From market to meal

Chef Tali Friedman found her calling by leading tours of Jerusalem’s famed Mahaneh Yehuda Market.

By AMY SPIRO
From market to meal (photo credit: AMY SPIRO)
From market to meal
(photo credit: AMY SPIRO)
After sampling burekas, muesli, a dozen types of cheese, halva, olives and tea, would you be hungry for a six-course dinner? Tali Friedman is counting on you saying yes.
The trained chef runs group tours of Jerusalem’s famed Mahaneh Yehuda market before bringing the participants to her kitchen studio – her atelier, which is French for workshop – to cook together a gourmet meal with fresh ingredients, all sourced from the market itself.
Friedman, 36, a native of Safed, has lived in Jerusalem for 25 years. A chef by training – at Hadassah Academic College in Jerusalem and later the LeNotre School in Paris – she worked for restaurants including Arcadia, the now-defunct Ocean and La Regence at the King David Hotel.
But “then I became a mother,” she says, “and I realized it was going to be very hard to be a mother and also work night shifts.”
So she switched to teaching cooking and baking at schools around the capital. But she quickly discovered her true calling.
“We reached a fish lesson [in the course], and I said, I’ve had enough, I can’t teach you any more in the classroom, let’s go to the market,” she recounts. “I took them and we stayed there for more than six hours, just me and my students going inside the stores talking with vendors, sharing all the knowledge I had of everything: spices, fish, meat.”
The day after that, she recalls, she realized she wanted to lead tours of the famed market as her job – “and that’s what I’ve been doing since.”
FRIEDMAN TAKES groups – offices, tourists, families and visiting delegations (she even escorted Martha Stewart once) – around the country’s largest market for tastings and tidbits along the narrow alleys. On a recent, sunny Wednesday morning, a group of coworkers followed Friedman from stand to stand, sampling some of the best the shuk has to offer.
From burekas to muesli with homemade granola, six types of halva, a dozen varieties of cheese and tastes of lychee and pomegranate tea, the group was fairly well satiated after the two-hour tour. But the day wasn’t even half over. Instead, they walked up to Friedman’s kitchen studio, overlooking the market, to start cooking.
There they divided into groups of two or three, each responsible for a different aspect of the six-course meal. Some filleted fish for a sea bream in Mediterranean sauce, others diced fakkous for a salad made from the Armenian cucumbers, while another group chopped apples for an apple-filled phyllo pastry with a coconut-vanilla cream. Thanks to everyone working together – with a little help from Friedman, her sous chef and her assistant – the meal was on the table in less than an hour.
When she started running her tours more than six years ago, she held about one a week and worked out of kitchens on loan from friends and colleagues. Since she found a place for her studio three years ago, she runs eight tours a week on average, in addition to hosting chef meals for events on her rooftop. She also wrote a book – along with fellow chef and cookbook author Elinoar Rabin – called Jerusalem: A Culinary Adventure, which was published in Hebrew and subsequently translated into English.
She has three children – whom she calls “my culinary monsters” – 11-year-old twin girls and a nine-year-old boy.
“They love to be in the market, love to come to my studio and cook,” she says. “If on Shabbat eve we don’t have ceviche on the table, they could kill me,” she jokes, referring to a marinated seafood dish. “I wish they would love french fries and hamburgers.”
Friedman herself also grew up loving food.
“My grandmother used to cook for everyone. I basically grew up in her kitchen,” she recalls. “I didn’t have toys, I was just playing in her garden. She used to grow everything.”
Though she remembers coming to Mahaneh Yehuda as a child, “I didn’t like this market. It was very loud and crowded.”
But today, she couldn’t imagine being anywhere else, and even serves on the committee of the market’s vendors. She looked into opening at the Carmel Market in Tel Aviv, but nothing compared to her beloved Jerusalem shuk.
“The vendors are just so welcoming,” she says. “They took me in like I have been here for ages.”


Related Tags
shuk