100 TRAVEL + L E I S U R E / M AY 2 0 1 7
At least, they weren’t like any
falafel balls I’d ever tasted, and
I’ve tasted many. During my 30
years of visiting Israel, I have
become something of an expert
on falafel, and I can tell you that
it is a quintessentially humble
food. For generations, the
people of the Fertile Crescent
have been dropping clumps
of mashed chickpeas into vats
of sizzling oil, and while the
recipes vary, they don’t vary
much. What you don’t expect,
when you order falafel, is to
bite into a rose-gold sphere of
succulent shrimp dusted ever so
lightly in panko. But that is what
you get when you order the
falafel at Majda, an acclaimed
restaurant in the hills outside Jerusalem. My wife, Lila, and
I spent a lovely afternoon on the terrace there last summer,
taking the fi rst of many bites on a trip across a country that is
in the process of joyfully reinventing its cuisine.
When I visited Israel as a kid in the 1980s, the food was
nothing special. My dad grew up on a kibbutz where oranges
grew in sprawling groves, but most of the fruit ended up
in crates bound for Europe. In the dining hall, the orange
farmers stirred orange-fl avoured syrup into cups of seltzer.
Before the tech boom, Israel had no restaurant culture to
speak of. The only restaurant I can remember was a grill at
a gas station where the no-nonsense servers slapped down
steaks tough enough to patch a tire. By then Israeli Jews
had developed an infatuation with Arab street food (falafel,
hummus, cucumber-and-tomato salat) but hadn’t yet
become hip to their neighbours’ more complex dishes, which
weren’t commonly served outside the home, like shurbat
freekeh, a soup of green wheat, and maqluba, a many-
layered casserole of rice, eggplant, potatoes, caulifl ower,
and sometimes meat. Most Jews were still getting to know
the land and what it off ered. How was a kibbutznik raised
by Polish or Moroccan immigrants supposed to understand
what to do with the plumes of sumac that grow wild in the
Judean Hills? What did the children of the diaspora know
about the mixture of local wild herbs c a l l e d za’atar?
A generation later, Israeli chefs receive glowing coverage
in the world’s top food magazines. Most gastronomes worththeir Maldon sea salt have heard of Meir Adoni, who helped
put Tel Aviv on the international fi ne-dining map when he
opened the celebrated Catit in 2002. Though Adoni closed
it and its more playful sibling, Mizlala, last December to
concentrate on opening his fi rst New York City restaurant,
Nur, he still has two other establishments in Tel Aviv,
Blue Sky and Lumina. But while much has been written
about Tel Aviv’s new culinary temples, the fi ne cooking of
the countryside, where the ties to the land are strongest, is
less well known. So when I took Lila to Israel for the fi rst
time, we planned a side excursion from Jerusalem to the
desert in the south, then to the hills in the north, skirting
the urban sprawl in the middle, eating wherever we went.
Religion doesn’t interest Lila; I couldn’t see her getting
excited about a hike up Masada. Fortunately, though, she
is fond of the work of Yotam Ottolenghi, the pioneering
Israeli-born chef whose 2011 cookbook Jerusalem
contributed further to the surge of excitement over
modern Israeli cuisine. Thanks to Ottolenghi’s brilliant
and distinctive way with the multi-ethnic fl avours of his
native land, Lila associates Israel not just with God and the
Confl ict but also with the sultry appeal of smoked eggplant,
mashed with a fork and bejewelled with pomegranate seeds.
I promised her that there was more where that came from.I
n Jerusalem, the sun burned hot and bright, and
only the shady maze of the Old City off ered an escape.
We walked the stone streets, fending off the
shopkeepers with their stockpiles of oil lamps and
wooden camels. At last it was time to eat. Rather than
cede a few shekels to vendors hawking sesame-encrusted
Jerusalem bagels (bigger holes, lighter dough), we left the
commotion of the city behind.
Olive and pine trees dotted the brown fi elds. We turned
off the highway onto a narrow road and began our crawl
through the Arab village of Ein Rafa. We got lost a few times,
but eventually found it: Majda, a surf shack of a restaurant
painted the same shade as the sky, with accents of pistachio
green and pomegranate red. Ottolenghi had proclaimed it
one of his favourite restaurants in Israel, which seemed to
bode well. We sat in the leafy, overgrown garden, where wild
herbs and fl owers spiced the air and the mismatched tables
were topped with salvaged mosaic tiles. Sunlight fi ltered
through the canopy of branches.
Majda’s husband-and-wife owners, Yaakov Barhum
and Michal Baranes, are central to its appeal. Barhum is
Muslim; Baranes is Jewish. Stories of thriving Arab-IsraeliTHE MENU
DESCRIBED
THEM
AS FALAFEL
BA L L S.
THEY WERE
SHAPED
LIKE FALAFEL
BA L L S.
BUT THEY
WERE
NOT FALAFEL
BALLS.
102 TRAVEL + LEISURE / MAY 2017