[Hip Synth Music]
[Chef Uri Navon] We want to plate the sashimi dish. This is Asif.
My partner. And he's a chef as well.
It's called Nablus Gate Sashimi,
which translate into sashimi [...].
Nablus Gate is one of the gates that surrounding the Old City of Jerusalem. There is nine gates.
One of them is called Nablus Gate, which is named after the Arabic city in Nablus, Shechem.
And this dish is the essence of new and old Jerusalem, okay?
It's taking something modern like sashimi —like a raw fish —
and connecting it to our philosophy with ingredients that come from Jerusalem.... Like three thousand-year-old ingredients.
Meanwhile, I'm going to grind the sumac.
Sumac — this is the sumac.
Okay, sumac is a spice. Really common in our area.
It's kind of salty and sour. Okay?
And it brings nice acidity to the food.
[Upbeat Synth Music Playing]
[Chef Einav Gefen] Uri, what fish is this?
[Chef Uri Navon] This is the yellowtail.
[Chef Einav Gefen] Shula.
[Chef Uri Navon] Shula
So, this is the sumac.
Taste it. How different does it feel?
[Chef Einav Gefen] Ah. [Chef Uri Navon] This is the real deal.
It's very different from one we tasted on the show.
[Chef Einav Gefen] And it's very hard to describe the acidity.
[Chef Einav Gefen] Because it's not really lemon, doesn't have that floral, but it's not vinegar.
[Chef Uri Navon] It's citric acid. It's natural. [Chef Einav Gefen] That's it. Yeah, yeah. [Chef Uri Navon] It grabs your mouth. Makes all the [....]
[Chef Einav Gefen] Salivate. Yeah, yeah.
[Chef Uri Navon] So, actually we have chili, garlic oil, we have — uh.....
.... It sounds better in English, but we call it "tomato ovaries."
And some fresh spring onion....
Sumac....
Everything here: almost 3,000 years old.
[Chef Einav Gefen] Tahini? [Chef Uri Navon] Yes.
[Chef Einav Gefen] Raw? [Chef Uri Navon] Raw tahini. This is raw tahini.
It's not diluted with anything. Olive oil, you put....
...with a lot of....
We do a lot of cooking with tahini, and a lot of cooking with yogurt.
[Chef Einav Gefen] Cooking with Tahini.... Cooked fish with tahini.... [Chef Uri Navon] Not only cooking with it! Just as a part of our dish.
Part of our food is yogurt and tahini. You cannot separate them.
You cannot.
This is our terroir. This is Jerusalem terroir.
[Chef Einav Gefen] And yogurt? Cow's milk? Sheep's milk?
[Chef Uri Navon] We do a sheep's milk. [Chef Einav Gefen] Sheep's milk.
[Chef Uri Navon] It's yogurt that's specially been made for us, by one of the top there is in Israel.
All right this is the Kadhi.
Kadhi is traditional [...]. From the [....] cuisine.
It's typical to one of the Jewish holidays called Shavuot.
Basically, it's a pastry, not baked,
but cooked on a pan, on a stove.
So we do it on the plancha, and then we heat it up
at the [....].So, this is why you have the net marks.
It's a yeast pastry. And inside we have, um....
....A mix of wild herbs, okay?
Now — because it's the pick of the season, it's the end of winter —
so we have all of the herbs in the mountains.
Everything is hand-picked. [....] which is typical to the mountains.
["Nu-ah"] which is, uh...
From the family of three pod.... Ivy — from the family of the ivy.
The [nu-ah] specifically, you have to cook it for three and a half — five....
between two and a half to five hours.
After that.... Otherwise, it will....
The side effect. It makes your tongue swollen, and you can suffocate.
It's very traditional we put [....]. We put [....] inside.
There's some Swiss Chard, some spinach, a lot of cheese....
[Chef Uri Navon] It's really cool. [Chef Einav Gefen] Which type of cheese, Uri?
[Chef Uri Navon] Um, we use a — it's like a feta cheese.
It's grainy but not so salty.
And it's — there's a salt on this recipe, coming from the cheese.
We don't add any salt, we just sweat down all the leaves,
little bit of garlic — fresh garlic — and we put a lot of cheese in it.
This is a vine leaves chili paste, [speaking Hebrew]....
[Chef Einav Gefen] Wow. [Chef Uri Navon] And this is a nice salad.
Over arugula with some fresh sumac.
So someone taste it. It's really, really good.
[Upbeat Synth Music]
So, I'm doing you a version of one of our famous dishes. It's called [....]
That's a version of [....].
Usually we don't serve it with the "Amba-ne."
But I wanted you to taste the "Amba-ne".
"Amba-ne" is the heat of summer 2011.
This is when it was invented.
It's a mixture of Labneh, which is a sour beef cheese — cream cheese — sour beef cream cheese
with Amba. Amba is a pickled mango chutney.
And this is quite nice.
They sip — the beef is cooked.
Its beef and lamb together with pine nuts and pistachios.
It's really seasoned with, uh.....
[Chef Einav Gefen] What are the little....? [Chef Uri Navon] Pine nuts. [Chef Einav Gefen] Ah, that's pine nuts, okay.
[Chef Uri Navon] It's topped with some harissa paste, we make.
Preserved lemon paste, that we preserve them...
