Tel Aviv Shawarma Survey

Dear Internet,

Similar foods exist around the Mediterranean-- the Greek Gyro, the Turkish Doner Kebab, and others. I am an afficionado of all of these, as I am of most meals from the "meat on a stick" group, but my first love is the Shwarma, as eaten in Israel.

The memories of the my boyhood trips to Israel are largely memories of Shwarma -- walking with my grandfather through his working-class neighbourhood to the local shawarma counter and receiving from his hands a pita-wrapped serving of steaming meat the size of my head, complete with french fries dropping out, salad falling to the ground, and humnmus and tahina dripping over my then-delicate fingers. So it should be no surprise that immediately upon arrival in Israel about a month ago, I immediately set out in search my favorite meal, that direct descendant of the manna given by God to my people in this very place, the world-beating Israeli Sahwarma.

The very first night I was in the country I scoured the mall adjacent to my hotel for a Shawarma, and found one that was sadly disappointing at best. I came back to my room to search the Internet for better options for next time, but with little results. Disappointed but not discouraged, I started asking around the next day for Shawarma recommendations. Each person I spoke to gave me three different ones. It seems that in Israel, such knowledge is to ubiquitous to waste time in posting it to the Internet.

But for the benefit of the future traveler, and for the love of the genre, I am cataloguing here my learning. Internet, this is my gift to you. Behold... THE ULTIMATE SHAWARMA GUIDE!!!!

Notes on the procedure: I write here about only Sahwarma's that I've eaten myself. I paid for the Sahwarma's myself, and the restaurant was not aware I was assessing their performance. Sahwarma's, where possible, I ask for Schwarmas to served in "laffa", the arab flatbread which I believe is Sahwarma's ultimate incarnation. The standard toppings I ask for are salad, hummus, and hot sauce. No chips.

Abulafia
Address: Clock Tower Square, Jaffo.
Say that you had a Shawarma at Abulafia to an Israeli and they will probably try to correct you. "No! Abulafia is a bakery! Maybe you had pita with zatar from Abulafia! Or you had a Shawarma somewhere else." No amount of convincing them will make any difference. Don't bother. Go back again to this lovely eatery across the street from the famous original Abulafia bakery. The two places have the same owner, and the one uses the bread from the other, but the similarity stops there. The bakery is a roadside counter which hands over steaming bags of pita and other baked goods. The Shawarma restaurant is in atmospheric old stone building, modernized with plate glass windows and a shawarma grill in full swing. It's location close to Tel Aviv and the beach makes it popular with families on a day out together (those families that don't deny its existence, that is).

Bread: 7/10. Good, but not great, considering the Abulafia's provenance
Meat: 6/10. Nothing special
Fixings: 7/10. Great fixing's bar
Overall: 7/10

Haj Kahil
Address: Haj Kahil Square, of Tefet Road, Jaffa
For old city Shawarma, Haj Kahil is it. The main location is a spacious shawarma counter with a lovely outdoor patio area on Haj Kahil square in central Jaffa. The place also does a brisk sideline in non-Shawarma grilled meats, and even has a full English sit-down menu for tourists, but I advise you ignore it. Do as the locals do and head straight for the Shawarma counter. They have a mini-bakery in the back, seperated with a large window, where you can see a guy making fresh laffa, one at a time. The bread, as a result, is superb. Oh, and there's a new outlet of Haj Kahil in the clock tower square, at the opposite end from Abulafia. I haven't tried it, but it's probably ok. Looks a bit flash for me.

Bread: 9/10
Meat: 6/10. Nothing special
Fixings: 7/10. They had some good grilled eggplant
Overall: 8/10. The nice patio puts it over into the 8 category





Shemesh
Address: Jabotinsky Road
My co-worker, who I told about this shawarma initiative of mine, said that I am wasting my time and that there are only three decent Shawarma's in Israel. One is Shemesh (the rest are still to be reviewed). It's in Ramat Gan, and manages to be somewhat well-organized yet seedy at the same time. Teams of yellow-shirted young men work the Shawarma grill as eager diners line a seated bar around the kitchen. There are some gross looking tables inside in the back, and one fine communal plastic table parked out front. There's a grocery shop next door where I executed the brilliant move of buying a Heinekin.

