Where to eat?

May 30, 2011 - 7:16 PM by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, Food, General, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Life 

From Jerusalem to Rechovot

Having lived here for just about 16 years, I’ve lost touch with the way one does things in the States. Like searching and finding a good restaurant in a neighborhood other than your own. If someone needs a restaurant recommendation in Jerusalem, even Tel Aviv, I can hold my own. But send me farther afield and unless I’ve actually been somewhere that’s worth recommending in the last year or so, I’d be hard-pressed to offer an idea.

When those moments arrive, I often turn to the various local restaurant websites, such as eluna (for kosher restaurants in Israel), 2eat, or rest.co.il. Eluna is pretty reliable, with its 10% off coupons and reader recommendations — although you do have to read between the lines, because one reader’s idea of a great meal is not necessarily yours. And the others are good in terms of the sheer breadth of information, but what’s up there depends on the restaurant and not all restaurants keep their pages up to date.

So when friends from the States wanted to meet us for dinner, and were staying in Rechovot, I immediately thought of nearby moshav restaurants and Facebooked a friend in Mazkeret Batya for recommendations. She came through, but most of her ideas were too far afield for us, beyond Rechovot and too long of a drive. We needed something meat, not in Tel Aviv, and within a 30-minute drive for each of us. The moshav restaurants I did find looked good — check out Cramim — but weren’t kosher, which didn’t work for us. When they nixed coming to the outskirts of Jerusalem, I sighed and told my husband that we were driving to Rechovot.

Now, where to eat in Rechovot? That wasn’t so hard, after Googling Rechovot, restaurants, kosher. We came up with Oro, a kind of fancy Moroccan restaurant that served good food, tagines and all kinds of ‘cigars’, but to my mind would have been better suited with a simpler, more homey kind of atmosphere. And, in very typical Israeli style, was housed in a mall — it used to be in a gas station, always a good bet for solid eateries, at least in this country.

But we ate our tagines, drank our wine and laughed and joked with each other and the waiter. Our friends were grateful that we drove out to them, and we left, knowing it had been a decent dinner, and worth the effort.

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Foto Friday – A little Italy in TLV

August 19, 2010 - 11:31 PM by · 2 Comments
Filed under: Art, Food, Foto Friday, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Life, Picture of the Week, Pop Culture, Profiles, Travel 

There is a lopsided love affair between Israelis and all things Italian. Italians think of Israel as the Holy Land. Israelis think Italy is what Israel could be were it not for the matzav — the word used to describe the roiling, boiling political-diplomatic-religio-ethno-social situation that is our constant reality. Without the matzav, your average Israeli believes, we too could focus on a life filled with beautiful objects, high-quality design, and of course, great food and wine.

Your average Israeli is, as usual, deluding and flattering himself all at once. If anything, Italy’s history is proof that a well-developed sense of aesthetics is possible to sustain, even in times of great conflict. And there’s no reason to think that, even if peace broke out tomorrow, your average Israeli would suddenly put those ass-crack jeans away and don an linen Armani suit in its stead.

Plus, despite the matzav, Israel has fine-tuned its palate over the past 20 years, with award-winning wines, gourmet coffees, excellent cheeses (especially the goat variety), and restaurants that rank four and five stars in leading international guides.

For five years now, restaurant RoniMotti has been serving up freshly made pasta and other Italian delights to the yuppie crowd working feverishly ’round the clock at Tel Aviv’s Ramat Hahayal high-tech park. Owners Roni Belfer and Motti Sofer recenty celebrated the anniversary with a series of photos celebrating their dedicated staff. The pictures are nice way to give a big public “Thank you” to their workers…

as well as pay homage to the persons, places and things that inspire them, like the mother who taught Motti how to cook…

the fresh food ingredients that are Roni’s passion…

and of course, la bella Italia itself…

…as they carve out their own little slice of Italian heaven in North Tel Aviv.

RoniMotti also recently launched an online magazine, Villagio, profiling everything from the Slow Food movement to Frank Sinatra. Hey, if it’s Italian, we Israelis love it! Salute e buon appetito!

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Nostalgia Sunday – Welcome to Eggs-rael

June 20, 2010 - 9:15 PM by · 5 Comments
Filed under: Food, General, health, History and Culture, Israeliness, Life, Nostalgia Sunday, Pop Culture, Travel 

Pinch me, I must be dreaming. For the first time in all my years here, I’ve found a place with egg white omelet on the menu. Not that you aren’t able to order an omelet made of egg whites in Israel. But this generally this involves making long explanations to young wait-persons who generally respond with everything from a blank stare of utter confusion to a just-as-confused-but-trying-to-be-helpful, “Are you sure you only want the whites? I’m going to have to charge you for a regular omelet anyway, you know.” So, having it on the menu is a big deal.

It got me thinking about eggs, which are a very important part of the daily diet for most Israelis – and not just during Passover when it’s all eggs, all the time. According to a 2007 report by International Egg and Poultry Review, hen egg consumption in Israel was 30.98, putting Israel 36th in world per capita consumption. In 2004, Globes reported that the average Israeli consumed 239 eggs per year.

