Cooking up a storm: the open-plan kitchen at Machneyuda, in West Jerusalem
The funny thing about Israel is that you can’t find Jewish food anywhere. At least not Jewish food as I knew it: matzo ball soup, chopped liver, knish, pastrami on rye, blintzes, potato pancakes with apple sauce. This turns out to be American Jewish deli food, an inauthentic ethnic hybrid like spaghetti and meatballs (not to be found on the Italian peninsular) or chicken tikka masala (unknown on the subcontinent).
Instead, as I found on moving to Jerusalem, there is everything else. The Jewish market of West Jerusalem lies in the heart of Mahane Yehuda, a neighbourhood of alleys and balconies, squares and courtyards built by Zionist families in the late 19th century. There you can find 20 different kinds of soft white curd cheese next to tubs of marinating herring, violently pink cactus fruit and slender young asparagus, toothachingly sweet halva, pickled garlic and beetroot, mashed aubergine mezze, harissa, maple syrup, gloopy mayonnaisey potato-and-pea Russian salad, poppy-seed Danish pastries and French croissants. You can tell Israel is a nation of immigrants by the multitude of breads on sale: small puffed Lebanese-style pitta, Scandinavian toasts, fire-blistered Iraqi lavash, crusty sourdough loaves, dense black bread for Russians, sweet soft plaits of challah for the Sabbath and oval loops of white sesame bread known as Jerusalem bagels.
Ashkenazi Jews, from Europe, brought with them smoked fish and heavy one-pot goulashy stews; Sephardic Jews, from the Middle East and north Africa, cumin and tomato-sauced dishes. Although the two cuisines have rubbed up against each other for years, for the last few decades Israeli food has been not much more than borrowed Levantine food: chopped fresh salads zingy with mint and lemon, falafel and mixed grill. Hummus is the mortar; almost everyone agrees the Arabs make the best lemony smooth concoctions (often served with a little parsley stirred in, a great local addition). Fine dining was, for years, a bland reiteration of international cuisine: pasta, steak, tiramisu. Saul Bellow wrote in his 1976 book To Jerusalem and Back: “Institutional food in Israel can be got down if you shut your eyes and think of other things.”
Plenty of Israelis, like Brits, grew up in the 1970s and 1980s on a diet of frozen pizza, macaroni and takeaway kebab. Yet Israel’s warm climate results in abundant produce, filling British supermarkets with creamy avocados, strawberries in midwinter and juicy citrus. Now a new generation of Israelis has started to fuse local ingredients with the idea of a simple Mediterranean diet and spice mixtures gleaned from places as diverse as Morocco and Persia.
Among them is Asaf Granit, one of three chefs at Jerusalem’s hottest restaurant Machneyuda (named after the neighbourhood). “For me as a half-German half-Polish kid who grew up in a house where my family didn’t really cook, there should have been no reason for me to be exposed to those flavours,” Granit told me. But all sorts of ingredients have ended up in the Israeli melting pot. Asaf recalls his grandmother, the only Ashkenazi in a neighbourhood of Moroccans, “cooking gefilte fish and couscous at the same time.”
Uri Navon, another of Machneyuda’s triumvirate, has Kurdish roots. His parents both worked long hours and he would often cook simple dinners, like rice and meatballs, for his siblings. Yossi Elad, the third of the chefs, grew up with an old-fashioned Austro-Hungarian kitchen: “meat and potatoes and a lot of flour, a lot of fat.” His father survived the Holocaust and ended up cooking in a refugee camp in Bratislava for a year. Yossi told me that “the generation that came after the war slowly adapted to the local food. What we are trying to do now is to make a fusion.” The three opened their restaurant in 2009 and it is now booked out weeks in advance.
I walked into Machneyuda for the first time at mid-afternoon, at the end of the lunch shift. The music was booming like a disco and the chefs in the open-plan kitchen were dancing a little shimmy to celebrate the end of service. I sat at a counter and was brought a glass of the house aperitif, arak and grapefruit juice. It was tangy, aniseedy and delicious. I drank it thinking: why has no one thought of this before?
People are coming from the more chic city of Tel Aviv to eat here. The tables are mismatched, the walls are covered in multicoloured tiles and there are boxes of fruit and vegetables everywhere, as if the market next door had overflowed. The atmosphere is kinetic. You can feel something happening, in the swing and energy of the chefs at their gas fires, mixing ingredients in a new and exciting alchemy.
