Wearing an immaculate white chef’s coat, and with his trademark thin braid of hair, Moshe Basson reaches into the pocket of the coat, and extracts three sprigs of myrtle. He rubs them between his palms, breathes deeply and sighs.
“When I smell the hadas (the Hebrew for myrtle), I smell my father,” he says. “My father would bring them to the synagogue every week for Havdalah (the ceremony that ends Shabbat) and then he would bring them home to us.”
For Basson, the chef-owner of the Eucalyptus restaurant which has been a Jerusalem fixture for decades, cooking and serving food is all about preserving tradition, whether they are traditions that go back to the Bible or to his Iraqi heritage. An evening with Basson (and our recent evening went well past midnight) is like taking a world culinary and historical tour. He is a born storyteller, a characteristic that Netflix has also recognized and he will be the subject of a Netflix documentary scheduled to air in December.
Basson was born in Amara in southern Iraq near the tomb of the Prophet Ezra, where his family owned a tehina and sesame oil factory that even supplied the Iraqi army.
The first “pogrom” in Iraq against the Jews was in 1941, he said, and in 1950, the Iraqi government seized the family factory and they decided it was time to leave. They were only allowed to take one ring each. Moshe, at the time, was nine months old so his parents made a ring for him and tied it to him so he wouldn’t swallow it. His laissez passe (transit document) which he still has, along with the ring, used an Arabic curse. “Go and don’t return,” it said.
Most of the family gold was stuffed into jars and buried around the property, he says, and is probably there until this day.
Basson’s story is interrupted by a piping hot focaccia with several dips including a pepper spread, an aioli amba, and homemade tehina.
“Don’t eat a lot of bread,” he warns. “I don’t want you to be too full for the food.”
He then goes back 60 years in time to the early 1950s. The family moved to a “ma’abara” a transit camp in Talpiot. In those days he says, Derech Hebron, Derech Beit Lehem and Pierre Koenig Street was called The Brown Road because it was so muddy.
“The whole area was filled with small aluminum shacks,” he said. “Electricity and running water were only a dream. Yet we didn’t think of ourselves as refugees but as pioneers.”
His parents had an innovative spirit, he said, and built an oven between two shacks to start making tsinim (crispy bread similar to melba toast). His father began working at a bakery in Mea She’arim to learn the trade, and brought Moshe with him.
“I learned Yiddish with an Iraqi accent,” Basson says. “And when I didn’t want to work for my father because he wouldn’t pay me enough, I used to go to Mea She’arim and work in the bakery.”
His family opened a bakery on the border with Beit Safafa, an Arab village that is today part of Jerusalem. One of the ovens, he says, was set aside for Arab women who brought their food from home, and just baked it in the oven. He was entranced, he said, by Arab pastries like fatayer, an Arab pastry that can be stuffed with either meat or spinach and cheese.
“It would come out of the oven looking and smelling terrific and I couldn’t touch it because it wasn’t kosher,” he said. “I had such a desire for these foods.”
Fearing that he would eat non-kosher food, his father hired a Palestinian woman he called “Auntie Zeinab” to come and cook some of these Arab dishes in their home. It began Basson’s love affair with Arab food, and he became an active member in Chefs for Peace, a nonprofit organization that brings Israeli and Palestinian chefs together through food.
One of the dishes Basson is most famous for is maqluba, which means upside down. It’s a layered dish with chicken or meat, rice, and vegetables that is then turned upside down before being served. Basson makes a whole ceremony out of maqluba including banging on the pot and clapping, before dramatically taking off the top of the pot.
Maqluba, he said, is a perfect metaphor for peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
“At Chefs for Peace we always talk about what should be the perfect dish for peace,” he says. “Jokingly we say it should be a dove served on an olive branch, but I think it should be maqluba. Maqluba is made up of a lot of ingredients and yet each one keeps its identity. Yet together they make something amazing.”
Basson has three children with his ex-wife, and his youngest son Roni, 35, is taking over more of the daily cooking.
He tells people that he started working in the restaurant when he was a baby, peeling potatoes, and it’s true,” Basson says.
