A (mostly) street food walk from our front door
Guests ask us where to eat more than they ask anything else, and the answer is usually not a restaurant. Tel Aviv is a city where the best thing you eat all week costs about the same as a coffee and is handed to you through a hatch.
Here are nine of them, arranged as a single walk from north to south: start at the marina, finish at Carmel Market. It is a long way on foot and an easy way on a bike, and you are not meant to do all nine in a day. Most people work through it over a week without meaning to.
The short version
- One route, north to south: the marina, Ben Yehuda, Dizengoff, Allenby, the Yemenite Quarter, Carmel Market.
- Everything on it is within walking distance of 16 Ruppin Street.
- Sit-down meals come with bottomless salads. They are refilled, free, and the best part.
- Order the brain soup in the Yemenite Quarter. It is a house speciality and it is very good.
- Take cash as well as a card. Not every hatch takes plastic.
1. Shtsupak, near the marina
Start at the north end, by the marina, with the thing that is hardest to explain to anyone who has not eaten here.
Sit down for a proper meal in this country and, before you have ordered anything, the table fills up. Little dishes, a dozen or more of them: aubergine in three different guises, beetroot, cabbage, tahini, pickles, matbucha, things you will not be able to name and will want the recipe for.
They are called salatim, they arrive as part of the meal, and the important part is that they are refilled. Empty a dish you like and another one turns up. Nobody charges for the second round, or the third.
Shtsupak is a fish restaurant and the fish is very good. The salads are the reason you will book it again. It is our favourite way to eat and the thing we miss when we are anywhere else.
The trap, and everyone falls into it once, is filling up on the salads before the food you actually ordered turns up. Pace yourself, or do not, and take the rest home.
2. HaLevantini, Ben Yehuda
Walk south and inland one block from the sea. Hummus here is not a dip that arrives before the meal, it is the meal: a warm bowl, a swirl of it, topped in this case with meat, eaten with pita you tear.
Eat hummus early in the day. It is breakfast and lunch food here, and the good places run out and shut for the day.
3. Nola, Dizengoff
Cut inland to Dizengoff. Nola does a corned beef bagel: an American idea done properly, and the right answer on a morning when you cannot face another salad.
4. Toast and Shake, Dizengoff
A toasted sandwich and a plate of salad. Unglamorous, quick, and exactly what you want after a morning at the beach.
Neither this nor Nola is traditional. Both are very good.
5. Yashka, Dizengoff and Frishman
On the corner. Shawarma carved off the spit, into pita or onto a plate, with as much salad and pickle as you can stand.
6. HaKosem, just off Dizengoff
The falafel everybody sends you to, and for once the queue is telling the truth. Have it in a pita as street food, or as a plate: falafel, hummus, a wedge of aubergine, pickles, salad, and pita that arrives warm.
If you only do one thing on this list, do this one.
7. Sabich Tchernichovsky, off Allenby
Further south. Sabich is the one visitors have usually never heard of and go home talking about: fried aubergine, hard-boiled egg, salad, tahini and amba packed into a pita, messier and better than that description makes it sound.
Eat it standing up, over the paper. There is no dignified way to do this and nobody is watching.
8. HaTeimani, Kerem HaTeimanim
The Yemenite Quarter is the tangle of small streets beside the market, and it is where you go for soup. Yemenite soups are the speciality: rich, long-cooked, deep red-brown, served with hummus and bread alongside.
Order the brain soup. Yes, brain. It is a classic of this kitchen, the texture is soft and creamy, and it comes in a broth with peppers, tomatoes and chickpeas that would be worth ordering on its own.
If you would rather not, the oxtail and the chicken soups are on the same menu and nobody will comment. But you can eat falafel anywhere, and you cannot eat this at home.
9. Carmel Market
The end of the walk, and less a place to eat than a place to move through slowly while eating. Go in the morning, when it is loud and full.
This is also where a kitchen back at the apartment starts to earn its keep: tomatoes, cheese, bread, fruit, and dinner solved for about a third of what you would pay for it sitting down. Walk home along the sea rather than back the way you came.
Practical notes
- Tipping. In a sit-down restaurant, 12 to 15 per cent, and it is expected rather than optional. Street food is different: nobody tips at a falafel counter or a market stall.
- Opening hours move. Many places close Friday afternoon and reopen Saturday evening, and the good hummus places shut when they run out. Check on the day.
- Cash still matters at the smaller counters and in the market.
- Portions are large. Two of you can share most of this list and still not finish it.
- Ask Yehuda. Places open and close. He will tell you what is good this month.
Photograph: Ruppin Apartments