Israel
Cook-up
nation
A gourmet revolution has put Israel
on the global culinary map, but is there
even such a thing as Israeli cuisine?
By Shula Kopf
ISRAELI CUISINE speaks a unique culi-
nary language, its vocabulary steeped in the
traditions of its diverse immigrant cultures.
Add a sprinkling of spices, fresh produce
grown under a Mediterranean sun and a
pinch of sass and you’ve got what some are
calling a world-class cuisine.
“It’s the perfect recipe for innovation,”
says Janna Gur, chief editor of Israel’s leading food and wine magazine, Al Hashulhan,
and author of The Book of New Israeli
Food. “The combination is unique. You’ll
find many dishes that coexist here. Couscous brought by North African immigrants
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feels at home, as do burekas brought by
Bulgarian and Turkish Jews. The cultures
that adapted best are those from Mediterranean, Balkan and North African countries.
But we are different from other Mediterranean cultures in that we lack an obligation
to tradition. It allows us immense freedom
and creativity. It’s like a child with no
boundaries.”
Celebrity chef Meir Adoni, who like many
top Israeli chefs studied abroad in prestigious culinary institutions and returned to
pioneer a distinctly Israeli kitchen, is of the
same mind.
THE JERUSALEM REPORT DECEMBER 12, 2016
“Italian chefs have a tradition of hundreds
of years with rules on how to cook Italian
food. For me, I have no rules, no limits. I
don’t cook inside a box, I’m creating the
box and I’m really proud of what we are
doing here. We use combinations of flavors
and textures you can find only in Israeli
cuisine. Israeli food is not shy. It’s emotional. We have chutzpah in the food, more
sourness, more spices that open up in your
mouth,” Adoni tells The Jerusalem Report.
A good example is a dish called Middle
Eastern Pleasure on the menu of his signature high-end Tel Aviv restaurant Catit:
AVIV EYLON / COURTESY MEIR ADONI
Smoked veal tongue in Bharat glaze, hummus pâtissière, peeled Hadas chickpeas, offal rillettes, garlic confit, Moroccan harissa,
pickled lemon aioli, Persian lemon dust and
sorrel leaves.”
“Europeans who come to Israel are astonished, amazed and surprised because they
don’t know about our heritage of food,”
says another of the pioneers of Israeli cuisine, chef Ezra Kedem, who founded the
high-end Arcadia restaurant in Jerusalem
in 1995 after studying abroad. “Let’s say
the essence of the taste is the famous Israeli chopped salad that when you finish it,
you take a piece of bread and dip it in the
liquid that is left. Israelis miss it when they
go abroad.”
Roger Sherman, a documentarian who
has won an Emmy, a Peabody and was
nominated for two Academy Awards was
skeptical when invited in 2010 by a friend,
revered Jewish food writer Joan Nathan, on
a culinary trip to Israel. He figured it would
be a short tour—falafel, hummus with a
sprinkling of desert sand.
“I was dragged kicking and screaming,”
he says in a telephone interview. “I couldn’t
believe what I saw. Israelis don’t know how
THE JERUSALEM REPORT DECEMBER 12, 2016
‘Israeli food is not shy, it’s emotional,’
says Chef Meir Adoni
good they have it. I came back to the US
and started telling people about the incredible boutique wines, amazing cheeses and
restaurants. People laughed at me when I
told them Israel has one of the most dynamic food cultures in the world. They didn’t
have a clue.”
That’s when he decided to return to Israel to film a documentary on the food
scene. The two-hour “In Search of Israeli
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Cuisine” had its Israeli premiere at the Haifa Film Festival in October. Released this
year, it has already been shown in 90 festivals worldwide and will be screened on
PBS next year. Sherman crisscrossed Israel
to more than 100 locations, visiting home
cooks, celebrity chefs, vintners, cheese artisans, farmers and street vendors.
“I would compare Israeli cuisine to the
best food in the world,” gushes Sherman. “I
would put Israeli cuisine against New York,
Paris and London. Israeli chefs no longer
feel they have to study in other countries.
Even Israel’s street food is among the best
I’ve ever had,” he says.” You have all these
chefs recreating, updating and spinning
their grandmother’s food in incredibly creative ways.”
I have no rules, no limits.
I don’t cook inside a
box, I’m creating the
box and I’m really proud
of what we are doing
Sherman is often asked if the locavore
concept, food grown locally, is important
in Israel.
“I tell them farm-to-table is standard practice in Israel. The whole country is accessible in a couple of hours,” he says.
Israeli chefs excel with vegetables, say
the experts. Local produce is improving all
the time with the introduction of heirloom
varieties.
“This is what makes Israeli cuisine so relevant for the world because everyone wants
to eat vegetables and we know how to cook
them so it’s not a punishment,” says Gur.
Anyone surfing the channels on Israeli
prime-time television might inevitably conclude that Israelis are obsessed with food
given the plethora of cooking and foodrelated programs starring celebrity chefs.
“We‘re a cooking nation,” says Gur. “We
are a very family-oriented society and when
you have Friday night dinner you cook it
from scratch. Food is important in Jewish
culture everywhere.”
Israel’s gourmet revolution began in the
1990s. Even as far back as 1994, a prescient
New York Times article about interest in Is36
raeli cuisine stated, “It’s as if some mystical
wind from Israel were rustling through the
collective unconscious of America’s chefs.”
Israel has gone from a gastronomic wasteland to what is becoming a world-class
foodie scene.
“A few things happened all at once,” says
Gur. “The Golan winery started a bit earlier and then boutique cheese farms and the
artisanal bread revolution started by Erez
Komarovsky.
