From Suq to Shuk

Pronto - a restaurant review

Two nights ago Bethany, Gabe, Carina and I met for a farewell dinner at Pronto.  The Italian restaurant has received critical acclaim in Israel but we found it somewhat lacking and overpriced for what we got.  The owner lived many years in Rome and desired to bring a taste of Italy back to Tel Aviv.  The wine list was quite impressive, which was organised by the regions of Italy.  We ordered two appetisers to share and each ordered a main course.  Bethany and Gabe proceeded to order two desserts which they were kind enough to let us taste.  Frankly, the desserts were the highlight of the meal.  Gabe lamented that the arancini (deep-fried risotto mozarella balls) were served with tomato sauce underneath rather than inside the balls, but alas, they were consumed before I was able to photograph them.

The second appetiser, the caprese salad, was delicious and true to its simple nature.  The texture of the mozzarella was nice and Israeli tomatoes are known for their intense flavour.  When working with quality ingredients, caprese is always delectable.

Carina asked for the fettucini primavera and requested that there be no mushrooms in it as she didn't want anything to heavy.  The waitress responded with a suggestion of the napolitana (their name for spaghetti with tomato sauce) and Carina politely refused.  While she had asked for something light, she did not ask for the simplest thing on the menu.  Carina opinion of the dish - she could have made it better herself.

Gabe and Bethany both ordered the lamb osso bucco over risotto.  Both enjoyed it although it was nothing spectacular.  I tried a bit of the meat and determined that it had only been braised for 2 hours and for that reason it was slightly dry and could have used another hour at least in the oven.  Unfortunately the picture came out a bit blurry.

I ordered the veal piccata with lemon sauce.  It was accompanied by "gnocchi alla romana" which had one of the worst textures I have ever experienced.  My carrot was undercooked (in fact I'm quite sure that both the carrot and broad bean were simply blanched).  The veal, which was actually beef, was dusted in flour then fried and covered in a lemon sauce.  Not only was the sauce like biting into one of the most sour lemons, it's interaction with the flour on the outside of the slices of beef turned it into a mush that was also quite unpleasant.  Paying 90 shekels for the dish made it even more unreasonable.

The chocolate truffles dusted in chocolate powder with confit lemon were quite tasty.  They were slightly too thick but the taste was good.  The confit lemon was excellent!  I could eat that every day.

The chocolate semi-freddo was positively the best thing we had all night.  The cold temperature was incredibly satisfying as was the light texture and well developed taste.  I did not have the pleasure of tasting the sauces but I am told that they were also excellent.  The interior of the semi-freddo was positively divine.

Without a doubt the best part of the night was the company.  Despite the lackluster nature of most of the food, the wine led to a convivial atmosphere and it was wonderful to dine with friends whom I see so rarely.  While I shall not be returning to Pronto any time soon, I do hope to see Bethany as much as I can for the rest of my life.    

Ikea in Rishon L'Tziyon - Swedish Meatballs For All!

Last week Lior and I made a day trip to Rishon L'Tziyon to visit their newly inaugurated Ikea.  Lior wanted to go to find a new closet.  I wanted to go to buy a new squeegee for my sink, but most importantly, for some Swedish Meatballs.  Taking pictures of the rest of Ikea would have been much like attempting make my own version of their catalogue.  Unsurprisingly, the Ikea in Rishon looks just like every other Ikea in the world.  What is exciting about Ikea, is that one can get great meatballs with excellent gravy and fries wherever the Swedish giant decides to grace the world with its presence.

On the menu were two Swedish favourites, the lovely "Baked Salmon" with roasted potatoes and vegetables, and ever infamous Swedish Meatballs.  Beyond these options were a number of Israeli favourites, namely a variety of salads and Schnitzel, with the kitsch and and somewhat odd addition of "Soup in a Bread-bowl".  The trick to this soup is that you must consume it before it leaks through the bread and begins to cover your plate with orange.  Knowing that this soup was designed for the Israeli clientele, it was probably made out of sweet potatoes.

