Can not believe this restaurant is in Tel Aviv

Elena is everything that contemporary Tel Aviv restaurants do not: it has peace, quiet, a sense of detachment from the outside.

And the food?

One of the pleasant surprises of recent times

Avi Efrati

10/02/2022

Thursday, 10 February 2022, 08:15 Updated: 08:17

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Eggplant pizza in Elena (Photo: Noam Frisman)

Elena is the home restaurant of The Norman, one of the most prestigious and expensive hotels in Tel Aviv.

From the beginning of her life, Elena functioned as a kind of brasserie.

It has always been quite expensive there, albeit very moderate compared to Dining - the Japanese luxury restaurant that used to operate on the roof of the hotel and was priced with unjustified scandal.

In the first years of its operation, Chef Barak Aharoni was signed to the kitchen at Elena.

He set up a proper menu, with a broad Italian base, evident in his restraint.

I never ate badly at Elena's of the early years, but the need for restraint and decency, which was apparently dictated from above, did not seem to allow the food there to fly.

Indeed, fairness is an unmistakable factor when entering the gates of Elena, located on the entrance floor of the model hotel, one that you will be happy to stay in any Western European volume (and probably pay much much less).

Elegant, classic, solid, quiet and bright space.

No gloom, no loud music, no Chasers vibe on the bar.

Instead of these, there is a team dressed meticulously, sweeping adherence to the rules of the corona and a lot of matter-of-fact restraint.

Elena is a restaurant in which every nuance radiates classicism, as opposed to jubilant contemporaries.

The reason for Elena's current visit is the replacement in the kitchen, which was entered by Daniel Tzur and Omar Shadmi Hatzairim.

A look at the menu shows that Tzur and Shadmi created a real makeover there.

To the remaining Italian infrastructure from the previous incarnations were added, with all its might, elements from the Galilean-Lebanese-Southern Syrian cuisine, hereinafter "Shami".

If before you ate in Elena food that in the absence of another definition can be defined as Western European, diversity gives its signals.

It’s not that at De Norman’s in-house restaurant you’ll encounter dishes that get in Luna or the Northern Sahara Palace, but a clear touch from these elements is definitely present in the flavors.

Last week

No restaurant, puff

To the full article

Cacho a Pepe in Elena (Photo: Noam Frisman)

The menu is divided into a cold department, a pan section and a jusper section (stone oven) and a plancha.

We started with

(NIS 65) and

(NIS 66).

The salad, which came from the cold wing, was rather hot.

It had chunks of Little Jam lettuce passed through the josper, alongside brown butter, toasted almonds and Hameiri cheese.

Lettuce that goes through an oven is a delicious thing in itself.

Here, the brown butter sauce gave depth, the almonds crunchy and Hameiri’s immortal cheese gave its own.

Together the elements joined together for an opening salad that reflected meticulousness in raw materials and execution skill.

The pizza, which we preferred to order over the classic one based on tomatoes and mozzarella, began to reveal the emerging change in Elena's kitchen.

Instead of topping tomatoes / cheese and friends, there was burnt eggplant and Hameiri cheese, to which was added a soft-boiled egg yolk, which in a small stab was sprinkled on the base of the dough, hyssop leaves and dipping sauce.

The word dipping may not mean much to many, but anyone who has ever eaten a portion of chickpeas on a plate of chickpeas is exposed to the greenish sauce that gives the chickpea-tahini-grains-shamnaz array the sour-spicy castor. Excellent) it had none of the basic ingredients of any generic Italian pizza.The eggplant that was on fire was the base, the cheese brought its rich and wonderful saltiness, the warm and rich yolk and the hyssop leaves combined with the dipping, delicate but present, completed a completely cylindrical dish. It is possible that if the configuration of the dough had changed from a pizza base to a pastry, we would have been talking about one or another sambusak.

We tend not to order pastas at restaurants that have plenty of goodies, and we have already loaded up plenty of carbs with the pizza, but we felt it would not be right to close a meal in Elena without pasta, given the significant presence of these on the menu.

We took advantage of the half-dish option offered by Elena from the beginning, and went for half

(NIS 48) on an intermediate portion standard.

If the choice of dish was accompanied by some deliberation, a tiny bite and first sensors from the dish brought a wide smile from ear to ear, of pleasure and satisfaction.

Oh, how delicious it was.