Our first course was a trio of raw fish presented on a blue nylon chopping block: tuna sashimi resting in a cup of pickled onion leavened with a fine mirepoix of green apple and a tangle of cucumber julienne; tuna tataki on slices of kiwi; and slices of fresh yellowtail topped with pinenuts and coriander and radish. The next course was a glass mason jar filled with polenta, topped with black sludgy mushrooms and crisp asparagus with truffle and parmesan shavings. Before serving it, Asaf cracked a raw egg yolk on top and heated it with a blowtorch. (This is the restaurant’s signature dish; Uri told me that “we can’t take it off the menu, people come in here and ask especially for it.”)
Next, Asaf unrolled a sheet of butcher paper in front of us and smeared multicoloured stripes of harissa, pesto, pickled lemon, tapenade and buffalo yoghurt across it. On top he laid fried fillets of dorade, a sauté of green beans, chickpeas, roast tomato and garlic and scribbled over everything with a drizzle of tahini. Every mouthful was different, sharp, salty, now sour, then suddenly spicy, then cooled with the buffalo yoghurt. It was an extraordinary dish; it could have been a mess but it wasn’t. It was Jackson Pollock on a plate, each flavour was distinct, unexpected and juxtaposed; a metaphor for Israel itself.
What else did we eat? Soft braised sweet tiny calamari served with two sauces, one tahini and yoghurt and one a dark grey velvet rich umami that was strangely delicious but that I couldn’t for the life of me identify. It turned out to be blue cheese and aubergine. We ate a molten chipped beef stew, rich with red wine and spices. It was served on a hybrid bread pastry I had never seen before: a sesame millefeuille brioche mini bagel. For dessert we had honeyed semolina cake, a Levantine standard with dollops of yoghurt and tahini ice cream.
On Tuesdays the chefs have an open stove night at their tapas bar across the street. Other chefs in the city show up and it turns into a kind of culinary jamming session. The night I went, the chef of a new and fancy hotel was cooking. The flavours were all over the map: glass noodles with cucumber, mint, chilli, pine nuts, plum wine, soy, fish sauce and star fruit; roasted sardines with olives and Israeli caviar and mayonnaise; and a kind of Kurdish salad of swiss chard and chickpeas and yoghurt that supported a yellowtail ceviche.
I arrived late and the line chef, Ringo, was pouring glasses of arak for other local chefs whose restaurants had closed for the night. Uri gave me a cigarette and dodged several groupies clustered at the entrance. In the year and a half they had been open, he said they’d cooked 500 different dishes at Machneyuda. “The Jerusalem vibe is still a bit wild, a bit kicking,” he told me, tired but happy. “It’s an explosive combination of people and one of the craziest places, even in peacetime.”
The funny thing about Israel is that you can’t find Jewish food anywhere. At least not Jewish food as I knew it: matzo ball soup, chopped liver, knish, pastrami on rye, blintzes, potato pancakes with apple sauce. This turns out to be American Jewish deli food, an inauthentic ethnic hybrid like spaghetti and meatballs (not to be found on the Italian peninsular) or chicken tikka masala (unknown on the subcontinent).
Instead, as I found on moving to Jerusalem, there is everything else. The Jewish market of West Jerusalem lies in the heart of Mahane Yehuda, a neighbourhood of alleys and balconies, squares and courtyards built by Zionist families in the late 19th century. There you can find 20 different kinds of soft white curd cheese next to tubs of marinating herring, violently pink cactus fruit and slender young asparagus, toothachingly sweet halva, pickled garlic and beetroot, mashed aubergine mezze, harissa, maple syrup, gloopy mayonnaisey potato-and-pea Russian salad, poppy-seed Danish pastries and French croissants. You can tell Israel is a nation of immigrants by the multitude of breads on sale: small puffed Lebanese-style pitta, Scandinavian toasts, fire-blistered Iraqi lavash, crusty sourdough loaves, dense black bread for Russians, sweet soft plaits of challah for the Sabbath and oval loops of white sesame bread known as Jerusalem bagels.
Ashkenazi Jews, from Europe, brought with them smoked fish and heavy one-pot goulashy stews; Sephardic Jews, from the Middle East and north Africa, cumin and tomato-sauced dishes. Although the two cuisines have rubbed up against each other for years, for the last few decades Israeli food has been not much more than borrowed Levantine food: chopped fresh salads zingy with mint and lemon, falafel and mixed grill. Hummus is the mortar; almost everyone agrees the Arabs make the best lemony smooth concoctions (often served with a little parsley stirred in, a great local addition). Fine dining was, for years, a bland reiteration of international cuisine: pasta, steak, tiramisu. Saul Bellow wrote in his 1976 book To Jerusalem and Back: “Institutional food in Israel can be got down if you shut your eyes and think of other things.”
Plenty of Israelis, like Brits, grew up in the 1970s and 1980s on a diet of frozen pizza, macaroni and takeaway kebab. Yet Israel’s warm climate results in abundant produce, filling British supermarkets with creamy avocados, strawberries in midwinter and juicy citrus. Now a new generation of Israelis has started to fuse local ingredients with the idea of a simple Mediterranean diet and spice mixtures gleaned from places as diverse as Morocco and Persia.