I couldn't preoccupy myself with such things and chose rather to concentrate on that Ikea staple: meatballs.  Traditionally Scandinavian meatballs (for the Danes claim their own right to such a heritage), are made with pork.  In Israel, the Ikea cafeteria is kosher and set up into a meat section, serving lunch, and a dairy section, serving coffee and pastries.  Pork, as most know, is the antithesis of kosher and as such the Israeli variety of Ikea meatballs are made with a combination of chicken and beef.  To be truthful, they were not as succulent as the pork variety I tasted during many childhood visits to Ikea in Elisabeth, NJ, but they were nonetheless quite tasty.

The biggest disappointment was the lack of lingonberry "sauce", which is really a jam.  The meatballs came accompanied by their requisite brown meat gravy and fries, but the lingonberry jam that so prominently figured into the photographs was absent.  This caused Lior to lament that the meatballs were mediocre and that he would have more thoroughly enjoyed them with the lingonberry condiment.  Lingonberry jam was indeed for sale at the Swedish food product section of Ikea past the registers, but somehow never made it to the cafeteria.  All in all, I enjoyed my meatballs, and will be sure to consume them again whenever I visit our favourite Swedish furniture retailer.

       

Coffee Bar: A Restaurant Review

Sunday evening Lior and I had the pleasure of meeting up with Teresa, a friend of my parents for over 20 years already, and one of my favourite people in the world.  I met Teresa at Coffee Bar, an established Tel Aviv culinary experience for several decades, whose parent company owns a number of gastronomical hotspots throughout the city.  Teresa, her husband Dick, and I had eaten there during Teresa's last visit and so I chose the location having remembered her fondness for the place.  We met for drinks at the bar before Lior joined us, as did 4 of Teresa's colleagues who were also in town on business.

The company was excellent and the discussion vibrant.  The food was satisfying though several dishes were found to be somewhat lacking by my fellow diners.  We imbibed a fair amount of delicious wine that accompanied our meals.  The service was perhaps the most disappointing part of the evening, and one of our party was evenly rudely told to be quiet by the hostess, in a room full of loud Israelis who were anything but.  Not to cast a gloomy atmosphere on the evening, but my first experience eating at Coffee Bar had more high notes than this one past.  The 25 minute wait in between courses did not help.

The meal began with an antipasti plate of cold grilled vegetables, salami and cheese.  While I found all of them to be tasty, I found the grilled artichoke to be quite underdone.  Bread was served to the table but placed only at one end, with those at my side of the table never seeing any.

On my right sat Teresa and on my left sat Fede, Teresa's colleague from the Madrid office.  They had both ordered the salmon ceviche special.  The two proceeded to ask for lemons after having received the dish, for it apparently lacked ceviche's primary ingredient: acidity.  They described it instead as simply salmon crudo with some avocado and sprouts, and I have no doubt that the lemon poured a top at the last minute with a poor substitute for marinating the fish properly.

Umut had ordered the "Chevre Chaud", or warm goat cheese salad.  It was a round of bruléed goat cheese atop lettuce and spinach with some sort of vinaigrette.  She pronounced that it was much to her liking, delicious even, and voiced no complaints.  

Ronald, at the other end of the table, had ordered the appetizer that I myself had consumed at my last visit to Coffee Bar.  Thin slices of sirloin, under which was hidden a crispy onion ring, all topped with parsley and a raspberry sauce.  Frankly, I thoroughly enjoyed that appetizer and would have been happy to eat more of it as a main course.  Ron objected, however, that it left too much of greasy feeling in his mouth and that it was altogether far too sweet.  The onion ring had it's own sweetness which was amplified rather than contrasted by the the raspberry sauce.  I am tempted to order it again to further cement my own opinion.  I believe that it is a good dish if you like sweet and greasy (which I do).

Meanwhile I had ordered a first coarse that I would never have dreamed of eating as a child, or even a few years ago.  Little does Teresa realise, in fact, that she is the reason for me eating shrimp.  She had forgotten that I don't eat seafood for the most part, and at our first outing to Coffee Bar she had ordered another shrimp dish that was a special at the time.  She kindly place a few shrimp on my plate for me to taste and to not be rude I complied.  Much to my delight I found that I actually enjoyed these shrimp as their texture was not whatsoever rubbery like most of the shrimp I had eaten prior.  I have since enjoyed shrimp on a number of occasions and decided to order the shrimp and pea risotto.  It was delicious save perhaps a slightly heavy hand with the butter that did leave a greasy coating in my  mouth.  Nonetheless the it was excellently seasoned and the shrimp were perfectly cooked.