Rocket, pesto, olive tapenade, yogurt and tahini.
We usually serve it with a pita, but I won't give you any more bread.
It's too much.
We cook a lot with Amba. A lot.
5 liters a week.
[Chef Einav Gefen] You cook with it?! [Chef Uri Navon] A lot.
It's a condiment I love so much.
I didn't like to eat it as I like to cook with it, at the beginning....
And I — all the time — try to find new uses for it.
All the time time, I try to make new stuff with Amba.
It's really cool.
Okay, last but not least...
This is one of our signature dishes, also like the [....].
This is one of the best dishes this restaurant is known for.
We have this dish all over the world in each of our restaurants.
We have three in London, two in Paris.... Marketing marketing marketing....
So this is the polenta, which is a cornmeal cooked with milk and cream.
topped with mushroom ragout, asparagus, and 24-month aged parmesan cheese....
And a little drizzle of truffle oil....
[Chef Einav Gefen] That's more French. Italian.
[Chef Uri Navon] It's a more French, Italian. But..... but!
I haven't tried any polenta in France, nor Italy, nor South America for that point.
They taste like that, which is rich and creamy like that.
[Chef Einav Gefen] Is it a local polenta? [Chef Uri Navon] No, it's Italian polenta.....
....but the way that we cook it, we cook it as we would like to cook it.
We don't just — they cook it in Italy, alright?
So, we think this is the best way to eat a soft and rich polenta.
[Chef Einav Gefen] Mamaliga. [Chef Uri Navon] Yes.
[Chef Einav Gefen] Dig in.
[Upbeat Synth Music Playing]
[Chef Uri Navon] After you taste it, it doesn't matter if it's cooked like the source, not like the source....
[Chef Einav Gefen] No, it's just the transition from Amba, Zhoug, you know.... to truffle oil and and polenta....!
It's an interesting tradition.
[Chef Uri Navon] Israel is a country of many contradictions.
Also, the people of it. And also our habits.
So, we can go from really Mediterranean, pungent and punching flavors....
to something really mellow and soft, and hugging, comforting like this.
This is .... This is Israel.
You have everything from everything all the time.
I've been.... I've been around. I lived in London for two years.
At the end, I think that what we have here in Israel, I mean, uh....
The terroir, the soil, the area, the Levant....
The geographic and the conditions that we have here....
Our character as Israelis and having a migrant country, a very young migrant country.....
Do those two factors together make the cuisine here really explodable....
And the thing is the most unique and the most diverse,
Comparing to the size of the country, and the the capital of it,
and compared to how many people live in here,
we offer something insane. I mean.....
You have a lot of countries where a cuisine is very rich and very complicated,
but it's India, China — huge places, huge number of people, a lot of culture, a lot of heritage, a lot of legacy....
Israel — a very young country, seventy years old, with so many different ethnic origin people here....
Everybody is mixed together, fused together....
With our — I don't know how to say — character, melted into it.....
....makes it very jumpy, makes it something that all the time —
.... looking for new stuff. All the time — looking for innovation.
All the time, doubting whatever we have. This is the reason we treat legacy and heritage so poorly.
But in Israel nobody care about.... I mean we do care about heritage. We do care about the tradition.
But we look to innovate it all the time.
So, this is, I think, why Israeli cuisine is so interesting now in the world,
and so interesting in general.
Here, we try to.... Every day, we we change two or three dishes on the menu....
From whatever we find in the market. We go strolling in the market.
Everything is seasonal, and everything on the menu on this restaurant is changing all the time.
Obviously, we have a backbone of a menu: dishes that our guests and our customers really like and coming back for it.
We try to please them and we try to please ourselves on the way,
because we want things to be changed and all the time to cook new stuff.
But it's a delicate balance between them two.
The kitchen being so widely open makes us exposed,
to our guests and our customers almost from every table in the restaurant beside one.
Beside one, there are 17 tables, and only one cannot see the kitchen.
One table in all of the restaurant.
I'm not talking about people sitting on the chef's bar where you are sitting and getting served by the team of chefs,
and getting a tailored tasting menu by the staff,
by the food they don't eat or the food they really like.
I'm not talking about that. I'm talking — every regular customer in the restaurant can see you when you work.
So, first we take a lot of pride in what we do. We not embarrassed by anything.
We never try to fool anyone or to trick anyone.
What we say is what we do. If we write on a menu....
grouper or sea bass or yellowtail, this is the fish we're gonna have.
Only fresh ingredients. Nothing is frozen here.
So to be honest.... Honesty. It what makes our team so happy.
And so much belief in what they're doing.
Because we know we're not lying to them. We're not lying to the customers, to the guests, to no one.
Even not to ourselves, which is the hardest part.
I think in Israel food is a story, because it tells the story of Israel.
Of people coming from the Diaspora, from coming from all over the world.
Even if it's from North Africa, even if it's from Europe, from United States, Jewish people all over the world...
Brought their heritage, legacies over here....
And all of them are threaded together by Jewish tradition and Jewish customs.
So, you have your Jewish holidays and you have Jewish customs,
and Jewish regulation like kosher food and non kosher food.
It binds all of us together.
The story of.... It's always something new to find.
So, this is culinary in Israel. I mean this is why I think it's genuine and always evolving.
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