TRAVEL + L E I S U R E / M AY 2 0 1 7 103
couples are so rare that if the restaurant served only
schnitzel, it would be a remarkable place. Suffi ce it to say,
the restaurant doesn’t serve schnitzel. We began with that
surprising ‘falafel,’ then moved on to a fl aky white fi sh
crammed gills to tail with woody stalks of herbs. It arrived
in a parcel of burnt parchment paper twisted at the ends,
with a puff y white blossom for decoration. The cast-iron
pan of peppery tomato sauce and fresh sardines was a
fi shy riff on shakshuka, the beloved Middle Eastern dish
of eggs poached in a vegetable ragoût.
After the meal, we wandered into the kitchen, where
Barhum greeted us with an easy smile, put down the bowl
of harissa he was mixing, and told us about the origins of the
restaurant. He and Baranes—who was juggling four or fi ve
pans on the stove—met some 30 years ago while working
together at a guesthouse at a nearby kibbutz. They fell in
love, and she moved to Ein Rafa to live with him. There,
she began learning traditional cooking from his sisters and
mother. Eventually, she started to channel their recipes
into something new. The restaurant attracted a following
in Israel, but its reputation didn’t explode until 2013, when
Anthony Bourdain featured it on Parts Unknown. Majda is
now famous in Israel both for what it serves and for what it
symbolises, and Barhum seemed well aware of his role as an
ambassador for cultural harmony both inside the kitchen and
out. “When you look at history, Muslims, Jews, Christians
always fi ghting—why?” he asked us. “Why not be gentle?”T
he next day, we drove south into the Negev desert,
through scrubby hills that gave way to stubbly
wheat fi elds, which then turned to canyons slashing
through barren expanses of rock. The grape vines
appeared out of nowhere, tucked into a fold between two
parched slopes. Hannah and Eyal Izrael, the founders of
Carmey Avdat, built their vineyard 18 years ago on the
remains of an ancient Nabatean settlement. Evidently,
the Nabateans had fi gured out how to grow grapes there 1,500
years earlier: the land had been terraced to capture water
from the fl ash fl oods that sweep across the desert in winter.
We stayed in one of the guest huts, in a kind of glamping
setup complete with pebble fl oors and a stone plunge pool
just outside the door. Hopping between the pool and a
hammock in the shade of a fi g tree was a relaxing way to
wait out the heat. When the immobilising sun fi nally began
to sink behind the rocky outcrop overlooking the farm,
we ventured down to the winery for a tasting.
Most Americans’ ideas about Israeli wine don’t go
beyond the syrupy stuff you might knock back at Passover.
But over the past two decades, acclaimed boutique vintners
have sprung up throughout the country. A decade ago,
Robert Parker, the high priest of wine critics, gave top
marks to two Israeli wines, including the 2003 Yatir Forest,
a red from a winery an hour north of Carmey Avdat. I’m no
Robert Parker, but the Chenin Blanc from Shvo VineyardsI had with dinner one night in Tel Aviv was light and fl oral
and, all in all, pretty damn good. Though Carmey Avdat
helped launch the wine trend in Israel, it isn’t at the level
of some of the country’s newer labels. But it gets the job
done. We grabbed a carafe and hiked up a sandy slope
scattered with boulders and scrub grass that overlooked the
vineyard. Previous travellers—Nabateans, bedouins—had
scratched inscrutable symbols onto the stones. Night was
approaching, and the desert, stretching as far as the eye
could see, was turning gold.A
t the shuk in Jerusalem, we had stocked up on
snacks for the road trip: dried pineapple, salty-
sweet banana chips glazed with date juice,
and dried hibiscus fl owers, garnet-coloured
and just tart enough to summon memories of the Sour
Patch–fuelled road trips of our youth. Our route passed
through the ruins of infrastructure built for much earlier
road-trippers. We stopped to tour what was left of Avdat,
a city founded in the third century BC by Nabatean
incense traders passing through the Negev on camels.
From there, we drove up the coast, past Tel Aviv, toward
Habait Be’EinHud, a showcase of traditional Palestinian
cooking in the Arab village of Ein Hawd, near Haifa. There
are two things that are challenging about eating at Habait.
The fi rst is getting there. Google Maps guided us only as
far as a town in the valley below. As the road thinned and
the pines and cedars thickened, the nice lady in my phone
instructed us to ‘take a right at missing name.’ Locals
directed us to the restaurant, a two-storey block of concrete
and glass with a sweeping view of the hills and the sparkling
Mediterranean beyond. Our server, wearing a T-shirt that
said #girlboss, announced that there was no menu.
Then, the marathon began.
First came cold salads and dips—hummus, baba
ghanoush, pickled caulifl ower and carrots and olives,
tabbouleh that consisted almost entirely of parsley, spicy red
mahoumarra. Then lentil soup, bright and complex, its broth
so fresh I would not have been surprised to fi nd the head of a
chicken still blinking at the bottom of the bowl.
I glanced at the bread basket and saw that our server
had provided only a single pita. Naively, I asked for more.
#Girlboss gave us a sideways look before retreating to the
kitchen. I would soon understand why.
The hot appetisers included cigars of rice rolled in vine
leaves as delicate as nori and stuff ed peppers bathed in
tomato sauce. Then came the roast chicken with a dipping
sauce of piney herbs. And the chunks of slow-cooked lamb
snuggled against a golden cupola of rice. And the misshapen,
nutty lamb cakes drowned in tahini-thickened gravy.
By now, you can probably guess the second thing that is
challenging about eating at Habait.
“I think there is no more,” our server announced after we
confessed that we were feeling full.TRAVEL + LEISURE / MAY 2017 105