Despite having received my appetizer last I was the first to receive my main course.  I ordered the entrecôte which came with "remoulade" of potatoes.  Remoulade is a mayonnaise based sauce and I got fried potatoes.  The steak was over salted and the potatoes were boring, and I ordered some mayonnaise to accompany them.  Despite having been over salted, the steak was of an excellent quality, and perfectly cooked.  It was juicy and tender and I was disappointed to have been distracted by so much salt.

 

I hope my fellow diners will forgive me the transgression of having forgotten who ordered what, but I shall relay the reviews of the following dishes regardless.  Two types of drum fish were ordered, one grilled and one pan roasted.  While both were supposedly delicious, many diners were disheartened by the server's announcement that there "was a problem with the mashed potatoes", and would they be terribly upset to receive roasted potatoes instead?  All obliged somewhat unwillingly in the substitution.  The pan roasted fish was accompanied by asparagus and creamed spinach which was delicious.  The grilled fish found its partner to be the last minute roasted potatoes.

Remco, and Ronald's end of the table, had ordered what appears to me to be a grilled Chicken Caesar Salad.  Unfortunately I didn't manage to get a report on its qualities but it looked appetizing.

Fede and I had spent a good deal of time discussing our love of liver, and so it was with no difficulty that I recalled him to have ordered that dish.  He claimed that the liver was indeed excellently prepared, but the dish seriously suffered from the swapping of the mashed potatoes for the roasted ones.  I find that completely logical as the texture of liver goes exceedingly well with mashed potatoes, and the roasted potatoes looked about as lackluster as my fried ones.  Nevertheless the liver was excellently prepared and Fede's choice of wine for the table seemed to go well with most people's dishes.

Lastly, Ronald had goose confit.  Although advertised as duck confit on the menu in English, the Hebrew line directly above it said goose and I know from my own experience that only goose legs can be procured individually, whereas a duck must be bought whole in Israel.  Without consultation, Ronald had ordered the exact same two dishes that I had ordered several months prior at my first outing to Coffee Bar with Dick and Teresa.  The goose confit was served with marinated and roasted dried figs, some roasted potatoes and sautéed chard, or beet greens, I'm not sure which.  I recall having thoroughly enjoyed the dish and to my knowledge Ronald found it satisfactory at the least.

All in all the food was tasty, the company good, but I would not describe it as having been a "wow" experience.  The prices are not cheap, and the parent company of Coffee Bar has several restaurant of a better caliber throughout Tel Aviv.  Beyond the food however it was simply lovely to see Teresa, no matter how brief the visit.  It was also pleasure to speak with her international host of colleagues in multiple languages.  Thankfully for Coffee Bar, they little need my advertising to in business as they already have quite the reputation.  Lior insists that next time we go to Brasserie, Coffee Bar's sister-restaurant in the much more central area of Kikar Rabin.  Despite it all, I would not be upset to be invited to another dinner at Coffee Bar, and would be happy to further discover what else their menu has to offer.

Poco: A Pizza Bar Review

Last night I stared at my ingredients from the Shuk and came up with nothing.  I felt thoroughly uninspired.  Little did I know that inspiration would later come to me at 4 o'clock in the morning when I had still not fallen asleep because of an obsessive train of thought dealing with just that subject (but more on that tomorrow).  Nevertheless, I had to be nourished, and my staple nourishment purchased outside of a supermarket is undoubtedly pizza.  It was Friday night, Shabbat, and so my usual haunt, "HaPizza" on Bugrashov and Pinsker, was closed for they are a kosher establishment.  Lior had come over to my place with the promise of dinner that was broken due to my lack of inspiration.  He had mentioned a pizzeria a few days prior whose name was as of then unbeknownst to me.  "Puko", as he called at first, was not just a pizzeria but a Pizza Bar, perhaps more aptly described as "Pizzeria/Bar".  Apparently, some Israeli chef whose name he could not recall, had designed the pizzas especially for the new owner of the bar, one of whom is Keren Peles, a musical celebrity here in Israel.

