Foreign flavors

Neve Sha’anan is paradise for adventurers who can pretend to travel abroad without leaving Tel Aviv

By DANIELLA CHESLOW
Shakshukan restaurant521 (photo credit: DANIELLA CHESLOW)
Shakshukan restaurant521
(photo credit: DANIELLA CHESLOW)
It’s a Sunday afternoon, and Linda Tamir’s regulars are filing into her Filipino restaurant on the third floor of Tel Aviv’s Central Bus Station. The women come into the kitchen, open the pots and tell Tamir whether they want Adobo pork stew or fish soup. Then they settle down at tables and chat together in a mix of Tagalog and Hebrew about their bosses, their nails, and their boyfriends and husbands. They have all been caregivers in Israel for years.
Tamir moved to Israel 20 years ago after she met an Israeli man in the Philippines.
They later divorced, but she still has Israeli citizenship, and her modest eatery has become a second home for many fellow Filipino women in Israel.
The ingredients are all Israeli. The fish soup, for example, is made with salmon, green beans, onions and eggplants. But Tamir keeps big chunks of salmon in the soup, including the head and the marble-sized eyes. Once the stew is ready, she mixes in a hefty amount of tamarind powder, which gives it the signature Filipino sour flavor. And after her customers eat, they take turns belting out American classics on the karaoke machine, beloved in Manila and in Tel Aviv.
“Most of my clients are from the Filipino community,” Tamir says. “And most of them are not living here as a family, just by themselves. So instead of wasting time cooking, there is already food here, and they come here to eat.”
Migrant workers have been an essential part of the local economy since 1987, when they replaced Palestinian builders, cooks and domestic workers who lost their permits to work in Israel following the first intifada.
Today, they number about 180,000, according to Sigal Rozen, spokeswoman of the Hotline for Migrant Workers. Just under half have valid permits. Migrant workers gravitate to Tel Aviv’s Central Bus Station, the natural choice for people who often need to travel to work sites across the country. There have long been groceries catering to them: walls of noodles, sacks of rice, and dozens of brands of soy sauce. But in the last few years, options are also growing for hot meals from home, either sold in restaurants or hawked off tables on weekends.
Tamir, as an Israeli citizen, has a fully legal restaurant, certified by the city and the Health Ministry. Steps from her door, other Filipinas descend on the bus station on weekends to sell grilled pork, fried noodles, crispy pig skin, and stews served out of large metal pots, all set up on tables outside Asian grocers, cell phone stores and money transferring storefronts.
Mina, who prefers to give only her first name, works a small table stacked with bags of boiled peanuts, boxes of barbecued meat and Ube, a custard made of purple yams. “The food where I work is all chicken, chicken, chicken,” says Mina, 51, who has worked for eight years as a caregiver. “At least here every weekend we eat our own food.”
Two girls approach her asking for rice.
Another is looking for cake made from the Cassava plant. Most dishes cost 10 shekels ($2.75).
Jeffrey, who also prefers to use only his first name, looks over the goods. He says the bus station used to be more crowded, back when there was a Filipino disco and restaurant.
“Now, most of my friends emigrated,” he says.
“Here, they only let us stay for five years. My friends want to go to Canada and England. I stay here because I have a son, and he is used to life in Israel.”
Tamir, the restaurant owner, calls the inside of the bus station Little Manila. The title isn’t great for business, according to Miki Ziv, the general manager of the bus station. He says the bus station has a bad image because most of its clientele are foreigners or poorer Israelis.
He says he has made some inquiries with the city about health concerns regarding the food being sold off tables on weekends, but little has happened.
If the station is Little Manila, outside, Eritrean Ghebrehiwot Meles, 32, says the surrounding streets remind him of Asmara, the capital of his homeland. He sells Eritrean dry goods like rice and spices, along with imported white cotton dresses and shawls for the increasing population of women. Eritrean migrants began arriving in Israel eight years ago. They said they were running from mandatory lifelong military service at home.
Their arrival coincided with the landing of thousands of Sudanese who were fleeing genocide Although the n umbers h ave f allen o ff now that Israel has built a fence along the Egyptian border, as many as 60,000 migrants walked across Israel’s porous southern boundary after trekking through the Sinai Desert. Israel allowed them to stay, but unlike many Western governments, Jerusalem has been slow to process their refugee requests, and only about 140 migrants received refugee status, giving them the right to work and open tax files. For some, it is easier to open a business, such as a restaurant, than look for undocumented work.
Consultant Anat Kliger, who advises migrants on opening businesses in Israel through a Tel Aviv University legal aid clinic, says that without refugee papers, African asylum seekers cannot legally open businesses – even though their community needs them.
“They need kindergartens or babysitters for their children, because there’s no solution until the child is three years old,” Kliger says. “And they want to have places to hang out, like pubs and coffee shops.”
So despite their murky status, Eritreans have opened more than a dozen shoeboxsized eateries on and around Neve Sha’anan, a pedestrian boulevard just north of the Central Bus Station. Midway through the boulevard on a mid-April Friday, two Eritrean women fry spongy flatbread called injera on metal stoves in the tiny back kitchen of a restaurant.
They lay the thin, wide injera on a steel platter and ladle lentil stew, called shiro, and meat stews on top. A young Eritrean man in a purple T-shirt ferries the trays to an all- Eritrean clientele, sitting at tables with green and white polka-dotted covers.
Injera is both the plate and the fork, as eaters tear off bits of pancake, grab a spoonful of shiro and eat it together. The thick, earthy orange stew offers an excellent complement to the lemony flavor of the giant pancake. A plate of vegetarian shiro costs 20 shekels ($5.50); some thin men split a serving between them and wash it down with a Coke.
