Tel Aviv: A Beach-to-Market Food Tour Israeli food is having its global moment, spurring ever more inventive cooking in trendsetting Tel Aviv. Here’s how to find the city’s most exciting restaurants, food stalls—and the king of all pita sandwiches By Raphael Kadushin
http://www.wsj.com/articles/tel-aviv-a-beach-to-market-food-tour-1475167369
When I was 7 my family moved from the Midwest, in the dead of winter, to Israel and everything shifted. Our snow boots gave way to sandals, blizzards turned into salty sea breezes and food that used to arrive wrapped in plastic came alive, in very real ways. On Friday mornings the poultry vendor would chase our Sabbath chicken around the market yard, until we heard the last strangled squawk. The oranges from our neighbor’s tree would spray juice when we halved them, and hummus was always spilling out of pita and running down our bare arms.
We left Israel before I entered high school and returned for short visits in the years that followed. But I hadn’t gone back for an extended visit until last year, around the same time the rest of the world was busy discovering the tastes I remembered. Israeli cuisine is having a huge global moment, from Jerusalem-born chef Yotam Ottolenghi’s network of Middle-Eastern restaurants in London to Alon Shaya’s Shaya, currently one of the toughest reservations in New Orleans. And all that excitement isn’t just an Israeli export. The Tel Aviv I knew, a relatively quiet, provincial town, has morphed into Israel’s largely secular trendsetter; new restaurants are debuting weekly. “We’re open to the world now,” chef Eytan Vanunu later told me, “in fashion, art, music and, of course, food.”
On this return trip, the proof of that voracious appetite, and Tel Aviv’s ascendance as style maker, were obvious my first day in town. I passed the Tel Aviv Museum of Art’s glossy new contemporary wing, and the warren of boutiques and galleries crowding the Neve Tzedek neighborhood, before my cab deposited me in the hipsterized Florentin district at Halutzim 3, the restaurant Mr. Vanunu runs with his partner, Naama Szterenlicht. Housed in a small renovated warehouse, the bistro is anchored by a recycled wood counter and filled with flea-market-find tables. But if the dining room’s casual design doesn’t suggest the dynamism of Israeli food, the amped-up menu unequivocally does. The parents of Mr. Vanunu and Ms. Szterenlicht variously came to Israel from Argentina, Poland, Germany and Morocco. A decade ago northern European Jewish (Ashkenazi) and southern (Sephardic) recipes would have ended up in different pots. But Mr. Vanunu and Ms. Szterenlicht, representing a new generation of Israeli chefs, bring all those international accents to the freshest local produce and turn out a coherent tumble of flavors. At Halutzim 3, my bowl of black lentils, true to Israel’s abiding vegetarian palate, came tossed with coriander, cured lemon, tomatoes, roasted almonds and goat yogurt. Unabashedly non-kosher, the kitchen also serves a challah loaf stuffed with minced pork and a calamari salad brightened by lime and parsley.
‘When you look at a national cuisine, it’s usually the history of a people. But we come from all over.’
“Israeli cuisine,” Mr. Vanunu told me, as he dished up the lentils, “is a dialogue that starts now. When you look at a national cuisine, it’s usually the history of a people. But we come from all over. The flavors on your plate aren’t just Naama and my own personal heritage. They also blend in lots of other strands of Israeli culture—Palestinian, Lebanese, Russian, Tunisian, Turkish, Algerian, Romanian, Bulgarian.” Add the growing number of French and Iraqi immigrants and Tel Aviv’s border-hopping food, taking shape before our eyes, is driven by an exuberant flavor profile that won’t be confined by any rigid tradition.
The lesson got reinforced that night when I dined at Yaffo Tel Aviv, an industrial-cool restaurant sitting at the base of downtown’s sleek Electra Tower. The standout hybrid dishes included a puffy focaccia that read more like pita, and an Italo-Israeli gnocchi with shavings of local goat cheese, for a taste of Tel Aviv on the Tiber.
