Destinations Editor Johanna Jainchill is visiting Tel Aviv, two months after a ceasefire ended a summer of conflict between Israel and Gaza, staying at Isrotel's year-old, 23-story Royal Beach Hotel, the first major new hotel to be built in Tel Aviv in 15 years. Her second dispatch follows. Click to read Johanna's first dispatch.
Much has been made of the proliferation of inventive and high-end restaurants here over the last decade, taking the local cuisine beyond hummus and shawarma.
I've enjoyed the new Israeli cuisine, but on this trip, I got excited again about the old Israeli cuisine -- and sought out some of the food that makes Israel unique. In the process, I discovered the treasures of the Levinksy Market.
Shuk Levinksy (Shuk is market in Hebrew) occupies about five blocks of Tel Aviv's Florentine neighborhood, centered on Levinksy Street and its offshoots, where small, open storefronts spill out heaps of spices, pastries, olives, cheese, fish and other delicacies.
Levinsky Market is a place to come hungry and sample. Pick up a Turkish boureka from one stall; olives and cheese from another; a Persian meat kebab from an Iranian storefront; spices from a Yemeni family. Each stop has delicious if not interesting samplings, and usually a story as well.
Like the Israel people, the purveyors here represent the many different cultures of Europe and the Middle East. The market was established in the 1920s by Greek and Turkish immigrants, and has since expanded to include Persians, Yemenites, Iraqis, Romanians and others. It has long existed as the place where Tel Aviv's restaurateurs know to go to flavor their dishes, but has mostly eluded tourists who usually opt for the more famous and much larger Shuk Carmel.
At Levinksy, many of the original purveyors are still peddling the same types of delicacies their forbears did before Israel was even a nation.
At the Yom Tov Deli at 43 Levinsky St., third-generation owners Yomi and Eitan Levi continue a family tradition established here in 1969, and since the 1930s in Izmir, Turkey. The deli is packed with cheese from all over Southern Europe (such as a Turkish cascaval), olive oil they press themselves, various eggplant salads and a delicious variety of olives from Syria, Turkey and Greece.
Opened in 1935, Konditoria Albert still claims to be Tel Aviv's only Greek bakery. Locals will tell you to visit on Thursdays and Fridays, the only two days you can get your hands on the owner's homemade marzipan. But the popular meringues are available every day.
While steeped in tradition, Levinsky is also ever-changing. A year ago Levinksy 41 opened at the same address, where the owner, "Benny Soda," serves organic fruit soda he concocts like a mixologist in a bar, using everything from fresh rosemary sprigs to dried spirulina to freshly scooped passion fruit pulp. The result is refreshing and energizing. He also makes a steam-pressed espresso on what he calls one of the few steam espresso makers in the region.
And I couldn't completely ignore the new Israeli cuisine, especially at a place as enticing as Hahalutizym 3, also named for its address just off Levinksy Street and one of very few locales to visit in this neighborhood after sundown.
The rustic restaurant is run by husband-and-wife team of chef Eytan Vanunu and Naama Sternlicht. The intimate space serves up unique, fresh dishes inspired by the many parts of the world the couple has lived in before returning to Israel, while also featuring stalwarts of Jewish tradition. The results include dishes like honey pork-stuffed Challah bread.
The couple cures its own beef for its pastrami sandwich, collects sour grape juice from a winery in the North of Israel for its verjus sauce served with calamari, and Vanunu's father cures the olives in the south of Israel.
"If there's pasta on the menu, it's fresh pasta. If there's cured lemon, we cured it," Sternlicht said.