Israel. Day 8. 16 Courses.
Once again, today did not go as planned, though in contrast to Monday’s unplanned sun, we woke up to nasty rain storms and a real feel of 20 degrees (Fahrenheit, not Celsius).
We were supposed to meet a photograph for a family photo session at 10 am in the old city, but the weather made that impossible, so the morning was suddenly wide open. We started with breakfast. For my money the King David breakfast is still the best hotel breakfast. Its really amazing that the same waiters and chefs have been here as long as we’ve been coming here.
I should mention that last night my parents wanted to do laundry. Between the seven of us we filled up four large bags and my mother was planning on bringing them to the laundromat they always use near Mamilla. We were running short on time though, so the hotel said they would take the laundry over for us. Just before we were ready to leave for dinner, a woman who looked like she was out of some 19th century Tolstoy novel, dressed in a classic black and white maid’s uniform, came to take the luggage. My mother explained everything, the woman nodded, and then she left. This morning, my mother got a call from the front desk asking if they had a child in their room (this hotel is very strict about how many people are in a room because they charge up the wazzoo for extra people). Apparently they had gone through the laundry and seen children’s underwear and they wanted to know why. My mother was upset that they were going through the underwear and “spying on us.” Tzvi said they weren’t spying on us, they were just doing the laundry. I think my mother was horrified by that thought given the prices they charge for laundry, but of course, Tzvi was right. They had done the laundry, and they had charged nearly $400 for it.
After breakfast we took a cab to the old city. It was pouring rains. Thankfully we had the King David umbrellas, which broke pretty quickly with the first gust of wind. We ran as fast as we could to the Cardo to visit the Blue and White gallery.
I don’t even know how to describe the scene at Blue and White. The gallery has been there forever (I think it may have been the first gallery in the old city). The owner, Udi, is an artists and sells his own work and other artists’ works. I think where he does his biggest business though is in small 8x10 prints of his paintings. The shop was packed with tourists (mostly American) coming in and buying handfuls of these prints. People would come up with 12, he’d say “you pay for 8.” The markup must be huge on those things. He also recently did a special painting dedicated to fallen law enforcement and said he gives a copy to all law enforcement officers who come in. While we were there, a man came in who is on the Aurora, CO state police. He said he was in the first car on scene at the movie theater shooting in 2012.
Meanwhile, Hallie was whining that she was hungry and wanted to eat a pouch. Then she started whining that she wanted a banana, except she doesn’t actually like bananas, except Udi didn’t know that, and before we knew what was happening he sent someone out to the shuk to buy bananas.
Anyway, through all of the madness we ended up buying two items. one was an Udi originally of two goats, or maybe sheep, that Tzvi liked.
The other was a Chagall lithograph. We’ve liked this Chagall for years, but when we originally say it, it was too expensive for us. Now the price has tripled and it’s still too expensive, but because we keep coming back and buying from him, he gave it to us for the original price on condition that we give tzedaka over the next few years up to the price he’s selling it for now. So I don’t know what the thing is really worth, but we’re getting an appraisal for the current price, so at least that’s something.
Here’s a photo of the piece:
The original painting is oil on canvas and is hanging in the Tel Aviv museum. Chagall painted it in 1932, apparently using really cheap paint, and so now the original is fading. The Chagall family commission a run of 450 lithographs so that the painting could be preserved (they say the print is a better representation of the original painting than what’s currently in the museum), and sold all 450 to Udi’s father. Now Udi only has a few left, and we bought one of them.
After we were done at Udi we went back to CoffeeBagel and got Hallie a cream cheese bagel, which she ate happily. From there we got slushy coffee and some pastries at Ne’eman. It was pouring raining at that point, and freezing, and the guy at the bakery told us we were crazy for drinking the iced coffee in the winter. When we told him that we don’t have it in America, he said “I was in New York, you can get this at Starbucks.” He is wrong.
Next on our adventure running around Jerusalem on the day of never ending rain, we called a taxi and had it take us to someone’s apartment in Talpiot. A week or so ago I was looking at instagram and saw someone I went to high school with post a really cool challah board carved out of a large block of wood - basically a slice of tree. I messaged her and she said her brother in Israel makes them. So we went to his apartment to look at blocks of wood and order custom challah boards. We spent about a half hour there figuring out what we wanted. Right now he just makes these things and sells them out of his apartment, but he’s going to start selling at a Judaica store at the tachana, so maybe we’re getting in on the ground floor of something. Hallie was really happy because they had a toy kitchen set that she played with.
this is going to be our challah board
We called another taxi and rushed back to the hotel, quickly got our stuff together, and then went back out to meet a driver we had hired to take us to the Castel Winery in the Judean Hills. Hallie fell asleep in the car and woke up just as we were getting ready to leave, so that couldnt have worked out better. The winery was about a 30 minute drive. When we got there we were welcomed into the visitors center and sat on a couch around a burning fire. Very cozy. Our guide, Adar, gave us some history of and basic introduction to the winery.
