about consistency—the ability to keep a style legible while it matures.