Bagel Café. (photo credit:PR)
With Bagel Café on Emek Refaim in Jerusalem succeeding beyond their wildest dreams, owners Tomer and Shimrit Tuti decided to expand their business and open a branch in Modi’in. The new Bagel Café is situated in the Moriah Center, a sprawling mall in a sprawling city.
The setting couldn’t be more different, but the high quality of the food served is the same. Bagels, which we immigrants somehow take for granted, seem to be considered quite exotic by native Israelis who flock to the small airy café to taste what they may consider sophisticated foreign food.
We visited the restaurant recently, venturing out of our Sharon comfort zone to the place that thousands now call home. As soon as we sat down, two fruit shakes appeared on the table – yogurt-based with hints of fruits like mango and passiflora.
They tasted great and felt healthy.
The bagels duly arrived, all seven kinds, as well as eight different dips and salads. The bagel varieties were natural, sesame, poppy seed, garlic, onion, salt and low-calorie whole wheat.
The salads and dips were all wonderfully fresh and tasty. They included chopped hard-boiled egg and spring onion; lemony avocado; smoked trout; creamed tuna; cream cheese with dill; smoked salmon; cheese; and cream cheese with olives. While they were all very good, the smoked trout was outstanding.
While this was quite enough food to satisfy the hungriest diner, the owners insisted that we taste the antipasti – grilled fresh vegetables which included sweet potatoes, eggplant, red pepper and purple onion, lightly dressed with vinaigrette.
And just to make sure we were aware of other savory possibilities, we were also required to taste a mushroom quiche that was so good, we polished off the whole thing.
The accompanying cappuccino was hot, strong and flavorful. As always, I was amazed at how even a decaf tastes so good and looks so authentic these days.
Insisting that we have a dessert with the coffee, our waitress brought us a divine tricolor cake, which she said was sugar-free (NIS 26).
Consisting of three layers – white, milk and dark chocolate – it tasted very rich, although it was more like a mousse than a cake.
Bagel Café also does events catering and offers home delivery.
Breakfasts are a feature of the restaurant, with prices varying from NIS 39 to NIS 52.
“We do aim to attract the Anglo community in Modi’in,” our hosts told us. “They certainly know their bagels.”
The writer was a guest of the restaurant.
Caesarea’s Helena restaurant. (photo credit:PR)
The gourmet restaurant Helena, in the ancient port of Caesarea, has a lot to recommend it: attractive decor in a historic setting; impeccable service; breathtaking views over the Mediterranean, especially at sunset. And, of course, the food, prepared by chef Amos Sion, who trained in a three-star Michelin restaurant and presides over Helena in partnership with renowned restaurateur Uri Jeremias of the famed Uri Buri restaurant in Acre.
Now there is yet another reason to pay the restaurant a visit. Not content to rest on its laurels, Helena recently introduced a new degustation menu, meant to be shared by two. The sixcourse tasting menu, which varies seasonally to take advantage of the freshest ingredients, is offered for NIS 380.
The creativity that permeates the menu begins with the full bar’s specialty cocktails. Our knowledgeable waiter recommended the Green Gin (NIS 44): Tanqueray gin and soda flavored with a medley of aromatic herbs, including sage, mint and a large sprig of rosemary as a garnish. It was a bracing and refreshing cocktail, almost like drinking a salad.
The actual meal began with warm focaccia, straight from Helena’s taboon. The fresh, doughy masterpiece, drizzled with olive oil and a sprinkling of herbs, was accompanied by a dip of olive oil and balsamic vinegar.
Four of the five non-dessert course featured two products from the sea: crab and drum fish. First was blue crab carpaccio, with fried shrimp. This bisque, topped with a thin layer of frothed milk and served in an espresso cup, packed a lot of seafood flavor for such a delicate broth and was gone all too quickly. The lone piece of crispy fried shrimp that came with each cup was the perfect cracker stand-in for this unusual soup.
Next was drum fish cured with beet and arak, on a salad of green herbs, almonds and seasonal fruit – grapes, on the evening we were there – all resting on smears of parsley oil and smoked eggplant cream. The freshness of fish shone through the exotic curing process, while the dish as a whole added up to a wonderful interplay of flavors and textures The pasta course consisted of crab ravioli with crushed tomato, olive oil, hyssop, white cheese and pine nuts.
The al dente pasta could have used more of the delicious filling of the crab meat with green herbs; but once again, the combination of herbed seafood, salty cheese and crunchy pine nuts was inspired.
The final fish course was described in English as a “cauldron of drum fillet in porcini cream sauce with mushrooms and rizzo.” This was one of a number of curious translations, as the dish resembled more of a casserole, and the “rizzo” turned out to be rice pasta.