This was the best Shawarma I've had so far. the bread was really good (despite no apparent on-site bakery), but it was the meat that really put this over the edge. They seemed to have marinated it in something before grilling it, which may be standard practice, but here the flavor just leapt out. They're also well known for throwing in a little delicious fat bits, which round things out nicely.

Bread: 9/10. Fantastic

Meat: 10/10. Fantastic

Fixings: 6/10. Nothing special

Overall: 9/10. The best yet.

Dabush
Address: Rabin SquareThe second and last on my tour of Israel's top shawarma (the first is Shemesh, above, the 3rd is in Haifa and I won't make it). Dabush is good, and is very popular. It enjoys a location right opposite Rabin Square in the heart of Tel Aviv and so has a line spilling out of the small shop day and night. This is a solid shawarma, but does not have the same magic meat as Shemesh nor authentic neighborhoody feel as Haj Kalil. In fact, I think this slides into 3rd place.

Bread: 9/10. Fantastic

Meat: 7/10. Good

Fixings: 7/10. Nothing special

Overall: 7/10. The best yet.

That's it for now. Check back for more updates!

Illeterate

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The literacy rate in the United States is 99%, which I suppose is pretty good -- but the converse of that means that 1% of our population is illiterate: 2 Million adults in America can't read. It's hard to internalize this because to me, and likely to you who is reading this right now, the concept of illiteracy is so foreign. Reading is simply part of language, which in turn is part of thought, part of life. Processing our native tongues, sentances simply flow out of books, websites, and directly into our minds. Learning a new language, we always start in a classroom, copying down words into notebooks repeatedly until they too become part of our conciousness. Our school system reinforces its visual learning approach even when it comes to written language. Without a word having a written, visual form, it does not exist.

Why do I write about illiteracy? Because here, in Israel, I am illiterate. Like I imagine most of those three million poor souls in the US, I have at several points learned the alphabet. I know most of the letters, and can sound out words, especially if I know in advance what they are. But I can't read. Not being able to take in road signs at a glance, they are useless. I can pick out a few simple, distinctive words on menus, but mostly I need to ask the waiter for recommendations and hope that they do more than point. Newspapers? Forget about it.

It's really not much of an issue -- Israel is mostly a bilingual society with plenty of English around. It's more just a curiosity both for me and those I interact with. My spoken Hebrew is not great, but having spoken it as a mother tongue for a few years at the beginning of my life, my accent is pretty good -- I can be confused, if not for a native speaker, then at least for one of the many Americans who turned Zionist and re-branded themselves as Israeli. So it strikes people as odd when I politely point out to a waiter or hotel clerk, with well pronounced words, that I cannot read a damn thing in the language I am fluently speaking.

Living arrangements

After trying three other hotels, I have returned back to my first, the Crown Plaza City Center in the Azrieli center in northern Tel Aviv. Astute readers will remember this hotel for its excellent breakfast, mentioned four weeks ago now in this space. What I look for in a hotel for extended business trips is simple: a comfortable and modern room, lack of vacationing families, and no in-house gym.

No gym? Why so? Because no gym, for a certain class of hotels that I frequent, means that they instead provide you with access to a real gym, the kind frequented by real people. Hotel gyms, on the other hand, are small, cramped affairs used only by business travelers, temporary shadows of real people that they are. This Crown Plaza grants me and its other guests access to a branch of the exclusive Israeli gym chain Holmes Place, located in the same building, reachable by the same elevator. It is the best gym arrangement I have ever seen (complemented by the best hotel breakfast I have seen). "You will like the gym," the check in clerk told me, "Its very exclusive."