During the Second Intifada, Basson closed Eucalyptus for several years and opened a catering business with Roni. It was Roni who convinced him to reopen the restaurant in 2005.
It is terrific working with my son, and also a challenge,” he says. “Sometimes we fight over dishes he wants to introduce because I don’t want to go too far from Biblical cooking, but we find something in the middle.”
"And,” adds Basson proudly, “he’s better than me because he won the couscous competition in Italy twice and I won it only once. I was the first Israeli chef to win, but we are the only country that won three times, and we were up against couscous powerhouses like Morocco, Algeria and France.”
Basson makes his couscous from fine bulghur rather than semolina, which comes from white flour, and he is sure his couscous is the solet blulah b’shemen, the vegan offering in the Second Temple.
Basson planted a eucalyptus tree next to his family’s home in Talpiot in 1962, when he was just 12 years old. Twenty-five years later, he opened the first Eucalyptus restaurant there. The tree grew through the center of the small restaurant. I remember the first time I ate there in the late 1980s, with close foodie friends. When I walked in to the modest space with red and white checked oilcloth tablecloths, I was not impressed. But I still remember the homemade olives that Basson served, and how I couldn’t stop eating them.
Eucalyptus has changed locations several times since then, most recently landing in its current location at the top of the Artists Quarter just outside the walls of the Old City. The tables are scattered outside and the walls of the Old City are lit up at night. There are herbs planted in front of the restaurant often used in Basson’s unique dishes.
It’s hard to describe the food as each dish is so different, but the food is outstanding and different from anything I had eaten before. Some of the dishes, like the eggplant in tehina, look like a painting. This dish appears on many menus around Jerusalem, but this time the tehina is full of flavor and thicker than the usual, and the red pomegranate seeds sparkle in the light.
Another creative dish I am served is a macaron, which is usually a dessert, but this time it is served with liver made from goose confit. The soft macaron and the rich liver are a wonderful combination. Perhaps my favorite dish of the appetizers is the pastilla, a Moroccan inspired dish of a cigar stuffed with duck meat with a pumpkin and vanilla cream. The interplay of flavors and textures was fascinating.
Basson is inspired by the Bible, his family roots and by local herbs grown in Israel. One dish served is purslane, a leafy green vegetable that is sometime considered a weed and can take over a garden. He says it is high in omega 3 and other nutrients, and when Basson eventually sits down for his own dinner, it consists of a large plate of purslane.
Basson also forages in the hills around Jerusalem for many of his herbs and vegetables. He often serves hubeizeh, also known as Jews mallow, one of the foods that Jerusalemites ate during the war of Independence. One of his signature dishes, figs stuffed with chicken, also got him into trouble with the Chief Rabbinate, the Orthodox religious authorities, and pushed him to switch to Tzohar, an alternative kashrut several years ago.
He says he had made an agreement with the Rabbinate that he was allowed to use certain herbs and plants that he foraged, but they later reneged and took away his kashrut certificate.
He says that he originally became kosher in 1997 to honor his father’s memory, and found himself angry at the Rabbinate. He is happy with Tzohar, and especially with the female kashrut supervisor, who checks all the vegetables for bugs and anything else that would make them not kosher.
Speaking of bugs, while I enjoyed all of the dishes that Basson served, there was one I just couldn’t stomach. Moshe had invited me to bring a guest, and my foodie son was available. The first thing he asked when he arrived was, “Do you have locusts?”
Moshe lit up and said “of course.”
Locusts are, of course, one of the ten plagues that the Bible mentions as having convinced Pharaoh to let the Jews leave Egypt, and most religious authorities say there are some varieties that are kosher.
My son received a plate with three fried locusts on a bed of zucchini.
“You pick them up by their wings and just eat the whole thing,” Basson instructed my son.
“Come on Mom, when will you ever have this opportunity again?” my son asked me.
I’m a pretty adventurous eater, but this was too much for me.
I thought again of the maqluba, which I also ate, and how each ingredient retains its taste but creates a unique whole. With Eucalyptus, Basson offers creative food in a beautiful setting and lots of good stories.