A few days ago, I came back from a trip to Israel – huffing and puffing, cursing at the teenagers working at the Ben Gurion International Airport (nobody seemed to be beyond age 25). After the full three hour gauntlet of misery elbowing Russian tourist while trying to stand my ground in line as they tried to sneakily pass me from all sides, being shuffled from one security line to another, I was almost starting to forget the reason that I came. And that reason, why of course, was – FOOD!
Starved for a satisfying culinary experience where the food is not laden with salt, marinated in oil or brined in sugar, we hardly even noticed when we slipped out of sight seeing mode and left all the other parts of the country – ancient, holy, political– behind, for we had found our foodie promised land. Mark and I spent a week in thick tahini haze, wondering the streets of Tel Aviv, Jaffa, Jerusalem and Haifa trying to find the next restaurant or café to get our Middle Eastern-Mediterranean fix. Here, like nowhere before, our taste buds were seeing fireworks and spinning in psychedelic circles as we devoured the freshest, most intriguing and yet incredibly simple and clean flavors we had tasted to date.
Puaa eggplant salad
humus shop in Carmel Market
Carmel Market, Tel Aviv
cafe in Florentin
Old Man and the Sea
We left a little piece of ourselves in the pit of each lemon soaked olive we ate at the Jerusalem market. We shed a tear of joy with every bite of moist falafel we took at Falafel Haznekim in the Wadi Nisnas neighborhood in Haifa. We almost licked out the plates at Puaa, a retro styled restaurant in the middle of Jaffa’s flea market, where we drifted from a fluffy eggplant and tomato salad to a cloud of sumac infused rice and lentils with walnuts and a side of yogurt. We roared with satiated laughter at Shabbat while we ate the thick hummus and greedily liked our fingers of the remnants of juice from Jaffa oranges we got at the souq in Akko, an Arab town, in the north of the country. Like children we gorged ourselves on the sweet and moist rosewater cake we found on a late night stroll in a small baklava store in Haifa. And like addicts we came back again and again to the Old Man and the Sea on the Jaffa port. With its twenty small plates of salads, which qualify as appetizers, ranging from tahini drenched cauliflower to silken smooth hummus to lightly fermented beets and carrots drizzled with sesame oil and its unquestionably fresh seafood it satisfied our deepest culinary desires.
Akko souq pomegranate juice stand
Jerusalem market olive stand
halva at Jerusalem market
With all this eating we had little time for much of anything else. We did manage to squeeze in the Western Wall, Dead Sea, Masada and a few other places, but those were footnotes in our grand and unabashed Tour de Food. Mostly, in between meals and when we weren’t cleansing our pallets with a strong espresso at one of the numerous hipster establishments at the gentrified neighborhoods of Florentin or Neveh Tzedek, we were busy crossing off places that we had previously ranked as good food travel – Barcelona out the window, France – one big X across the entire country, New York- not even close. Because here unlike any other country or city which we had visited, we could go to any restaurant, café, market stall or street food vendor and leave completely satisfied, regretting only that our stomachs were too small.
When it was all said and eaten…we waddled out of the country a few pounds happier, even though I think I might have lost a few of them at the airport battling with security. But never mind, as the last drops of honey from the baklava I brought home are quickly melting, I’m very well reminded it was worth it.
en medias res 