Among the more veteran restaurants in Jerusalem is Café Rimon, which this year
celebrates its 60th anniversary. The original Café Rimon is situated on Luntz
Street, accessible on one side from Ben-Yehuda Street and on the other from
Jaffa Road. In recent years it also opened a second branch in the Alrov Mamilla
Mall. Both branches are almost always crowded, despite ever-growing nearby
competition.
Rimon on Luntz Street has an advantage over its rivals in
that it has two adjacent dining areas on the ground floor - one meat and one
dairy. It was originally a dairy restaurant but some years ago, when several
meat restaurants opened in the area, Rimon rose to the challenge and expanded
its operations to include meat, albeit in a distinctively separate
section.
Both sections attract a huge clientele, and one often has to
wait for a seat, especially on Fridays when Rimon offers one of the best deals
in town – an all-you-can-eat buffet brunch for NIS 49.
Having sampled the
Luntz Street experience and enjoyed it, I suggested to a friend a couple of
weeks later that we go there. She said she was on a diet and would have only
coffee but would keep me company while I ate. She got there before me
and, after inspecting the variety of choices with which she could pile her
plate, she changed her mind and decided to eat. There were lots of salads and
other healthy and nutritious offerings, but I noticed that having opted to eat,
my friend also abandoned her diet – especially when it came to
dessert.
There are some things that are standard on the buffet, such as
baby potatoes in cream sauce. Sometimes there are also mushrooms in cream sauce.
There are several kinds of rolls and breads, egg salad, tuna salad, bourekas,
cucumber and tomato salad, spiced cherry tomatoes, pickled herring, shakshuka,
macaroni, yellow cheese and several cream cheeses that are standard fare week
after week as is fruit salad, but there are numerous other options that change
from one week to the next. The meal comes with a soft drink in a tall glass. If
one wants coffee, there is an additional token charge.
By mid-morning on
a Friday, Rimon looks like the dining room of a religious matchmaking
service. Because of its high standard of kashrut, plus its bargain price,
it serves as a magnet for yeshiva boys and seminary girls. Many are native
English speakers, and the most common accent is American.
The Mamilla
branch also attracts a mainly religious clientele, but the ambience is
different. The Mamilla patrons wear more stylish and expensive-looking clothes,
and a fair percentage are tourists per se as distinct from students who have
come to Israel for a semester or a year’s study. There are slight differences in
the buffet and the service is neither as friendly nor as efficient as that on
Luntz, but the backdrop of David’s Village and the walls of the Old City perhaps
compensates for any deficiency. The soft drink is not included in the price, and
the orange juice that came in a smaller glass than that on Luntz was heavily
diluted, in sharp contrast to the undiluted version on Luntz, and cost NIS 9.
This was ludicrous in comparison to what one could eat for NIS 49. But the food
was excellent, and the buffet tables were quickly replenished. The sour note
came at noon when the staff quickly cleared the buffet food and removed the
tables. Anyone who had arrived five minutes earlier managed to get a few dregs,
which were certainly worth NIS 49, but the scrambling for it wasn’t worth the
effort.
Café Rimon
Kosher
Luntz Street and Mamilla Mall, Jerusalem
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