The owner refuses to talk to reporters; getting caught by police can mean hefty fines and the confiscation of hard-earned equipment.
Police cracked down on Eritrean businesses in early May, confiscating restaurant equipment and grocery inventory in about 10 businesses on Neve Sha’anan street. Owners at four other Eritrean restaurants refuse to answer questions as well.
Proof of the worth of a refugee ID lies a mile north, in the Shakshukan restaurant steps from the entrance to Tel Aviv’s main vegetable market. Sudanese Seifallah Bush, who has the coveted refugee status, mashes Darfur-style hummus by hand. Bush arrived from Sudan in 2005. In Darfur, he was the family cook, heading the food production at village-wide events like weddings, funerals and holidays.
In Israel, he has worked as a cook in hotels, upscale restaurants and cafés. Friends of his opened a Darfuri hummus restaurant in the neighborhood. When their restaurant closed, Shakshukan’s owner, Adi Livay, offered Bush a place making hummus as a partner in the eatery.
“He was looking for work, and I wanted to make some sort of change in my restaurant,” Livay says. The hummus Bush makes has a distinctive flavor because “we have a special spice mix. It’s slow-cooked, and we mash it in an old-style mortar and pestle. And the tehina we use is from Nazareth. It’s produced on a stone grinder and it’s very thick.”
Hummus at Shakshukan is served with fried cauliflower and eggplant, chopped fresh tomatoes, a fresh sliced egg, a dollop of thick tehina paste and a tiny Israeli flag on a toothpick.
“I brought the Darfuri flavors here,” Bush says. “In Darfur, we have a lot of hummus.
Ful Darfur (made with fava beans), we eat it there on Friday mornings. And we have here the Mara Mountain salad, it’s named for where I was born.”
Rozen, of the Hotline for Migrant Workers, says the unregulated migrant restaurants are evidence of temporary lives in Israel. Filipinos selling boxed barbecue off tables in the Central Bus Station have little capital investment.
Eritreans cooking in tiny shops likewise don’t buy much equipment.
But the restaurants may also be a sign of communities getting strong enough to support the local food cottage industries. Indian food, for example, has long been the province of upscale restaurants in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
But two months ago, the Taste of India spice and dry goods shop on Rosh Pina Street began selling samosas and chicken biryani out of large trays on weekends. The two owners have Israeli citizenship, but the clientele is mostly migrant Indian, Nepalese and Sri Lankan caregivers happy to see their own food made well and affordable.
The growing food offerings make Neve Sha’anan a paradise for adventurers who can pretend to travel abroad without leaving Tel Aviv. But for the neighborhood’s Israeli veterans, the area is overrun with strangers.
On weekends, the sidewalk is thick with bed sheets, covered in used shoes, old electronics, household appliances, books and stolen bicycles, all for sale. Con artists play shell games on cardboard boxes. All the migrants talk and shout to each other in languages that are strange to the Israeli ear.
And in the nearby Lewinsky Park, newly arrived Africans camp out on the slides and under the jungle gyms as a first stop before finding apartments. Rozen says this is because the government sends the Africans to Tel Aviv without help to find housing and without papers to work. As a result, about 25,000 Africans arrived in this neighborhood, living in uneasy coexistence with the original 7,500 residents.
City councilman Shlomo Maslawi grew up in this neighborhood and sits on a committee addressing the issue of migrant workers.
He says the informal economy attracts underworld activity. Maslawi has initiated several protests demanding the government deal with the migrants.
“Everything there has become chaos,” Maslawi says. “There’s no control. Police don’t come, the other authorities don’t come and the Health Ministry doesn’t come… [The migrants] don’t pay taxes. And of course this comes at the expense of local residents.”
Despite the tension, food is becoming a platform for limited mixing of cultures.
At Taste of India, Carmichael Akor, whose wife works at the Nigerian Embassy, comes hunting for plantain chips. He says Indian food reminds him of what he ate in Nigeria.
And at Tamir’s restaurant, on an early April afternoon, Israeli Roni Maabari eats a fluffy pita bread and a tub of hilbeh, or Yemenite fenugreek dip. Maabari is married to a Filipina who taught him the language, Tagalog, and the national hobby, karaoke. Maabari grabs the karaoke microphone at Tamir’s restaurant and sings “Sometimes When We Touch,” the 1977 ballad by Dan Hill, in English, Hebrew and Tagalog.
“I started to sing because of my wife, it’s fun,” Maabari says.
According to Janna Gur, founder and editor of the food magazine, Al Hashulchan, Asian food has expanded rapidly in Israel, thanks to a local love affair with the flavors of Thailand and Japan. Once exotic vegetables like bok choy, Thai basil, sprouts and different gourds and melons are now grown in Israel by specialty farms. What cannot be grown is readily imported. Gur says when the first Chinese groceries opened in the central Carmel Market in the 1990s, “the fact that you could buy Asian noodles, nori seaweed for sushi, and so on meant that every foodie had these places on their list.”
Today, however, Asian goods are available in many specialty shops around Tel Aviv. And the Neve Sha’anan neighborhood remains a mystery for all but the most daring, she says, making a Chinatown-like appeal unlikely.
“Most of the foodie community is hardly aware of these restaurants,” she says. “Maybe for hardcore hipsters, certain places might become fashionable or trendy for a while, but not the whole area. It’s perceived as too sleazy.”
Back in her restaurant, Tamir says the everincreasing variety of Asian ingredients makes her life as a cook much easier. When she first arrived in Israel in 1992, soy sauce was hard to come by. Now the only thing she brings from home is Knorr’s tamarind powder and a few spices. The rest is on sale in the neighborhood.
“Even though I am not welcome in this country,” she says, “I feel at home.” 