In short, Eli Ben Zaken started the winery in the mid-90s. He planted cabernet sauvignon and merlot grapes, harvested, made wine, aged it for a year, and called it Grand Vin, which is a title given to top wines in France, so it was pretty Israeli and cocky to call his first wine that. But, the wine was good and the winery became a success. Now they sell on the back wall of Chateau de’Vin with the expensive wines ($70-$100/bottle). Tzvi was very focused on why their wine is so much more expensive than other Israeli wines. Basically he told us (1) it’s better than other wines, (2) they put a lot more into their production (i.e., handpicking instead of machine picking, they have a special expensive French sorting machine, they only use new French barrels), and (3) they only produce about 300,000 bottles a year.
We got a tour of the production room and learned that their cheaper “entry level” wines don’t actually go into barrels at all, they just go into either large steel tanks or large concrete tanks, and sit there for a number of months. Apparently a lot of wines are made this way and we just don’t realize it (or at least we didn’t realize it). We next went into the barrel storage room and saw the endless rows of barrels and learned more about the storage process. Apparently our wine fridge is too cold.
After the tour we went back to the visitor’s center and sat around by the fire tasting all of the wines. He also served us three types of cheese and some bread. Tzvi spilled some wine on himself. My father vomited in the bathroom, but we didn’t find that out until later. It wasn’t because of the wine - he’s just sick. All of the wines were great. Tzvi ended up buying 6 bottles, which had to be packed in a special box for checking on the airplane. Good luck.
We drove back to Jerusalem and once back at the hotel, Hallie went to dinner with my parents in the hotel restaurant and Tzvi and I went to the sauna in the “spa" which is really a gym with a sauna and massage rooms. Then we got showered and dressed and made it out around 7:00.
Our first stop was a cocktail bar called Gatsby. We took a cab to the address, but once we got there, all we saw was an Aroma cafe. We started looking around but couldn’t find anything, until we noticed that there was a wall covered in leaves. As we got closer we saw doorknobs and a small hidden G on the wall. We went through the doors into a small room where a woman stood behind a desk. The walls were covered in bookcases, but there was nowhere else to go. The woman grabbed two menus, slid the bookcase aside and led us into the bar. It was a speakeasy!
The bar, which we actually found in a recent NY Times article, was very cool. The decor was kind of 20’sish and the music was like swing/big band, and then at one point the song from the Jungle Book. We sat at the bar in front of our bartender Roi, who knew our tour guide from the winery because he also used to work at Gatsby. Tzvi had a drink that was sort of like an old fashioned but had rye and pineapple syrup. I had a drink with passion fruit and spicy chili infused tequila. Both were great. We stayed about 20 minutes, then paid and got a cab to the restaurant for dinner.
For dinner we met Avery and Gabriella at The Eucalyptus, a restaurant in the Artist’s Colony that’s been around for 30 years but we’ve never been there. The restaurant kind of feels like one of those bucharian places in Queens. It’s very homey and feels like a traditional Jerusalem restaurant, not a new highly stylized place. We were very excited for the meal as we were going to do the Queen of Sheba tasting menu, their biggest tasting menu. It was pretty incredible. It was really an experience. I’ll take you through course by course.
First, they brought bread with some sort of garlic dip, tomato dip and parsley dip. Then the chef/owner, Chef Basson, came over while Avery and Gabs were washing, and picked up one of the pieces of bread and said, “You are two people? I’m going to take one piece, you should not eat so much bread.” Then he realized we were four people and gave it back.
I’m not going to do every course in detail, but I’ll list them all out.
Trio of soups: Jerusalem artichoke, tomato and lentil:
Barramundi ceviche with vegetables and pomegranate seeds:
Whole roasted eggplant with pomegranate seeds, tahini and parsley:
Fried cauliflower with tomato-lemon cream, tahini and black lentils:
Chicken liver on macarons with mixed berry jam:
Fish falafel served over tomato sauce:
Figs stuffed with ground chicken:
Pastia: Duck confit rolls served over carrot cream and red wine sauce:
Jerusalem Sania: layers of pita bread, lamb, eggplant, tomatoes and tahini:
Lamb “candies” with yogurt sauce and almond paste:
Entrecote with mustard and amba aioli:
Lamb neck stew with peas and carrots baked under pita bread:
Makluba: chicken legs and rice
For this course, they made a big show out of the makluba. The chef came out with a giant pot and had volunteers from the restaurant bless the makluba or something. Then he turned it over and dumped it out and invited people for photos.
Seared mulard breast with mashed potato and berry sauce:
(The mulard is a cross between a duck and a goose)
Chocolate soufflé, semolina cake, malabe, dried pears with almond nougat cream:
I should also note that during the meal they gave us shots of sangria, shots of arak, which was too licorice tasting for all of us, and shots of Jack Daniels. We had all of the courses once, except for the entrecote and the mallard breast, which we asked for second servings of. I didn’t eat everything, but what I did eat was delicious. It was a special meal and different from other tasting menus we’ve done before; usually they bring things out one course at a time, but here they were kind of throwing food at us, so we had multiple dishes on the table at once.
We were the last people to leave the restaurant, and at the end of the meal the chef came over and told us how his family fled Iraq in 1951 and came to Jerusalem. He’s been living in Jerusalem, or around it, since then, and has had this restaurant for 30 years (though only 10 in this location).
After the meal was over we took a cab back to the hotel and went to bed, stuffed.