Among them is Asaf Granit, one of three chefs at Jerusalem’s hottest restaurant Machneyuda (named after the neighbourhood). “For me as a half-German half-Polish kid who grew up in a house where my family didn’t really cook, there should have been no reason for me to be exposed to those flavours,” Granit told me. But all sorts of ingredients have ended up in the Israeli melting pot. Asaf recalls his grandmother, the only Ashkenazi in a neighbourhood of Moroccans, “cooking gefilte fish and couscous at the same time.”
Uri Navon, another of Machneyuda’s triumvirate, has Kurdish roots. His parents both worked long hours and he would often cook simple dinners, like rice and meatballs, for his siblings. Yossi Elad, the third of the chefs, grew up with an old-fashioned Austro-Hungarian kitchen: “meat and potatoes and a lot of flour, a lot of fat.” His father survived the Holocaust and ended up cooking in a refugee camp in Bratislava for a year. Yossi told me that “the generation that came after the war slowly adapted to the local food. What we are trying to do now is to make a fusion.” The three opened their restaurant in 2009 and it is now booked out weeks in advance.
I walked into Machneyuda for the first time at mid-afternoon, at the end of the lunch shift. The music was booming like a disco and the chefs in the open-plan kitchen were dancing a little shimmy to celebrate the end of service. I sat at a counter and was brought a glass of the house aperitif, arak and grapefruit juice. It was tangy, aniseedy and delicious. I drank it thinking: why has no one thought of this before?
People are coming from the more chic city of Tel Aviv to eat here. The tables are mismatched, the walls are covered in multicoloured tiles and there are boxes of fruit and vegetables everywhere, as if the market next door had overflowed. The atmosphere is kinetic. You can feel something happening, in the swing and energy of the chefs at their gas fires, mixing ingredients in a new and exciting alchemy.
Our first course was a trio of raw fish presented on a blue nylon chopping block: tuna sashimi resting in a cup of pickled onion leavened with a fine mirepoix of green apple and a tangle of cucumber julienne; tuna tataki on slices of kiwi; and slices of fresh yellowtail topped with pinenuts and coriander and radish. The next course was a glass mason jar filled with polenta, topped with black sludgy mushrooms and crisp asparagus with truffle and parmesan shavings. Before serving it, Asaf cracked a raw egg yolk on top and heated it with a blowtorch. (This is the restaurant’s signature dish; Uri told me that “we can’t take it off the menu, people come in here and ask especially for it.”)
Next, Asaf unrolled a sheet of butcher paper in front of us and smeared multicoloured stripes of harissa, pesto, pickled lemon, tapenade and buffalo yoghurt across it. On top he laid fried fillets of dorade, a sauté of green beans, chickpeas, roast tomato and garlic and scribbled over everything with a drizzle of tahini. Every mouthful was different, sharp, salty, now sour, then suddenly spicy, then cooled with the buffalo yoghurt. It was an extraordinary dish; it could have been a mess but it wasn’t. It was Jackson Pollock on a plate, each flavour was distinct, unexpected and juxtaposed; a metaphor for Israel itself.
What else did we eat? Soft braised sweet tiny calamari served with two sauces, one tahini and yoghurt and one a dark grey velvet rich umami that was strangely delicious but that I couldn’t for the life of me identify. It turned out to be blue cheese and aubergine. We ate a molten chipped beef stew, rich with red wine and spices. It was served on a hybrid bread pastry I had never seen before: a sesame millefeuille brioche mini bagel. For dessert we had honeyed semolina cake, a Levantine standard with dollops of yoghurt and tahini ice cream.
On Tuesdays the chefs have an open stove night at their tapas bar across the street. Other chefs in the city show up and it turns into a kind of culinary jamming session. The night I went, the chef of a new and fancy hotel was cooking. The flavours were all over the map: glass noodles with cucumber, mint, chilli, pine nuts, plum wine, soy, fish sauce and star fruit; roasted sardines with olives and Israeli caviar and mayonnaise; and a kind of Kurdish salad of swiss chard and chickpeas and yoghurt that supported a yellowtail ceviche.
I arrived late and the line chef, Ringo, was pouring glasses of arak for other local chefs whose restaurants had closed for the night. Uri gave me a cigarette and dodged several groupies clustered at the entrance. In the year and a half they had been open, he said they’d cooked 500 different dishes at Machneyuda. “The Jerusalem vibe is still a bit wild, a bit kicking,” he told me, tired but happy. “It’s an explosive combination of people and one of the craziest places, even in peacetime.”