The next morning, though, the very idea of another restaurant seemed claustrophobic. In a city where the sun rarely dives behind clouds, nobody stays inside too long, and Tel Aviv’s dense network of markets and street vendors do a brisk business. The choices are legion. Determined to recover a nostalgic taste of my childhood, I started just down the block from Halutzim 3 at the Levinksy Market, where the fruit stalls displayed pyramids of pomegranates and the market’s long-running Yom Tov Deli was selling cream cheese-stuffed hibiscus flowers in a dollhouse-sized storefront. “What’s good?” I stupidly asked the sale clerk. “Everything,” he said, with a classic Tel Aviv shrug, as I popped a rice-filled grape leaf in mouth, “We’re a deli.”
Then I cabbed over to Carmel Market, a few blocks from the city’s long western shoreline, where the cafes in the Yemenite Quarter like Shlomo & Doron’s are famous for their silky masabacha hummus—an almost mousse-like blend of hummus, tahini and lemon, crowned by whole chickpeas. At my next stop, the shiny new Sarona Market on downtown’s eastern fringe, everyone was plowing through sushi and burgers, but I held out for a pillowy pita stuffed with fat, grilled chicken livers at Miznon, celebrity chef Eyal Shani’s pita cafe, and then for a sample of Tel Aviv’s latest street food craze: the Iraqi-inspired sabich sandwich—fried eggplant, tomato, cabbage, tahini, eggs, potatoes and mango sauce piled into one very beleaguered pita. My grazing marathon ended, late in the afternoon, on the Mediterranean seafront, at the Banana Beach Café. That’s where I wound up wearing a shirt splattered with tahini sauce, as I always had as a boy, and surrounded by surfer waiters looking longingly at the tide. What they were serving, when they remembered, were plates of shakshuka stew, the poached eggs popping yellow against the peppery tomato sauce.
The next day, I retreated back inside, at Mizlala, which sits just off downtown’s cafe-lined Rothschild Boulevard. Once again, the austere dining room belies the hyperactive menu, which pairs seared scallops with pumpkin and citrus cream, and mullet fillet with charred tomato butter. The chef is Meir Adoni, who cooked at Noma and Alinea before coming home to whip up something he calls quintessentially Israeli. “We are only a 60-year-old country,” he told me as I finished a serving of his signature Palestinian tartar (steak and pine nuts), “so we are free to develop our own culinary language. I want flavors screaming in my mouth, full of taste, color, texture.” He achieves that by updating his grandmother’s Moroccan recipes, focusing on contemporary techniques and combining a mix of Jewish and Arab flavors. “I frequently work with Arab chefs because I don’t want to live in a divided country. Food is one of the best ways to pull people together.”
The current reality, though, is a dangerously divisive one; more than anything, that may shape the lusty, sensual flavors of Israeli cuisine, along with the hungry local appetite. “Everyone here, including my own four children, knows what the sirens mean when they go off,” Mr. Adoni said. “Every kid in the Middle East has a scratch on their soul. Right now we keep nothing for the future because there may be no future. So we live wholly in the moment, and we live to the extreme.”
The almost manic sense of immediacy was evident on my last evening in Tel Aviv. A surprising thunderstorm had swept through the city. But before the clouds had even cleared, every restaurant, cafe and bar on Rothschild Boulevard had dragged its chairs back onto the sidewalk and couples were strolling down the street’s central promenade, below the bowed fronts of the Bauhaus buildings. At perennially buzzing North Abraxas restaurant, just off Rothschild, the cooks and servers were dancing a raucous hora in the open kitchen, banging on pots and pouring rounds of free shots for the diners tucking into zucchini pizza. “It’s raining again,” someone yelled. But the patrons sitting outside at the restaurant’s sidewalk tables didn’t budge. Passing around dessert plates of caramelized challah slathered with peach marmalade, clapping along with the waiters, no one was going to concede a single sweet bite, even when the drops gave way to a steady drizzle.
Comments are closed.