Regardless, this was the second superb dish starring drum fish – this time, moist fillet in a rich sauce under a huge leaf of grilled kale, whose mild bitterness was a great foil for the richness of the sauce, while its brilliant color added luster to the presentation.
The penultimate course was puff pastry with veal sweetbreads and grilled portobello mushrooms. A thick demi-glace sauce and runny egg yolk in the center of the flat, crusty phyllo pastry enhanced the tender sweetbreads and meaty mushrooms without overwhelming them.
The tasting menu recommends only one wine for pairing with its six courses – an Italian full-bodied red (NIS 45) – but the sommelier recommended a particularly fruity Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand as the most suitable choice for a warm summer evening.
Dessert was apple crumble a la mode. The proportion of chunks of piping hot sweet fruit, which had been stewed in aged balsamic, to buttery crumble was ideal, while a too-small scoop of melting premium vanilla ice cream rounded out this eminently satisfying dessert. The delicious crumble went nicely with a cup of café-quality cappuccino.
Tip: One must take a parking ticket in order to access the ancient harbor parking lot. Helena will validate so you are not charged, but you must ask for it; and since even the restaurant cannot be sure of the exact hours when the parking is supposedly free, it is advisable to insist on the validation.
Edna Halup spent much of her working life in education, starting as a kindergarten teacher and ending with a spell in Africa, where she volunteered for three months and set up a children’s enrichment center in Kenya.
Just over a year ago, she fulfilled a life-long dream and opened her own restaurant, Edna’s Café, on the grounds of the Protea Village retirement home.
“I have always loved to cook, and I love people,” says Halup, who was born somewhere in the middle of a family of 11 children.
”It seemed a winning combination for opening my own restaurant.”
The large glass-walled eatery was filled with diners, including families with children, when we visited there recently to taste the food.
We began our meal with a selection of vegetable starters.
The grilled artichokes were warm and tender, full of flavor and accompanied by a rich labane sauce with the addition of goat’s cheese (NIS 36). Halup explained that they were special artichokes which she brings from Italy and are so soft and young that the whole vegetable is edible, even the choke.
Another starter was little fried potato latkes, or pancakes, made from grated sweet potatoes rather than the more usual white potato.
They were piping hot, crispy and came with a piquant tzatziki on the side (NIS 32).
Some pan-seared fresh mushrooms in garlic and thyme with goat cheese made yet another very tasty hors d’oeuvre (NIS 39). The mushrooms were chewy and full of flavor.
Last in the appetizer department, we had arancini – cheese-filled risotto balls fried in breadcrumbs on a rose sauce (NIS 42). The dish looked beautiful, but we felt that the filling got somewhat lost inside the large quantity of rice. Garlic confit, sweet and pungent, saved the day.
Having very much enjoyed the starters, we got down to the serious business of the main course. My companion chose the fillet of fresh salmon on potato puree (NIS 69). It was a large piece of fish, very crispy underneath yet not overdone. The buttery puree was presented like a bird’s nest with grilled mushrooms nestling on top – a feast for the eyes and the palate.
My choice was spinach quiche (NIS 45), a light-as-air piece of pastry topped with a heavenly mix of spinach, cream and cheese.
The individual side salads were a mix of lettuce, cherry tomatoes and carrot julienne in a very good sweet vinaigrette.
By this time we felt extremely over-nourished, but Halup insisted that we try her cheesecake to go with the postprandial coffee. This was a huge chunk of cake – a light sponge base topped with whipped cream cheese and more fresh cream on the top. She told us it was 5% cream cheese, and it certainly wasn’t overly sweet, so we were able to share a piece and enjoy it without too much guilt.
The hot strong coffee, served in a brightly colored cup and saucer, was excellent, even the decaffeinated one.
Protea Village and Edna’s Café are a long way from Africa, but for Edna Halup and her many faithful customers, it’s definitely the place to be.
The Croque Madame at Roladin is well worth a try.
Croque Madame (illustrative). (photo credit:PR)
Foodies have naturally adventurous palates and are willing to try any edibles they haven’t tasted before. On the other side of the table are people who are afraid to taste anything new, particularly if it has a foreign name.
They hesitate until they see it on someone else’s plate and then, after tasting a tiny morsel at the urging of the companion who ordered it, may decide that it’s not so bad after all. It may even come close to being delicious, though finicky eaters might be reluctant to admit this.
The current influx of French immigrants has been followed by the opening of French coffee shops and restaurants, most of them kosher, and most of them in and around Netanya, although there are plenty in other cities and towns as well.
Regular Israeli restaurants are also introducing French dishes to their menus. At dairy restaurants, the most popular item is Croque Madame. The authentic Croque Madame cannot be served in a kosher eatery because the real thing is made with ham. At one of the Roladin branches on Hillel Street in Jerusalem, they’ve substituted smoked salmon for the ham, but otherwise it comes as close as it can get to the genuine French recipe.
