Nini Hachi presents a reasonably priced dining experience

And perhaps Ben Yehuda will finally deign to wake up? With so much focus on Dizengoff and Ibn Gabirol – and in fact on Tel Aviv as a whole, still dug up beneath impossible dust – the city’s northwestern traffic axis has almost been forgotten. Long years of destruction, almost systematic, brought countless businesses along it to their knees, and distanced it from the discourse, from the residents, from itself. The blame, as usual, is partly on us.

Now, none of this is anywhere near over, but certain sections have returned to being, well, a street, and it seems to me they are now looking at themselves, shaking off their clothes, and not quite understanding what exactly happened here. The optimists are sure this is the next big thing. The pessimists are burying it in sorrow. The realists, as usual, sit down to eat lunch. At Nini Hachi, for example.

The kosher Asian restaurant at the end of the street has been practicing efficient and professional restaurateuring for more than a dozen years, without raising its voice or the volume, and without any need for flattery. It works, rewards, thinks, continues the next day exactly from the point it stopped.

Over the years, it also added Nini Chu in Petah Tikva to the family, and wisely expanded its work spaces with an adjacent delivery and take-away hub, and with ambitious and intriguing future plans. Slightly under the radar – self-promotion was never on the table here, until now – it established itself as a popular option for tasty casual dining, highlighting a design that speaks street, but still invests – in it, and in you.

Now, they want you at lunch as well. And how they want you.

Nini Hachi’s table-opening deal is brilliant as a format, brilliant as an idea, and brilliant in execution as well. It was born from all the table openings its owners experienced (and we experienced, in fact) at restaurants where this is their doctrine, and from the thoughts those tables stirred. If they can do it at skewer joints and fish places, for example, why can’t we too, actually?

The result is a set of half a dozen small plates that arrives at the table for NIS 39. Not per diner, and not with fine print, but like a dish, which can be multiplied according to the number of diners, and also replenished as a refill for a few additional individual shekels. It is cheap, very cheap, but not tacky. In the gap between those two concepts, we have learned the hard way over the years, your angle of smile is usually determined.

There is a bao bun and crispy rice sheets with “Asian chimichurri” and chives, Japanese pickles, grilled shiitake mushrooms, tofu in a spicy Sichuan marinade, seaweed salad and a cucumber salad with pomelo and cashews. It will not close the corner for you as a full meal, and it does not pretend to do so, but it certainly wonderfully gathers all sorts of hopping forks and skipping chopsticks that together will naturally and smoothly steer you toward a main course. Real fun, fun of colors and flavors, and exactly what you want when you sit down. In every sitting down, and it turns out here as well.

Nini’s lunch continues proportionally to medium-sized center-of-table dishes and very medium prices, and to a collection of handmade dumplings priced – thank you very much for this – per unit. I have not seen many like these, if at all, and I love this transparency and the ability it gives you to divide and multiply as you intended and with whatever company you arrived. Fried or steamed spring roll, excellent gyoza and namas, fried wonton and beef-filled soup dumpling, NIS 11–18, and go wild.

Six more serious dishes (NIS 48–64, time-machine prices) will complete the experience quite properly. A little street and a little fire, a little trash and a little fine – a sashimi and rice fan with vegetables, slices of sirloin with spicy Thai sauce and cubes of fried fish, grilled chicken thigh in a delicate red curry sauce and stir-fried beef strips with crispy matters of kaffir lime, asparagus and beans. Together, all together and most delicious together. We came to open up, didn’t we?

This story is pleasantly and smilingly broadcast to those who enter, and the tables fill nicely and efficiently, and then are allowed to contain at a suitable pace. This is Israeli Asia, or Asian Israel, and by no means “the izakaya from that alley in Nagoya you remember from your last trip to Japan.” It did not intend to be, and that is good for it.

Another small plate and another dish, another couple who moved up their evening date and another family that can suddenly allow itself a little more, without accounting for a little less. At these hours, the sun paints the tables orange and illuminated. Who knows, perhaps by the end of the meal some of those beautiful rays will slowly spill outward as well, and Ben Yehuda will finally wake up.