“Our chefs went abroad to study and applied their knowledge to local ingredients.
The standard of living was rising and travel became a norm. But what makes it more
than just fine dining, what got us here to the
first baby steps of creating a new Israeli cuisine, is that these young chefs in the 1990s
started to explore local Palestinian food
and the food of their own immigrant Jewish culture. There is incredible wealth there
and they played around with it to mold it
into something suitable for contemporary
restaurant dining.”
The gourmet revolution began slowly.
Haim Cohen, at the time chef of the upscale French restaurant Keren that has since
closed its doors, “did something very bold
that took a lot of courage,” says Gur. “He
served lamb kebab for a lunch special in
Keren. At that time, there was a very clear
divide between Middle Eastern food, which
was popular and cheap, and fine restaurants, which at the time were French, Italian
or Chinese, but never Israeli. Haim started
with baby steps to include Israeli food in
high-class dining.”
It takes more than
20 years to create a
cuisine. It may be too
early to define Israeli
cuisine but there is
definitely food that
speaks Hebrew
Gur cites some problems in the local food
scene, among them lack of consistency,
restaurants opening and closing, and peripatetic chefs who move around.
THE JERUSALEM REPORT DECEMBER 12, 2016
MIRIAM ALSTER / FLASH 90
Israel
Adoni, who opened Catit in 2002, an Israeli culinary institution, to be followed by
three other Tel Aviv restaurants, announced
recently that he will close Catit and its sister restaurant, Mizlala, in December. He
will keep his two kosher restaurants in Tel
Aviv’s Carlton Hotel and will join a growing trend of Israeli chefs who try their luck
abroad. This fall, he spent time in New York
working out the menu for Nur, a casual brasserie-style restaurant he is planning to open
on East 20th Street in the Flatiron section of
New York City. His Facebook page shows
a photo of a dessert he is trying out: Medjool dates filled with smoked trout, natural
almond, thyme and Bharat, wrapped with a
mixture of doughnuts and Persian lemon.
Catit is closing for financial considerations ‒ the difficulty of running an exclusive restaurant with seven chefs in the
kitchen cooking for only 22 diners, the
restaurant’s maximum capacity.
Chef Assaf Granit’s Machneyuda
restaurant in Jerusalem; Granit’s London
restaurant The Palomar was named
the best in England in the 2015 Veuve
Clicquot GQ Food and Drink Awards
East Jerusalem born chef, Sami Tamimi, sold
nearly half a million copies in Britain and has
become a bestseller in Germany, Holland and
the US.
A London restaurant launched by Jerusalem chef Assaf Granit was named the best
restaurant in the country in the 2015 Veuve
Clicquot GQ Food and Drink Awards. The
Palomar was described as having “without
a doubt the most chutzpah of any food and
drink establishment operating in the country
right now.” Londoners appreciate the vibe
imported by Granit from his successful Jerusalem restaurant, Machneyuda, and savor
its signature dish, polenta with truffle oil
served in Kilner jars.
“The easy answer is people just don’t
have enough money for the high-end
restaurants,” says Gur. “There is a market for expensive restaurants but they are
struggling, so I don’t know. We don’t have
enough high-end restaurants. If you go
mid-range, casual, informal, then Tel-Aviv
is a world-class food destination and a fun
one at that.
“In an Israeli restaurant, you can’t be underdressed. Tourists love the fact that they
can wear flip flops and a T-shirt and have
a wonderful meal. You can have an amazing meal at two in the morning and the best
breakfast in the world at nine in the morning.
There will be more and more Israeli chefs
going abroad because Israeli cuisine is becoming popular and because it’s difficult to
run a restaurant here.”
Israeli chefs have staked out strategic
beachheads on several international gastronomic fronts in a trend that is gathering mo-
mentum. Last year, Shaya, an Israeli restaurant in New Orleans, the capital of Cajun,
was crowned the best new restaurant in the
United States in the food industry’s version
of the Oscars.
“Who would have thought – hummus in
New Orleans?” mused Chef Alon Shaya as
he accepted the award, probably perplexed
by the improbability of food borne by desert
winds finding its niche in a city born in a
swamp.
In last year’s James Beard Foundation
awards, another Israeli-American chef, Michael Solomonov, won the prize for best
new cookbook with “Zahav: A World of
Israeli Cooking,” based on recipes from his
award-winning Philadelphia restaurant of
the same name. He also opened a hummus
joint called Dizengoff that serves shakshuka
to denizens of the City of Brotherly Love.
London-based Israeli chef Yotam Ottolenghi’s cookbook, “Jerusalem,” co-authored with
THE JERUSALEM REPORT DECEMBER 12, 2016
You have all these
chefs recreating,
updating and spinning
their grandmother’s
food in incredibly
creative ways
Israeli celebrity chef Eyal Shani has taken his everything-in-a-gourmet pita chain,
Miznon, to Paris and Vienna, and is eyeing
New York.
Travel and food magazines have given Tel
Aviv accolades with Saveur Magazine voting the city “an outstanding Culinary Destination in 2014” and Condé Nast Traveler
ranking its Mesa restaurant as one of the top
80 restaurants in world.
So, is there such a thing as Israeli cuisine?”
Depends whom you ask.
Says Adoni, “I think, today, we can say
that there is Israeli cuisine. It took us more
than 70 years to be able to say that.”
Gur is more cautious.
“It takes more than 20 years to create a
cuisine. It may be too early to define Israeli cuisine but there is definitely food that
speaks Hebrew.”
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