Homemade picchi noodles, excellent, in just the right state of aggregation, and a synergy of flavors derived from the seemingly simple encounter between butter, pecorino and black pepper.

Quite a few local restaurants have been offering cachio a papa dishes in recent years.

I have a sheer fondness for this dish, which seemingly can also be prepared at home successfully if the right ingredients are chosen and meticulously executed, and I do not remember when I ate such a good cacho a papa here.

The encounter between the slightly spicy omami (excellent pecorino), the depth and richness of the butter and the spiciness of the hot pepper, on a bed of peaches that were amazingly absorbing it all, produced those Gregory of happiness that basic Italian food at its best knows how to evoke.

If we had ordered a whole dish it would have been way too much.

The proportion of the half was a stamp in place.

Octopus skewers in Elena (Photo: Noam Frisman)

comes

as one or two skewers (75 for one, 135 for two).

We went for one skewer, for another intermediate standard.

The octopus chunks on the skewer came with lamb fat, laid out on a potato, in a yogurt sauce.

There was quite a bit of octopus in this dish.

It softens and burns properly and lamb fat has done what lamb fat knows how to do - add corrupt richness and remind again of the new Elena's correspondence with Arab cuisine.

In the yogurt sauce we met again in the dip.

Not the best we ate at this meal but definitely a fun dish.

Next dish:

(NIS 120) was taken from the mains section.

The calamari and shrimp were seared in a plancha and sat on a mottled bean stew that was also in it - guess what?

Baptism.

The seafood was quality and came with the right burn.

The beans brought a touch of delicious stews and dipping, huh?

The truth is that it really suited there as well but it seems to have started to create an effect of repetitiveness that you should pay attention to in the kitchen.

It was a good and worthy meal, at times also excellent, given the doses of carbohydrate in which it also created a degree of explosion threshold.

We felt that dessert-dessert would burden us and we were happy to find out that alongside baked desserts there is also the

(NIS 36) - Home ice cream immediately in three flavors: honey yogurt, strawberry sorbet and strawberry mascarpone.

Well, I wonder if the non-ice cream desserts are closer in level to Elena's quality food, because the gelato is not quite.

Three large, super generous balls, in three different serving dishes were there.

The honey yogurt ball was reasonable, even if it took a little too much sweetness.

The strawberry sorbet ball was quite mediocre, and suffered from a sweeping over-sweetness.

The strawberry mascarpone ice cream has already raised concerns that we may have accidentally stumbled upon a branch of Golda - the successful crowd of ice cream chains that children love, a kind of Coca-Cola corporation of the ice cream world in Israel, and something that people with a degree of finesse do not really consume.

One word to sum up the dessert chapter: disappointment, especially compared to everything that preceded ice cream.

Elena is everything that contemporary Tel Aviv restaurants do not: it has peace, quiet, a sense of detachment from the outside.

You do not meet that door, which opens and brings in a cold wind in the middle of winter;

Not the closing of winter, sitting on city sidewalks with a constant presence of buses outside;

Not the overly loud music, the weak outdoor heaters and the need to transmit cool vocals.

This is a decent restaurant, for a decent audience, where from time to time you hear English, from the few tourists who are still in it, and could have been not here at all either.

The food has undergone, as mentioned, a considerable change.

The base threshold is closer to very good than Latov, and there are also dishes - in our case the roasted eggplant pizza and the kacho a papa - in which it is really excellent.

Chefs Zur and Shadmi know what they are doing, it's perfectly clear.

The food they serve reveals a surprising degree of maturity relative to their young age (30) and the fact that this is actually the first restaurant they lead themselves.

Although the gelato dish seemed like a customer from other content worlds, it was good enough and systematic enough, so that at this initial stage of their work in Elena, it was possible for them to slip it.

It is not trivial that a restaurant that has been established for many years in such a mainstream position will allow professionals to go for such a sweeping change of direction, in the Arab-Shami direction.

Now that they have proven that this adaptation can be done elegantly and still maintain the sense of decency that is so important to the captains of such a place, it's time to let Tire and Shedmi go one step further, loosen up the buttoned shirt a bit more, pour a nuance or two of funk into it all.

Obviously they can, it would not be too bold a gamble to assume they would succeed, and it is quite clear that it would be fun (only if possible, please, no more baptism).

One of the pleasant surprises of recent times.

invoice:

Roasted Little Jam - 65

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