I was quite skeptical.  Lior had explained that they served square pizzas, by the slice so to speak, and there was already one other place in Tel Aviv, Tony Vespa, that made such pizza and I was truly unimpressed by them.  Tony vespa charges 88 shekels/kilo for pizza that is far too much bread.  They make a focaccia in a large rectangular pan in the oven, and only after its ready do they then top it with sauce and cheese and return it to the oven.  The toppings there are somewhat lackluster, and I would always prefer to eat at HaPizza.

The look at poco was tremendously different from any other pizzeria in Tel Aviv, for adjacent is a bar.  One enters to the spectacle of myriad pizzas, all on long wooden planks with various toppings.  Despite the square nature of the pizza, it was not encased in any rectangular pans and the pizza is prepare first time around with the sauce on the dough at the very least, if not the cheese as well.  The pizza is thin, no matter what slice you buy, and the customer has the option of taking his pizza to go, or eating it at the bar where he or she may order drinks and have the pizza simply added to the night's tab.  It's an excellent business model, for while the pizza is not terribly inexpensive, the alcohol is reasonably priced and there exists a certain cyclical consumption of pizza and beer that fuel each other to those prone to said vices.

One of the delightful things that I discovered at Poco was their pepperoni pizza.  Many establishments have tried to produce an American style pepperoni pizza in Israel to little effect.  The style of Poco's pizza is clearly Neapolitan, and the "pepperoni" was in fact French cognac saucisson, which was delicious despite the fact that it did not resemble the overwhelming red substance with which we Americans are most familiar.  The pizza was simply delicious.  To do a proper test, I ordered a margherita/plain slice, as well as a pepperoni slice.  As I've stated in previous pontifications on pizza, the test of truly good pizza is always the margherita, for only it displays the perfect equilibrium, or lack thereof, of dough, sauce and cheese.  Contrary to HaPizza's claim to make Neapolitan pizza, the taste there resembles more pizzas that I had tasted in Northern Italy, ordered by the pie.  Poco's pizza was truly reminiscent of Italian street pizza, with some refinement even.

   

The falvours Poco's pizza delivers to your palate are distinctly Israeli.  While many of these ingredients may be considered mediterranean, the combination of eggplant, zucchini and orange bell peppers struck me as typical for this country, as did the sweet potatoes paired with leeks.  Canned tuna with green onions and cherry tomatoes - pretty Israeli.  Spinach with Halumi - pretty Israeli.  The multicolored bell peppers with kalamata olives might be somewhat Greek, but I dare to say that even their version of pepperoni struck me as nothing but Israeli.  

We took our pizza to the bar, where I had a pint of Stella with my two slices of pizza.  Both were delicious, as was Lior's slice of sweet potato and leek pizza that I got to try.  The decor of the bar is somewhat striking as well.  On the wall adjacent the pizzeria side, are baskets of fresh produce that I assume make there way across the wall onto pizza.  Above the bar, was a huge tree like sculpture that housed empty Cava bottles.  A Hebrew review I had read of Poco prior to going there had mentioned their excellent prices for Cava.  I stuck with beer.  At the end, two slices of pizza and a pint each came to 92 Shekels, or about 55 shekels each with tip.  While not cheap, you don't exactly have to break the bank to enjoy this lovely corner of Tel Aviv.

Poco is located on Herzl Street, between Rotschild and Ahad Ha'Am Streets.  I highly recommend it.

  

MezCal, a Restaurant Review

Last night I had the pleasure of eating at one of Tel Aviv's very few mexican restaurants.  The prices and food were excellent and the atmosphere was both quaint and well decorated with images that brought Mexico a bit closer to Tel Aviv.

MezCal was opened two years ago by Ziv, an Israeli who spent a lot of his childhood in Latin America.  His father worked at a number of Jewish schools in Venezuela and then Mexico.  They lived in Monterey, Mexico, a culinary hotspot.  There Ziv became enchanted with Mexican cuisine and even said to me that he "began to feel Mexican."  Ziv himself is a cook and developed all of the recipes on the menu himself.  He trains everyone working in his kitchen personally to ensure that the food is prepared to his standards of authenticity.

 Mezcal is located in a small space in the Florentine neighborhood of south Tel Aviv.  Much of the public space is devoted to the well stocked bar along which people also sit to eat their meals.  I arrived with four friends shortly after the restaurant's 7 o'clock opening.  The friend at whose behest we went to the restaurant invited us all to a Tequila shot to start off the evening.  The bartender recommended the Frida Kahlo Tequila Blanco, which went down very smoothly.  Unfortunately, the tequila was served with lemon rather than lime, but such is the nature of Israel's gastronomical reliance on seasonality.