One of the reasons consumption is so high is because eggs aren’t just for breakfast in Israel. I still remember this revelation at the age of 7 or 8 when I was invited to dinner at the home of a little girl in my Grandmother’s Jerusalem neighborhood. Her mother served us fried eggs, sunny side up. Wow! Breakfast food for dinner! This must be a pretty good country to live in if you can have that.

Of course, actually coming here to live meant dealing with some of the peculiarities of egg procurement. For example, during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, eggs were taken away from consumers and delivered straight to our soldiers. The only eggs available were tiny little substandard ones — and then only through the black market.

Meanwhile, Israel’s soldiers were being stuffed silly with four, five and six eggs a day. Eventually, this artificially created shortage ended, eggs came back to the grocery shelves and those soldiers — now in their 50s and 60s — treat their high cholesterol levels with statin drugs. (Israel’s Hadassah Hospital, you should know, was a pioneer in the use of statins for controlling high blood pressure).

Another weird thing was that there were no egg cartons, just trays of eggs. If you just wanted to buy a few eggs, say 6 or 8, the grocery store proprietor would place them very carefully in a little brown paper bag and hand it to you to carry gingerly back home. And if you were lucky, most of them would arrive whole. This led to the development of the portable plastic egg carrying case.

Even before the State was founded, most of Israel’s eggs were marketed by evil monolith (I am not kidding) Tnuva which at one point in the 1980s marketed 66% of all of the country’s eggs. To its credit, Tnuva did standardize levels of production and was the first Israeli company to qualify for ISO 9002 international standardization. Nonetheless, times have changed and today Tnuva has to make do with controlling a mere 35% of the egg market in Israel.

I’m too young to have experienced the austerity regime of Israel’s early statehood but the excellent Nostal site (in Hebrew but with lots of pictures) has a nice entry about powdered eggs, which seem to have characterized the era for many.

But I am old enough to have seen one of the last egg stores in Tel Aviv, which was located on Shenkin Street right next to Cafe Tamar. It was not a boutique. It was a dumpy little store that sold one thing and one thing alone: that perfect oval symbol of rebirth.

Today, we have egg cartons by the dozen, restaurants like Tel Aviv’s Benedict that serve eggs all day and all night, and shakshouka, a North African dish consisting of eggs poached in tomato sauce, is a staple on every menu. (The Israel Poultry Council has a nice recipe here).

As for the aforementioned egg white omelet, it was served to me at the Si Espresso cafe. Located at the Latrun junction, the cafe is a popular hangout for mountain bikers from all over Israel (hence the healthy Lite Breakfast)*. Definitely recommended, even if you aren’t wearing biking shorts.

*This past Friday morning was no exception; the bikers hadn’t yet received the news that one of their own, triathlete Shneor Cheshin, had been killed while riding by a hit-and-run driver. You can read more about it in Yossi Melman’s impassioned editorial, Drivers to Blame, in Haaretz.

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Welcome to Beersheva – Israel’s mall capital

July 7, 2009 - 8:36 AM by · 8 Comments
Filed under: Business, Environment, General, Life 

mall-lahav-beer-shevaA couple of months ago we were on our way back from Eilat with friends when the kids started to get hungry and fractious. We decided to stop in Beersheva.

My memories of Beersheva were of some hot dusty town with a dilapidated center, and a few basic restaurants that looked like they were decorated in the 1980s. Our friends, who had lived in the nearby army base of Hazerim for some years, took us on a short cut from the main road through a neighborhood and then out into the retail district of the city.

The sheer size of this area was flabbergasting. We drove from one power outlet or outdoor mall, to another – seven in total – all seemingly lined up one after the other. There were so many restaurants and cafes to choose from that we actually got confused. It went on and on for miles, and because it was a Saturday evening, the roads were heaving with people.

Hundreds of shops, restaurants, cinemas, bowling alleys. It was as if we had taken a wrong turn out of the barren and empty Negev desert straight into America. “It’s the biggest mall in Israel,” our friends told us, and we certainly weren’t going to argue that point.

Well not any more. Apparently the biggest mall in Israel is just about to be built. Where? In Beersheva, of course.

The Lahav Group has announced that it plans to build the Beersheva Mall over a stretch of about 100,000 sq. meters at a cost of $180.5m. The shopping center, 2km from the old city, and 3km from the central bus station, is due to be completed in 2012, and what makes this entirely different from all the other malls, apparently, is that it’s going to be the first green shopping center in the country. This means recycling rainwater, solar panels, and a few bike lanes.

What it also means is that the citizens of Beersheva and the environs will have yet another mall to shop at. How many stores can one town possibly need?

Maybe this is what happens to desert towns. Maybe in a boiling, often inhospitable climate, shopping is the only resort. But it seems to me, and please correct me if I’m wrong since I don’t live in Beersheva, that rather than create yet another out of town shopping area, this money might be best served by actually turning the still run down but potentially interesting center into a place where people might actually like to just hang out.

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