As I don’t mix meat and milk and certainly don’t eat ham, I can only guess, based on recipes that I’ve read, that this is as close a substitute as a kosher eatery can serve, other than imitation meat, which is either vegan or vegetarian.
Many years ago in Jerusalem there was a burger bar that served cheeseburgers in which the burger was made from a vegetarian meat substitute that tasted very much like meat, and there were long queues lined up to sample what looked and presumably tasted like forbidden food – but wasn’t. There were many haredim in those queues, and business was so good that it’s truly a wonder that the enterprise didn’t last. Around the same time, there were hotel restaurants promoting kosher “shrimp” and “bacon,” but that too was a short-lived fad.
Back to the Croque Madame.
The first time I ordered it was at the Haba café restaurant at the entrance to the Mahaneh Yehuda market. The eggs were poached on top of a brioche sandwich that contained very creamy white cheese. It was quite tasty but not sufficiently filling.
The second time was at the Grand Café in Jerusalem’s Baka neighborhood, where the eggs were also poached, there was a mix of white and yellow cheese, and there was some spinach. Because my mother, a professional chef, always put a lot of garlic in any spinach and egg dish, I find almost all spinach recipes in Israel to be too bland for my palate – but the brioche was excellent.
The next time around, it was Café Paris in Rehavia, which was more or less on a par with the Grand Café, except that the eggs were fried, not poached.
And then there was Roladin.
What I particularly like about Roladin is that they serve toasted bread, not toasted bagel. Moreover, the bread comes out of a very large loaf pan, which means that a slice actually covers the plate. The toasted sandwich was filled with a blend of melted cheeses and onions and was topped with two fried eggs. Yum! Definitely worth the price of NIS 56. It was so satisfying that I couldn’t eat the accompanying salad, though I did taste it because it looked exactly the same as the one I’d been served in Café Paris the night before. It also tasted the same, which gives one food for thought.
Of all the Croque Madames, the one at Roladin was definitely the best.
Mr. and Mrs. Lee takes Asian cuisine to a high level.
Located in the heart of North Tel Aviv, in the G Tzameret boutique mall, Mr. and Mrs. Lee is definitely a cut above your typical Asian restaurant.
It is run by chef Shaul Ben Aderet of the Blue Rooster (next door on the same floor). Patrons are greeted by a welcoming ambience, modern decor and a spacious dining room, including an outdoor terrace with a long bar.
Menus were handed to us, glasses of water were filled, and we started going through the options in an attempt to narrow down our choices. Deciding on what to order was really difficult. The menu was huge, and everything looked appetizing. As always, I made sure to over-order to ensure that I could try as many items as possible in one sitting.
While waiting for our dinner, we started off with some interesting and cocktails. I particularly enjoyed the Sanche, a blend of tequila, mango and yuzu, which was served along with a small bottle of lemon juice infused with a large red chili pepper.
We began our meal with the steamed lamb buns (NIS 54) with fried shallots and Korean vinaigrette.
The buns were light and fluffy, while the lamb was nicely grilled, partially fatty and tender.
Next up was the crispy chicken spring roll (NIS 49) with mint, cucumber, kaffir lime and Thai chili sauce. The rice paper was not thick (better for frying) nor too thin (breaks apart too easily) but just the right consistency to hold everything together. The dipping sauce was exceptional, perfectly balancing savory and sweet.
The sushi pizza (NIS 56), the restaurant’s signature dish, gets points for being fun. The crust was made of deep-fried rice and was topped with salmon, avocado, mushrooms and cherry tomatoes. I enjoyed the pairing of textures, but the overall taste of the dish fell a bit short. In the end, we preferred the sushi rolls. The rainbow roll was tasty and very pretty to look at.
After a bit of a breather, we were served the Thai chicken curry (NIS 74). The curry was delectable and fragrant, infusing the chicken and vegetables with that deep earthy flavor that I love in a masterful curry. The texture was not too watery nor too thick, just right.
The dish definitely had a kick but was not overpowering.
Next up was the homemade noodles (NIS 82), which consisted of stir-fried egg noodles with beef fillet cuts, vegetables, sweet soy and Thai chili. As I savored each bite, I marveled at the texture of the noodles and the flavor of the sauce. The beef was thinly sliced and nicely charred.
Last, we tried the crispy chicken (NIS 89) in soy-honey and ginger.
The chicken was very crisp on the outside but moist and delicious on the inside.
When I didn’t think that I could take another bite, they brought out dessert. We somehow managed to polish off the frozen creme brulee. Absolutely great.
Overall, Mr. and Mrs. Lee is great place to sit, relax and enjoy good food and good company.
Built on the ruins of a Byzantine chapel, this stylish boutique hotel is a 2-minute walk from Jaffa Flea Market, 4 minutes' walk from the nearest beach and 5 km from the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.