 

We were given menus with the titles of the dishes in Spanish and explained in English and Hebrew.  Red dots on the side of dishes indicated the level of spiciness, and brown dots indicated vegetarian options.  My friends and I ordered a number of dishes and over all they were well received.  I ordered the one dish with the greatest number of red dots next to it, the Pollo con Mole, which is grilled chicken covered in chocolate chili sauce. The sauce came with hints of cinnamon, cloves, garlic, onion and tomato as well.  Although dishes come with flour tortillas, corn tortillas are also available and made on site.

Lindsay and Liat ordered the Tostadas, which were fried flour patties topped with avocado, refried beans, lettuce, red pepper, red onion and feta and are served with salsa.  The feta replaced the traditional Mexican Queso Blanco and they were supposedly not filling enough for dinner.  They were reportedly delicious, however.

Becky ordered the Cebiche de Camarón, or the Mexican Shrimp Cockatail if you will.  The shrimp was pared with avocado, generous amounts of cilantro, tomatoes, onions, lime juice and hot sauce and accompanied by tortilla chips.  These were also more appropriate as an appetizer. 

 

Lastly, Jordana ordered the vegetarian enchiladas which were filled with tofu, refried beans, roasted peppers, cilantro and feta and topped with white cheese and sour cream.  Unfortunately I was able to photograph them only after one was half consumed.  They supposedly went down very smoothly and were filling and delicious.

 

When asked why he decided to open MezCal in the Florentine neighborhood, which is not in the centre, he responded that the younger population of the neighborhood was more open to exotic choices, and that he lived in the neighborhood so it was also a matter of convenience.  He called the Florentine crowd "more alternative and less aggressive" than the competition in the centre demands.  In his words, "if a restaurant stays alive after its first year in Tel Aviv, you have a steady following and you'll be around for a while."  He is very happy with the move and proud of his restaurant as well he should be.

All of the food was scrumptious and a wonderful change from the usual Tel Aviv fare.  The prices were very affordable as my dinner came to less than $10 and I was most certainly full and satisfied (even if my mouth was on fire for a while afterward).  Our service was helpful, attentive and prompt.  I highly recommend this lovely restaurant/bar.

    

"Rak Basar"/"Just Meat" - a restaurant review

Today I got a surprise call from my friend Shira whom I had not seen in quite a while.  We made plans to have lunch and spent a good deal of time on the phone discussing options of where to eat.  Shira was driving around in her Ford Focus, so I decided to think outside of the limited area of Tel Aviv that I usually fequent.  My friend Assaf had recommended a place by his work on an number of occasions, but it is located quite far south in Tel Aviv, so today was the first time I thought making the trip.  The restaurant, "Rak Basar", or "Just Meat", has a 30% discount for lunch, making it much more affordable than dinner.

A few days ago I read a fellow Tel Aviv blogger's review of "Rak Basar", and she found the food underwhelming but that the service adequately compensated for what the food lacked.  You can read her review here:

http://irenesharonhodes.wordpress.com/2010/01/11/tel-aviv-loves-its-gimmicks/

When entering "Rak Basar", one passes through a black out curtain behind a heavy door and stumble upon what appears to be a cavern.  It has got vaulted ceilings, the whole place having been done in stone masonry, and the room is relatively dimly lit (certainly when entering from a sunny Tel Aviv day).  The flash on my camera makes this less apparent, but you get the idea.  As soon as we walked in we were greeted with complimentary wine to accompany lunch.

  

Customers then make their way to the meat counter where they can choose from a large variety of meats, the prices of which are indicated on a blackboard.The most striking options available were the ostrich filet, sweetbreads, and bbq spare ribs (which were also the cheapest item on the menu).  They had a relatively large cariety of cuts of meat, including Sirloin, Rib-eye (what Israelis call "Entrecôte"), Filet Mignon, T-Bone and a New York Strip.  The marbling on the steaks varied with their countries of origin.  The same friend who recommended the place to me recounted having seen cartons from the "Tiv-Ta'am" supermarket chain around back, fueling his suspicions that the quality of the meat was no better than available to consumers in the supermarket.

