Oh, Bassa, I so wanted this review to end differently

We arrived at Asif Cafe prepared and ready for one of the happiest meals of recent times, but already after the first defeat we had to take a moment to try to understand what was happening here

Avi Efrati

03/03/2022

Thursday, 03 March 2022, 07:20 Updated: 07:21

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Asif's deli (Photo: Amit Giron)

Asif, the center for food culture in Israel, is without a doubt one of the most spectacular initiatives in the culinary culture in Israel ever.

The center, established with funding from the Jewish Food Society and the technology entrepreneurship giant Start-Up Nation Central, was founded to promote and document Israeli culinary culture in its variety of origins, anniversaries and shades.

Such a center, which deals with the collection and dissemination of knowledge and promotes a discourse about the culinary in Israel, which has an impressive library of cookbooks;

Curating relevant exhibitions;

Running an organic farm, and more and more, he is no less than a miracle in the town.

As someone who accompanies the local cuisine for quite some time, I was thrilled when it opened.

I identify with his ideological principles and believe in all his goals.

The significant place given to Arab-Palestinian cuisine in Israel, for the diversity that exists in it (there is no Arab food law that exists in the triangle or in the south as this is the Shami law, from the Galilee) is not just required in my eyes, is necessary.

This is where we live - Mizrahis, Ashkenazis, Arabs and more - and this is the food created here.

I have been waiting for a while since Cafe Asif - the cafe restaurant of the Asif Center - opened before I went there for a meal for review purposes.

I thought it would be right to let the place get organized a bit.

With the same excitement I felt when the center opened I arrived last week to eat at Cafe Asif.

How endearing it is to have a restaurant here that has a food service that does not seek creativity but deals with the best of the traditional repertoire that is so diverse in Israel: lattes and borscht, doshfra and khorsht sabzi, mamulim and sinia fish kebab.

With the abundance of possible culinary spaces in Israel, there really is no brother or sister and it is great to come and eat in such a place, oil is probably very careful in the raw materials it uses, vegetables and herbs, through cheeses, olive oil and everything else.

Even in the wine menu of the place, on the purity of carefully selected small local wineries, it is clear that serious, wise and ideological selection work has been done.

Chef Erez Pinchas, who returned from a long stay in the United States, is in charge of managing the kitchen.

Last week

If almost three years, two closures and one damn corona were required to make such a place - it was worth it

To the full article

Roasted veal almonds (Photo: Dana Tal)

Everything, then, was prepared and prepared for one of the happiest meals of recent times.

We sat down in the fun space on the ground floor of Startup Nation, where we had previously eaten some very decent meals in its previous format as the L28 pop-up, and started ordering.

The first came up and came

(66 shekels) with smoked mackerel, Matias and Ikra with fresh vegetables, olives and bread.

The build up I did for myself was so much that I needed a moment and another one to try to reconcile the dissonance.

The fish of both species were downright unimpressive, not even mediocre of their kind.

Ikra is completely random.

Even the vegetables, the ones that when you come to such a place you imagine each of them will be from a million, or at least a fairly privileged relative of his, were of the most ordinary and banal kind.

And the olives, the ones you imagine will be some of the best you've ever tasted - and if there is a raw material in Israel that is at its best one of the best there are in all of these olives - well, they were far below average.

So how do you reconcile the dissonance?

At this point it is too early to settle.

"It must be a dish that dressed them a little less" I thought to myself.

"The sequel will be much better."

So we continued:

(64) were, again, a demonstration of mere.

Veal almonds are among the crown diamonds of the local skewered cuisine and those that have long since been successfully naturalized in local chef kitchens as well.

Take really good veal almonds, burn them right in the right fire and serve with the proper additives, and you have a delightful folk abrasion, the place of which we will also recognize in upscale and stellar restaurants.

Like the Matias and the mackerel, the vegetables and olives from the previous round, these almonds were medium and low.

Much less than a reasonable skewer.

Tahini, ambala, smoothie, tomato and charred onion.

All of these came as a supplement.

The smoothness was reasonable.

The ambala is ok and the tahini is much less than medium.

Beyond the quality of the raw materials, this was already a matter of hand.

A good cook would take out more of these raw materials.

While this was not enough for a dish that represented the best raw materials of the genre but it was probably more successful than what we got.

(NIS 42) we ordered, which came with roasted eggplant yogurt and arisa, was better than the previous two dishes.

A thin and not big sausage, spicy, juicy but not too greasy, not wonderful but good.

The eggplant yogurt next door was reasonable and nothing more, with no special touch.

At this point we were already beginning to realize that it might not be going to be the way we thought it would be.

That there is probably a certain, not insignificant, gap between the values, goals and blessed work of the center, and the quality of the food served in the café-restaurant that operates within it.

Margaz sausage (Photo: Dana Tal)

We continued with two mains:

(NIS 108) and

(NIS 84).

The fish dish was based on sea bass with Persian lemon butter, with a chard-sour stew and a roasted dolorita.

The Persian lemon butter was good, the fish was slightly overcooked and the addition of greens below average.

This is a dish that spoke to the marvelous Persian cuisine tradition, in contemporary attire of grilled fish fillets.

It was mediocre and at most reasonable, solely given the required presumption due to the good intentions and the blessed worldview.

Gourmet Sabzi is the marvel of traditional Persian cuisine - a stew of meat, beans and plenty of herbs, with black Persian lemon.

This is a dish that a not very skilled home cook can prepare, with the right recipe, and happily serve to his guests;

A more skilled cook will bring out in his hands a really decent dish and an experienced cook with good hands will put up an addictive gourmet gourmet that you can’t stop eating.

The memory of the gourmet flavors of Keshet and Eden, the Persian restaurants that used to operate on Neve Sha'anan Street in Tel Aviv, will be etched in my memory forever and ever.

Well, to which category did the sabzi we got at Asif - the first one belong?

the second?

The glorious third?

When we ordered the dish, even before we tasted the first ones I was betting it would be great.

After the sucky show that preceded the serving of the dish, I was already less surprised to discover Sabazi from the most amateur category, one that each of the surfers would make himself at home with one of the many recipes on the net.

Not a good or reasonable performance, not a touch of an experienced home cook;

is nothing.

The dessert -

(42 shekels) - we have already ordered mainly because it was needed.

It had layers of filo with goat yogurt cream, rosemary honey and candied strawberries, and it reflected the work of a really amateur confectioner.

All of its components did not rise on their own and joined a sweeping obscurity.

The worst dish in the meal.

What surprised us and what we were happy about was that the espresso was excellent, without a doubt more successful than anything we have sampled so far.

Milfey Summer (Photo: Dana Tal)

The disappointment from the meal at Asif is not solely derived from the magnitude of the expectations.

It stems from the fact that we did not eat even one really good dish.

Most of the food was banal, with no hint of mention of what should be the starting point of such a place, even before the quality of workmanship in the kitchen: even the raw materials did not seem to reflect the best of local trout.

If you add to that the performance, the banal minus in most dishes, you get a pretty failed meal.

So handsome the kitchen, handsome the rooms, very handsome who do the craft at Asif (some of whom are colleagues I know, cherish and love for years), handsome even the hallway leading to the bathroom in the cool start-up Nation building;

Just that the food, this thing for which we came together, oh, bassa, I would like to sign this review differently, far from aligning with the content foundations of the venture.

Of all the merry work of the Asif Center, this is a weak link, which needs some dramatic improvements.

Asif Coffee Account (Photo: image processing, Walla system!)

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