Sophisticated rooms with chic tile bathrooms come with free Wi-Fi, flat-screen TVs, minifridges, and tea and coffeemaking facilities. Many rooms include balconies, some with sea views.
A complimentary breakfast buffet and evening cocktails are served in a funky, industrial-chic lounge and dining area. Bike rentals are available.
Jaffa’s Market House Hotel. (photo credit:PR)
The upscale Atlas boutique hotel chain boasts one property in Jaffa, the Market House Hotel, on the fringe of the Flea Market. The expertly refurbished building was built on the ruins of a Byzantine chapel, which can be viewed through the lobby’s glass floor. Twice a day, for breakfast and a light dinner, part of the lobby is transformed into a dining room, which from 7 a.m. to noon is accessible to anyone who wants to partake of the hotel’s morning buffet.
What was impressive about the breakfast buffet was not its size, since at first glance it looked quite small, but the amount of food that could end up on your plate in an endless procession from the limited display area to your table. And this all-you-caneat feast is priced at NIS 80 per person.
It doesn’t take long to scope out the entire buffet, but it is definitely worthwhile investing a minute or two surveying it all before digging in. For example, we only discovered the hot food buffet – featuring flaky cheese and spinach burekas – after filling our plates as a result of making a first pass at two groaning sideboards.
The first thing that caught our eye on the buffet were the breads, thanks to French baguettes standing tall in their container. They marked the spot for an array of fresh, crusty breads that included a rustic round loaf, one studded with black olives, and a basket of ciabatta rolls, including multigrain seeded rolls. According to the hotel manager, the breads come from the supply bakery Lahma, which delivers the breads 90 percent frozen, so they can be warmed up and taste like justbaked even on Shabbat morning, despite kashrut restrictions.
Now entering its third year, Asian Deli offers dishes from Thai, Chinese, Vietnamese and Japanese cuisines, in a decor accented by Oriental esthetics, from the stylish ceramic plates to the substantial chopsticks, nicely scented towelettes and even the packaging of the flavored green tea sachets.
The English food menu is not updated as frequently as the Hebrew one, so it is missing the lone reference to the house cocktail and still mentions duck, which is no longer available. But it is generally reliable, with symbols indicating which dishes are vegetarian/vegan.
A popular appetizer is the pop shrimps (NIS 49) – fried popcorn shrimp atop a pile of shredded lettuce, served with two dipping sauces. The tiny shrimp were breaded and fried to crispy perfection. After trying each sauce, I ended up combining the two, thus discovering the level of complex spiciness I liked best.
One example of Asian street food gaining popularity in Israel is bao (NIS 33-45) – small sandwiches made with steamed bread. At Asian Deli, what the menu calls “buns” are two dainty sandwiches served on a bamboo skewer; and there is a nice choice of fillings. We tried the fish tempura, which was heavy on the mayo – although I didn’t mind, as it was a pleasant Japanese version. Still, the light and airy buns stole the show. It is likely something that kids would enjoy if the restaurant’s children’s meals do not appeal.
There was one Ramen dish on the menu, starring chicken as the featured protein (NIS 53). The rich broth was replete with thick noodles, fresh mushrooms and chicken breast strips that were moist and flavorful. A veritable meal in a bowl.
The same can be said for the Tom Yam soup (NIS 69), which was a feast for the eyes as well as the palate. The practically overflowing bowl of the pungent Thai classic was studded with seafood – mussels, shrimp and calamari – as well as cherry tomatoes, mushrooms and bean sprouts.
Accompanied by a copious serving of steamed white rice, this was a dish whose pleasant heat continued to suffuse through the body after each spoonful.
Another good option starring the same trio was the seafood curry (NIS 69), an equally generous dish in a red coconut cream sauce that boasted just the right amount of spice.
One of Asian Deli’s beef dishes was the Pad Kapao (NIS 59) – ground beef and vegetables in a mild sweet and spicy sauce, topped with fried egg.
The sauce and yolk seeped into the meat and rice to make an eminently satisfying main course.
It can be a difficult chore to finish all the food here, but one can take leftovers home or order some takeaway.
I discovered that allowing the flavors of the Tom Yam and Pad Kapao to meld further for an additional 24 hours led to another fine dinner the following day.
It is worth saving room for at least one dessert. The creme brûlée (NIS 35), with hints of lemongrass and ginger, was a refreshing bit of sweetness, while the “bun special” (NIS 42) was exactly that: two vanilla ice cream sandwiches fashioned out of toasted Asian buns, covered in blueberry topping and crunchy strips of toasted coconut.
Asian Deli offers a variety of business lunches (until 4 p.m.), ranging from NIS 49 to NIS 89. Given these reasonable prices, this is the kind of place you can try a couple of times until you've found the dishes you want to make your regular choices.