Shira and I ordered 4 ribs, which had clearly been braised first which upon being ordered, were slathered in bbq sauce, then wrapped in tin-foil and grilled and placed on the grill.  We also ordered two lamb kebabs and a 250g sirloin steak.  We split everything.

Salad were not included with steaks, and we ordered the "Herb Salad", composed of cilantro, mint, chives, arugula, dried fruit and nuts with and olive oil and lemon juice dressing.  The salad was frankly delicious, and I believe they had marinated in the dried fruit in the dressing prior to tossing it into the salad for it seemed to be slightly rehydrated.

 

The meat was accompanied by potatoes, although not very many.  They were, however, perfectly cooked.  The meat, that we ordered medium-rare, came back rare.  The kebab was positively delicious.  It was heavily spiced with onion, garlic, paprika, and chilies (and whatever other spices they had snuck past me), and were both well cooked and juicy.  Personally, I found the sirloin to be of average quality but Shira was so put off by it she didn't finish it.  The ribs were well cooked and provided flavours that I have not tasted since moving to Israel (namely a sauce so reliant on ketchup).  The meat came out on a gas grill that was so low that it did nothing to further cook my undercooked steak.

The bill came to 75 shekels each, or $20, which I justified to myself as the reward for not having eat the prior two days.  Sadly, even with the lunch discount, it was not worth it.  I would rather have spent 50 shekels on a much thicker Rib-eye from my butcher from the Golan Heights and prepared it myself.   There was no abundance of flavour, and the chimichuri that accompanied the meat was somehow bland.  All in all it was a bit kitsch for me, although the display cases of meat were a beautiful sight to behold.  Live and learn.  

Pizza

No, I didn't make this one myself.  Rather, this post will treat my adventures as a NYC ex-pat in search of my native staple.  I've now been living away from New York City for five and a half years, and never have I found pizza as good as the pizza with which I grew up.  When I was 11 years old, I went to Italy with my parents for the first time and ate margherita pizza almost everywhere we went.  I believe wholeheartedly that the test of a pizzeria's quality is in its plain, cheese, margherita pizza.  Toppings, for the most part, are a distraction from the potentially perfect equilibrium of dough, sauce and cheese.  To be fair, I have certainly indulged in many a slice of pepperoni in New York, and occasionally a slice of olive pizza.  Topping are an enhancement only when the pizza is good, otherwise, they are there simply to cloak the poor quality of the core ingredients.

Montreal for the most part has horrible pizza.  Many of their toppings go underneath the cheese, including the "pepperoni", which is really more like badly spiced pork salami.  The one thing that brings to many Montrealers to consume pizza with any frequency is that it is damn cheap!  There are many 99¢ options for the drunk wandering out of a club at 3 o'clock in the morning.  I consistently ate pizza from two different locations in Montreal.  Pizza 1+1, which was not very good pizza, but somehow they were the only ones in the city able to procure real pepperoni, and they managed to put it on top of the cheese.  Otherwise, for a proper margherita, I would order form the Italian restaurant Pino, a plain pie that while delicious was rather expensive.

Jerusalem, surprisingly, is home to the best New York impostor I have yet found across the Atlantic.  "Big Apple Pizza" has found some formula to reproduce a taste that I've only had prior in NY, despite the fact that their slices are about half the size, and the crust is slightly reminiscent of cardboard.  Otherwise, the pizza there tends to be awful.  For whatever reason, many Israeli establishments use the same dough for pita as they do for pizza.  Despite the fact that they are near homophones, I vehemently insist that no pizza dough ought to be like a pita.  The fact that they used pita dough produced the very strange result that the already cooked dough would sometimes split, like a pita.  I suppose if you don't like too much dough, then this offers your an opportunity to take off half of it, otherwise, it's just strange.

I expected to find good pizza in the south of France.  I was studying at culinary school in a place that was more or less half way between Italy and Spain.  Alas, the french have no appreciation for the extent to which Mozzarella is essential to good pizza!  I ate a few pizzas in France, always wondering why the taste was so strange, before I decided to ask the proprietors of several pizzerias what cheese they employed. "Ici on n'a que de l'emmental!" I would hear at most places.  Finally, I found a man with what I identified as a thick Italian accent.  In fact, he simply had a very thick southern French accent, which to the unaccustomed could easily be mistaken as Italian.  Nevertheless, this pseudo-Italian, had Mozzarella at his pizzeria!  But just my luck, the pizzeria closed 2 weeks after I discovered it in October, and would not open again until May when the tourists began to return.

