Tel Aviv shines as a ‘foodie destination’

The Eat Tel Aviv festival draws in tens of thousands.

By RACHEL MYERSON
Updated: JUNE 10, 2016 18:24
The Eat Tel Aviv festival (photo credit: CHARLIE YAAKOV)
The Eat Tel Aviv festival
(photo credit: CHARLIE YAAKOV)
There’s no doubt about it – Tel Aviv has become a foodie destination.
The basics of Israeli cuisine have long been integrated into Western culture, with middle- class families around the globe keeping a container of hummus in their fridge, and the majority of hippie/healthy food restaurants featuring falafel as a staple. The world is hungry for more, and the past five years have seen chefs such as Yotam Ottolenghi and Mike Solomonov championing a far more intricate replication of Israeli cooking abroad, intertwining the abundance of beautiful, fresh produce and traditional dishes to form modern Israeli cuisine.
While this formula works overseas, chefs in Israel face the challenges of creating something novel, of reworking traditional dishes so that they are better than those your grandmother made and encouraging the use of new ingredients while maintaining a signature cooking style. There is really only one place to address these challenges: Tel Aviv, where cafes and restaurants bustle even during office hours, where residents are willing to eat late into the night if it ensures them a spot in the trendiest eateries, where food is a constant topic of conversation.
It is only fitting that such a rising culinary location should boast its own food festival, and puzzling that the one it once had – Ta’am Ha’ir (Taste of the City), which reigned from 2006 to 2012 – took a four-year hiatus. The municipality came to a spontaneous decision that they would, in only two months, organize Eat Tel Aviv, an “improved” version of Ta’am Ha’ir.
They moved the festival from Hayarkon Park to the seafront, which seemed “a lot more Tel Avivi,” and welcomed tens of thousands of people to the seaside Charles Clore Park at the end of May. Ofra Ganor of the iconic seafood restaurant Manta Ray was appointed culinary adviser, securing many of Tel Aviv’s top chefs and eateries to participate in the festival.
Eat Tel Aviv was an overwhelming success, and the organizers have since claimed they are willing to “bet a lot of money that it will take place again next year.”
The secret to such a victory was, seemingly, the wide appeal of the food places present. Arranged into two main clusters, stalls were divided between popular places for the masses, including sweet treats like Tamara frozen yogurt and Cookiez, reading like an outdoor, slightly less expensive Sarona Market, and restaurants for foodies, such as Manta Ray, Peruvian/ Japanese Jaffa eatery Lima Nippo, and various- meat-stuffed-into- pita stands headed by one of Tel Aviv’s most established chefs, Haim Cohen.
Stalls offered an average of three dishes, priced at NIS 25 to NIS 35. Although lines were long, they moved quickly as hordes of people took their food to eat on the grass or by the sea to watch the crashing waves.
For those who wanted to avoid the surging crowds, a finer dining option was made available by the elevated eatery Dinner in the Sky, a culinary experience engineered by the Tel Aviv Municipality and Diner’s Credit Card. Guests were lifted 50 meters by crane to a raised platform to enjoy a meal cooked for them by chef Nitzan Raz, while enjoying panoramic views of the sea, the city and the festival below.
On land, standout dishes included a crispy-skinned white fish fillet paired with cherry tomatoes and a cilantro aioli at Lima Nippo; spongy banh bao, Vietnamese steamed buns filled with tender pulled beef at the Vong stand; and a memorable Iraqi kebab at David Ve’Yossef. Also of note was a collaborative project between 929, an organization that aims to make the Bible more accessible, and kosher restaurant Liliyot, which served food featured or inspired by the Tanach, such as a Seven Species salad. Of course, a Tel Aviv food festival would not be complete without a vegan-friendly option, which was provided by the organic, vegetarian eatery Meshek Barzilay.
If one were to predict the future of the Tel Aviv food scene, it would be vegan-heavy. The municipality has been marketing the city as a vegan tourist destination throughout the past year, using the food trend as a niche to attract visitors. Certainly, Israel’s street food naturally lends itself to plantbased diets and clean eating; think falafel or hummus, the ever-present salads that begin many a meal, and the abundant olive trees that have resulted in the trend to cook with olive oil rather than butter.
Moreover, 5 percent of Tel Aviv residents are vegan, with 10% of the restaurants classified as vegan-friendly, meaning that one-quarter of their menus are suitable to such a diet. It is not surprising, therefore, that the next foodie event to look forward to is the upcoming Vegan Festival, which will take place on September 24 at Hayarkon Park. It is expected to attract more than 15,000 visitors.
While the numerous options at Eat Tel Aviv catered to every conceivable diet or preference of the massive crowd, with major chefs and eateries on hand, there was a disappointing lack of effort to scout out the hidden gems of the Tel Aviv food scene. The farmer’s market stalls were ideal opportunities to expose the wider Tel Aviv community to the highest caliber of spices available at the much undervalued Levinsky Market or to the Yemenite eateries that have seen Tel Aviv flourish by generations, hidden in the Yemenite quarter behind the Carmel Market. And the superb Florentin gem Mexcal could have flanked the mainstream Mexican restaurant Mexicana.
To refer to Tel Aviv as a foodie destination should mean that smaller – and perhaps less assured – businesses are encouraged to flaunt their vibrant flavors and superior quality produce to the masses.
The most important observation that arose from the Eat Tel Aviv festival, however, is the evident market for food trucks around the city. It seems fitting to end with a resounding “Nu?!”