And its not just a real gym -- its an Israeli real gym, frequented by Israeli real people. I remember the first time stayed here, my manager, a sweet south indian-cum-bostonian, arrived in the lobby wide eyed, having checked out the gym earlier that morning. "Intense!" he remarked,"those people are working out as if their lives depended on it!" He was right -- this morning at the same gym, I felt myself pounding the elliptical machine at a more frenzied that usual pace, and looked around to realize that I was merely trying to keep up with the focused sweating bodies around me.

Today, somewhat overwhelmed by the exclusive athletes around me, I embarked upon a new phase in my years-long running battle with fitness. I signed up for a trainer. I endeared myself with a little suprise hebrew to the guys at the front desk (I usually hold back at first, keeping it reserve for exactly that purpose), and they referred me to the gym's best personal trainer. "Is it OK if she is a woman?" the little man, Yaron, asked me.

"Yes," I replied, "as long as she is tough."

"She is tougher than you." he knowingly replied. Just then a tall woman passed by, and blew the clerk a kiss. "Ingrid Feldman," he proudly intimated, "She is one of the best models!" He then ushered me upstairs to find Gilli, a compact woman, tougher than me, who gave me a once over and told me that she would check her schedule and get back to me. "Give your number to Yaron. I will call you." She blew me a kiss and was off.

Hummus. Not just for snacking anymore.

Most Americans know that Hummus is a ubiquitous middle eastern snack, and some even know that it's something of a national obsession in Israel (just ask The Zohan). But it may come as a surprise to many that Hummus, in it's full incarnation is not a snack at all, but a meal in itself.

Tomorrow is Simchat Torah , the final and least important day of the gratuitous Jewish holiday season. For (literally) the 10th and last time this month, my client will be shut down tomorrow. And in Jewish fashion, today, the day before this minor holiday, it's a half day. Actually the whole last week was half-days. Today was more of a quarter-day. Which means that in addition to the growing frustration of not being able to schedule any meetings, the (excellent) cafeteria was closed and there was no fresh mint in the mini-kitchen for me to make my tea with.

Lest you should feel sorry for me, allow me to say that this religious slow down of work provided me with a pre-text for crossing the highway from my office to one of Israel's many Hummus restaurants. The small strip mall eatery was simplicity itself. No menu. Only one display counter, behind which was nothing more than a few toppings and a large vat of, yes, hummus. The attendant skillfully served up plates of the stuff, artfully smoothing it into the contours of the dish. He sprinkled the customers choice of toppings and handed it over for about $4. Mine had everything: garbanzo beans, tahini, onions, parsely and a boiled egg.

The result is below. Delicous!

And this is just a local joint. The mother-of-all-hummus-restaurants, Abu Hassan is in Jaffo. I have long since heard of this pilgramage site, but have been unable to sample its product due to the fact that it is so popular that it runs out by about 11 in the morning. Re-invigorated, I plan to redouble my efforts and report back.

De-conquering the Golan

This weekend, back in Israel after almost a week in my non-home of London, I took a trip with my manager up into north of Israel, partaking in that great Israeli pastime of seeing the country.

I've been reading a bit lately about Israel's Prime Minister-elect Tzipi Livni. She says she views Israel's greatest moments as when it struck peace deals with Jordan and Egypt. I assume this means that she will be well-disposed to attaining her own greatness and perhaps forging a peace treaty with Israel's last angry neighbor, Syria -- a deal that would almost certainly involved returning the Golan Heights. I have been there before, and decided to take what might be one last trip.

The Golan Heights are small -- perhaps 30km wide and 50km long. "heights" to me always suggested some kind of plateau, but there's is probably not one square acre of flat land in the whole area -- it's just a bunch of high, scraggy hills jammed together above a fertile valley below. Aside for some nice views of the Galilee, there not really that much to see. That is, except for the monuments. The Golan Heights have been fought over for years, due their "strategic" location. They are astride the main road from Damascus to the sea, and perhaps more importantly, they are within rifle short of the farming settlements below. And within artillery range of Haifa.


