It is one of the most beautiful places in the country, what is the problem with making delicious food too?

The atmosphere in Moma is that of a country inn somewhere in Spain or Italy and it is endearing, it is a pity that the food landed us very quickly back on the ground

Avi Efrati

20/01/2022

Thursday, 20 January 2022, 08:00 Updated: 08:07

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Muma, a beautiful and inviting space (Photo: Itamar Ginzburg)

When you want to leave the city, everyone travels north - to the Jezreel Valley, to the Galilee to the Golan Heights. These mountains of Jerusalem and the valley are much closer to the center and no less beautiful and perhaps even more so. But unfortunately this is one of the most culinary spaces. Abu Ghosh is Abu Ghosh, for good and especially for the least good. In Ein Rafa there are Majda and Rashta that serve not bad Arab cuisine at all. Besides, if you go to a B&B or hotel in the area, a good restaurant to have dinner in without feeling like you are stuck in a remote kolkhoz? Search Antarctica.

In recent years, within the great vacuum, Moma has been operating with great success, a food bar at the entrance to Kibbutz Kiryat Anavim. Always busy there, a table should book quite a bit in advance. With the exception of the problematic Naia in Beit Nekofa, the many moshavim and kibbutzim in the area have, as mentioned, no real alternatives when it comes to looking for a restaurant that is not based on Arab cuisine.

We booked a table in Muma weeks in advance and went up to the Jerusalem mountains on another frozen evening of midnight.

The parking lot next to the restaurant, next to the Caramim Hotel, was blown up and you had to park relatively far away and walk in the cold, between the puddles.

The outer space of Muma, which is disabled during the winter, looks beautiful and inviting.

The summer must be stunning here.

Inside, the large space is built of stone, housed in a building that used to be the old barn of Kiryat Anavim and has a huge rectangular bar and slightly dim lighting.

The atmosphere in the place is that of a country inn somewhere in Spain or Italy and it is endearing.

Last week

Mansura: Unpretentious, very tasty

To the full article

Muma's Kaunas (Photo: Dror Einav, Dror Einav)

The menu, on the other hand, lands in one fell swoop to Israel. And not just for Israel. It conveys great modesty, without the slightest hint of pretension: some dishes from the ceviche-carpaccio genre and friends of the simplest kind, some salads, some very basic pastas, a hamburger, schnitzel, one fish dish and two meat dishes. Not much interest, not pretension to character or uniqueness nor a hint of striving for excellence. Not every restaurant needs to be interesting. There are generic restaurants of the good kind, serving the simple-simple when well-made. We ordered

(NIS 52) and next to it

and

(NIS 58 each) and hoped for the best.

The first came Kaunas, the source of pride for the people of Muma, which even recently began to be sold, with considerable publicity from the Shechinah itself, in Tel Aviv. Sour cream and smoothie ("Grandma's"). Kaunas at its best is indeed the right cousin of the French brioche - airy, greasy and unstoppable. A dish of bread-dipping from Aafana, that someone would price wildly, not to mention scandalous.

Next, to Ceviche.

Originally it was South American street food.

There are restaurants that take ceviche to heights of investment and touch.

This ceviche, sea of ​​chopped peppers, almonds, onions, herbs, chili and a little whipped cream felt a lot below average even in terms of this type of dish that is unpretentiously prepared at home.

It lacks the touch of the fruit, it lacks raw materials of a high standard, including the fish, it lacks interesting seasoning, it lacks the hand of a cook who knows his job.

In other words it was a really amateur ceviche, the kind you would not expect to meet in a restaurant, even one that belongs to the generic genre.

This is also true of carpaccio, which could and should have been based on much higher quality meat.

Too much balsamic, rocket, purple onion, garlic confit and a bit of parmesan enveloped this dish, which a very long time has passed since I ate banal like it.

Amateur Ceviche (Photo: Dror Einav, Dror Einav)

We began to realize that truly delicious would probably no longer be here. We lowered our expectations for simple, reasonable and harmless food and continued on to a

(NIS 98) and

(NIS 72). The linguine dish had shrimp, calamari and mussels in a cream, garlic, white wine and anise sauce and it was one of the worst imaginable. The origin of the shrimp and calamari was quite clearly from a not particularly superficial freezing genre. They had that sucky viscosity and that sweeping tastelessness of what looked like seafood but went through every possible abuse along the way, reaching the palate as an inferior product that a mediocre to reasonable restaurant should not use. The sauce, again, evoked an association like the one already present in one of the previous paragraphs: why and why should a restaurant serve food at the level of a medium-sized and down-to-the-bottom amateur cook who does not need any training, talent or experience to produce it?

We chewed and finished the burger mainly because we were hungry, certainly not because it was delicious and it was not clear to us what we were more - upset by bad food or amazed that there are still successful restaurants that are the accepted standard.

dessert

(NIS 46) with pistachio ice cream, mascarpone whipped cream, halva, butter crumble and raw tahini was amateurish and sloppy, and it was evidently practiced by those who knew and professionalized in the world of sweets far from the distance between Kiryat Anavim and Paris. This tasteless hiccup of suspense, which had not the slightest expression of thinking about balances, just assembling random materials in a monotonous way, was without a doubt the worst dessert I can remember from restaurants here for a very long time.

Muma probably belongs to the type of places that work hard first and foremost because of their glorious solitude.

Places like this dominate the herd of captive audiences, one that doesn't have a lot of alternatives.

This is a classic of Israeli peripheral restaurants.

It's time to finally have a really good, at least reasonable, restaurant in the Jerusalem mountains.

The people of the area, as well as those who come to visit it, deserve a little more than this culinary overlapping place, deeply rooted in the history of Israeli restaurants.

Muma account (Photo: image processing, Walla system!)

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