The Six Kosher Food Groups of Jerusalem

Saturday, May 9. 2009

With thousands of observant Jews in Jerusalem, as well as even more halal Muslims, one of the most important assets a restaurant can have is a kashrut certificate. So important, in fact, that there's a substantial trade in ersatz certificates. Since we were visiting my brother, the rabbi, we looked for these a lot. Fortunately, unlike US clties, you can get a lot of really good food in Jerusalem eating kosher, and it doesn't even have to be expensive.

The major kosher food groups of Jerusalem are baked goods, bagels, yogurt, felafel, pizza, and (as of the 21st century) sushi. Having already covered the first, here's some notes (and pictures) about some of the others.

Holy Bagel is a Jerusalem chain which embraces the concept of bagel-as-entire-meal. No tiny bagels with a tiny dollop of cream cheese here! You can have any of a dozen spreads on your bagel, plus fish, vegetables, and other things you wouldn't expect ... like olives, peppers and hot turnip salad.

Above is a bagel with an onion omlet on it, which was cooked to order.

This is my bagel: lox, onion, tomato, multi-herb cheese.

On a hot day, few things are more welcome than frozen yogurt, more popular than ice cream in Jerusalem for reasons I don't quite understand. For some reason, it's easier to kasher a yogurt place. Certainly my mother can't pass up a frozen yogurt place.

Maybe it's because they give you the option of whipping in any of a couple dozen varieties of frozen fruit, nuts, candy and other things. I had strawberry-halvah, which was delicious.

If you're somehow still hungry into the afternoon, how about the national "sandwich" of Israel, felafel? We visited one of the most popular, and one of the oldest, felafel stands in the New City. It was opened almost immediately after the 1967 war and probably started out feeding refugees and soldiers. It's busy, crowded, and pretty much entirely lacking in ambiance unless you like bus exhaust, but the felafel is worth it.

Get in the mob/line. Better know what you want to order (in Hebrew) before you get to this guy; he won't wait for you.

You can get a half pita or full pita, and options include hot sauce, tomato, cucumber, hummus, israeli salad, cabbage and a few other things. For some reason, they've recently started putting french fries on the felafel; ask him to leave them out. But, no more than two special requests; additional ones will be ignored.

If you don't have quite enough stuff on your felafel, there's a condiment bar. Try the fenugreek sauce for something unusual.

Sit down at one of the little plastic tables next to the bus stop and dive in.

Mmmmmmm ... real felafel. Nothing I've had in the USA gets close. Although Sunset Deli in San Francisco isn't bad. It would help a lot if we had decent pita bread in the Bay Area.

My brother gives the rabbinical seal of approval. He brought his own beer, since they don't serve any.

Oh, and sushi? Well, the observant jews really like it because it's parve, meaning neither milk nor meat, so it can be served with any kind of meal. Also, sushi chef's dedication to extreme cleanliness makes it easy to kasher sushi restaurants.

However, since sushi is just as expensive in Jerusalem as it is in the US, my sister-in-law Shifra and I made sushi for the Berkus clan in their Old City apartment.

P.S. a little tip about dining out in Jerusalem: in sit-down restaurants, order in English even if you know Hebrew. The waiters generally know that Israelis don't tip but Americans do. You'll get better service that way (and do leave a tip of 5 to 10% if they do a good job).

Posted by The Fuzzy Chef in Food Tourism at 08:44 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)