At one point, I held in view three monuments. Nimrod's Fortress, a forbidding castle complex built by Saladin's nephew and used alternatively by turks, crusaders and whoever else was coming through for the last thousand years. (At one point the castle was the base for a band of hashish-smoking murders known as hashishin, who's name over time tranformed into assasins...)



Within an arrow's flight from that castle was more modern monument, to an Israeli battalian of Golani troops who nearly massacered themselves trying to storm a Syrian position during the war of 1967 when the Golan was conquered. A few burnt-out tanks and a dozen sign posts testify that the soldiers on the strength of their love for each other and for Israel alone.


Just down the road from there, within shouting range, lies one of the many modern army bases we passed during the day. Tanks guarded by young men with guns testify to the view held by many that the Golani monument is not likely to be the last one built among these rocks and shrubs.

They have been conquered many times over the millennia, and today I was but one member of a new conquering force -- the mass of Israeli domestic tourists taking advantage of the pleasant weather to tour their country, to show it to their children. This is the way that Israel was built -- by drawing a line on a map, or in ones mind, and calling it ours, and then beginning to behave as if it was ours. I read in Tom Segev's excellent book 1967, which paints a vivid portrait of the Israeli character as well as the war, that it was commonly held that the more Israeli vehicles drove over a road, the more Jewish it became. The settlment movement, and indeed the entire Zionist idea, stems from this philosophy of action -- and the many, many tourists I saw this weekend testified to its continuing prevelance.

I suppose if there is a peace deal with Syria, these tourists will all retreat, and with them will go the army bases and the monuments. There are a few towns in the Golan, which I suppose will also pack up. I passed through the region's "capital" of Katzrin looking for a place to eat lunch. The town itself was a small, well-planned affair, consisting of a central commerical district surrounded by a few roads of standard-issue Israeli settler houses, red-roofed as ever. It was clearly built as a settlement in the '70's.  As the Golan's started to succumb to some ecconomic growth, mostly in the form of cattle ranching and wine-making, Katzrin has grown. It being the Shabbath, I was only able to find one restaurant open in town, in the new section down the highway from the original settlement. The restaurant, an excellent steak house called Meat Shor, was in a row of warehouses, like what you might find in a hasty suburban development in the States. In contrast to the older settlment, these were buildings built cheaply and quickly, designed to serve for a few years before being replaced. 

I'm sure that if Israel does achieve peace with Israel and the Golan is its price, there will be much wailing about the loss of these now-Jewish roads and the vanity of the deaths of those brave soldiers of 1967, and perhaps about the existential danger presented by the very act of withdrawal. All that, and probably worse. But at least in Ketzrin, they are considering the possiblity.

Air-conditioned kotel

This picture has been up for a while without me really explaining what it is -- it was taken furtively about 50 feet from the main section of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, in an air-conditioned cave.

The wall, as you may know, is the wall of the temple mount, the massive platform which used to house the most sacred Jewish temple, which was destroyed by the Romans 2000 years ago. Over the years, Jews became forbidden from going up on the temple mount, partly by superstition, partly by the presence of two very important Muslim monuments that were built in its place. They were allowed instead to worship at one small (50m) segment of the base of the mount, and that's about it. The remaining 2km circumference of the mount, while technically available for worship, was soon covered up in the many feet of sediment that somehow unexplicably builds up in every town. Over the course of the two millennia, the street level in the old city of jerusalem rose up some 25 meters. The Western Wall area, which was in active use for worship and was not built upon, rose only some 10 meters. This left a 15 meter shelf between the area at the foot of western wall and the area that adjoined it.

Now that the jews are firmly in control of Jerusalem, they have taken the liberty of putting that shelf to use by burrowing into it and area which is also alongside the temple mount and as such equally holy, but also has the advantages of being enclosed. This means that it is shielded from the sun, and naturally, air conditioned.

This is good because a lot of the men there were wearing those awesome round furry hats and silk dressing gowns, despite it being about a million degrees outside. Oh yes -- only men are allowed inside.

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