Solomonov's toughest challenge: Beating drugs

For a stunningly frank piece Sunday in the New York Times, chef Michael Solomonov tells Frank Bruni about the depths of the drug abuse that threatened to destroy him.

"I was living a double life," Solomonov told Bruni. "I look back and I'm horrified."

Solo recounts sleeping only an hour or two a night in spring 2008 when he was opening Zahav - the groundbreaking Israeli restaurant in Society Hill Towers - with business partner Steve Cook. But the insomnia wasn't necessarily stress-induced.

He was smoking crack, sometimes adding other drugs to the mix.

People around him had no clue. His self-destruction was uncovered when he developed withdrawal symptoms on a trip to Bermuda after he ran out of drugs in summer 2008. That prompted his wife, Mary, and Cook to intervene. He joined a 12-step program.

Not that everything was perfect, he told Bruni. When Mary was in the hospital giving birth to the couple's first son in 2011 - two months after he won the James Beard Award for best chef, mid-Atlantic - Mike says he had a "fleeting notion" that he could go out and score drugs.

He discussed the sad chapter on the eve of the opening of the restaurants Dizengoff and Abe Fisher, and also given the emotions stirred by the current conflict in Israel. His brother David was killed on patrol on the Lebanese border in 2003.

The article is painful to read. We all know how these stories play out all too often.

Mike Solo is one lucky dude.