Finally, I have come to Tel Aviv.  The day I arrived I began to search for all sorts of gastronomic fair.  It took me about a week to find all the Asian stores, a month to find a good butcher, and 6 to find the pizzeria that has taken my money several times a week ever since.  I tried all sorts of pizza, however, before finding succulence.  I'm a pizza addict, what can I do?  The first pizza that came highly recommended was a place called Tony Vespa.  Tony Vespa has several locations in Tel Aviv, and they make their pizza sort of in the style of the Italian "a taglio"--that is to say a large rectangular pie that of which a piece is cut to your preference, then priced according to weight.  They charge and absurd amount of money: 88 shekels a kilo!  That's over 20 dollars a kilo, for bloody pizza.  Further more, they don't make pizza properly.  The bake a large rectangular focaccia, that is dressed with sauce and cheese and returned to the oven only after the dough has fully become bread.  I might as well make pizza toast at home with cheese and bread I buy at the shuk and a sauce I can myself.

Secondly, there was "Agvania", which means "Tomato" in Hebrew.  Agvania has very tasty pizza, but it too is expensive.  The crust is impossibly thin, something achieved only with the aid of electric rolling machine through which they put each piece of dough twice.  The result, is that the exterior of the pie is simply a cracker by the time it leave the oven.  They have become quite popular in Tel Aviv, however, dude to their excellent sauce.  I find the plain simply not filling enough at Agvania.  It's a kosher establishment, which means no meat present, so I usually get a slice of tomato, garlic and basil.  It's like deconstructing the sauce and adding it at a topping.

Over the summer I frequented another pizzeria relatively often.  It was recommended to me by a friend and it was damn hard to find.  It's off of Nahalat Binyamin, which is a pedestrian street.  The pizzeria is accessed through a narrow corridor beyond a nondescript blue gate, whose existence I would never have noticed if not for the advice of my friend.  The place is called "Pijama" and is entirely by one man who owns the building and lives above the pizzeria.  It is only open from 7pm-midnight, except for Tuesdays and Fridays when they open for lunch with the hope of attracting those visiting the Nahalat Binyamin crafts' market that occurs on those days.  The pizza here is pretty damn good, and had I not discovered my favourite pizza in TA, I might still eat there sometimes.  The pizzas there come in 3 sizes: personal, double, and family.  The dough and sauce are excellent, but the cheese is "yellow cheese", which is not actually yellow in colour, and is a cheap substitute for mozzarella.  Frankly, as good as it was and as much as I liked the feeling of being privy to well kept secret, I finally have found a pizzeria with which I can find almost no complaints.

HaPizza, on Bugrashov.  Aptly named "The Pizza" in Hebrew, this place has captured the attentions of my palate with great frequency.  This is not NY style pizza by any means - there are only two options, personal pie and half a personal pie, and the pizza is cooked in a brick oven.  It is by all means an Italian style pizzeria.  It's not terribly cheap, a personal pie costs about 9 dollars and is the equivalent in weight of 2 NYC slices, but it's damn good!  The staff there are at this point familiar with my face, and one a woman asked me, "why do you always buy the margherita?"  I gave her my explanation about an equilibrium, and rather than taking the highly bestowed compliment, she tried to get me to add toppings to make my pizza a little more expensive.  Typical.  HaPizza also offers a white pie, made with fresh mozzarella and topped with a chiffonade of basil which is also excellent.  Everything is tasty and the right texture.  There is a perfect balance of dough-sauce-cheese, and the dough, while thin, manages to retain a more bready quality in it's exterior than the cracker-like substance found at Agvania.

None of this is to say that i do not still long for a slice of NYC pizza (I won't begin to name specific pizzerias for fear of a war of words with other New Yorkers who may be reading this).  But my addiction is better sated than a smoker on the patch.

If ever any of you are in Tel Aviv, I most highly recommend a stop at HaPizza on the corner of Pinsker and Bugrashov.