Optimism is needed at the entrance.
Grand Cafe Turquoise (Photo: Yaron Brener)
It started as an attempt, optimistic but not really realistic to eat lunch at Grand Cafe Turquoise on just a weekday.
We arrived at the restaurant, which is located in the Ramat Aviv Mall and where it is not customary to reserve tables, we registered with the hostess and won number 37. Optimistic as mentioned, we estimated that it would probably take about twenty minutes and headed for a tour of the fancy mall, which in general evokes associations with airport duty free.
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we went to walk around the shops and saw that the other cafes in the mall had no shortage of free tables.
When we noticed, more than 35 minutes later, that we had advanced to only 21st place, we gave up and gave up.
On Friday evenings and for Saturday brunch, the Grand Cafe does take reservations, by phone only.
Surprisingly, it went easier than we imagined and we arrived on Friday evening.
under the radar
Grand Cafe Turquoise (Photo: Neta Salonim)
Ingathering of the exiles.
Grand Cafe Turquoise (Photo: Neta Salonim)
If it wasn't clear by now, Grand Cafe Turquoise is a kind of natural phenomenon.
A restaurant that is open seven days a week from 09:00 in the morning, and is always full.
If Rishon Lezion has Soho as a restaurant for everyone, Grand Cafe is Soho in the style of the northern suburbs of Tel Aviv.
Like Soho, it also operates completely under the radar of the food sections of the media.
We went out to her to wonder about Cankana.
The mall parking lot, which on a mid-week afternoon you can walk around for long minutes looking for parking, is probably completely empty on Friday evening.
The restaurant itself is full, without those entry lines.
The Grand Cafe has an interior space, located between the mall's stores, and a kind of exterior space, facing the exterior windows.
We were seated in the space inside the mall.
The tables and chairs of the bistro and also the active bar do not eliminate the atmosphere of the mall, certainly when sitting in front of the Super Pharm.
We were cold.
We looked around.
Most of the people sitting were wearing jackets.
We took off the Uniqlo and put it back on.
Won't we cheer?
We already forgot that you can pay this way for food in Tel Aviv. Now let's talk about the same food
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All inclusive menu.
Grand Cafe Turquoise (Photo: Neta Salonim)
The food concept: Blend.
On one side of the large manoylan page is a menu for the whole family with a multitude of influences.
The first ones have tartar, carpaccio, tacos and also chicken soup with chicken breasts.
There are salads, sandwiches, a pasta section, fish mains and meat mains with schnitzel-hamburger-chicken, as well as goulash and beef fillet steak.
The other side is sushi based on its biases, with Asian appetizers and salads, and the most prominent element in it is its high pricing.
There were three of us and at Grand Cafe as in Grand Cafe, the first order went to Blend - such a postcard kibbutz I'm not sure we've ever had - a locust kebab (NIS 78), fresh chicken soup (NIS 52) and seaweed salad (NIS 62) from the sushi menu.
The three kebab patties sat on a small vegetable salad, really excellent vegetables, with a lot of tahini.
The meatballs themselves, three in number, were quite average in taste, with anemic seasoning and a fair amount of dryness.
The chicken pockets in the fresh soup were particularly good, but the soup itself is thin, flavors are not consolidated, not good enough.
The Asian salad was large and generous in its portions and was based on wakame seaweed, bean noodles, cucumber, sesame and coriander.
If the other first two had at least one good element, the salad was all bad.
He radiated fatigue instead of freshness and an Asian sauce saturated with umami flavors and sugar killed him.
If in the previous two there was a mention, even if partial, of a high-quality culinary creator, the salad signified a free fall from a great height, with a parachute to be opened, into the worlds of mall food.
Delicious and happy.
Grand Cafe Turquoise's seafood spaghetti (Photo: Neta Salonim)
Not bad, not great.
Grand Café Turquoise's chicken steak (Photo: Neta Salonim)
Mains: chickpea steak (90), seafood spaghetti (110) and Hungarian goulash with split peas (96).
First of all: Expensive!
NIS 90 for a chicken steak is really a lot of money.
He himself was fine, without outstanding merits but also without wrongdoing.
It sat on a mashed potato, not soft enough, and a very tasty slightly caramelized onion.
Since it had no unusual added values of raw materials or method of preparation, and it was another not bad but not excellent chicken steak, which you will get in a lot of places, there is no escaping the fact that its cost is quite outrageous.
Although there was very little seafood in the seafood spaghetti and 110 shekels is a lot of money for spaghetti with some shrimp and calamari, I liked this dish after the hen steak because it was delicious.
A really good seafood stock, with tomatoes, zucchini and a spicy touch made it delightful.
And since we have already begun to understand that frenzied fluctuations and considerable differences in the level of food are probably the name of the game here, the goulash portion has arrived to download.
Dismal, discolored, disgusting, completely flavorless beef stew, with pieces of meat that are not softened enough.
If the Asian salad dish transferred the qualities to the food courts of the malls, the goulash reminded of working restaurants of the less good kind.
We gave up and did not eat it.
Not a lot.
Grand Cafe Turquoise's account (Photo: ShutterStock)
We shared a Basque cheesecake (48) for dessert.
A huge cake arrived, almost double the size of similar dishes in other restaurants.
Generosity, we already understood, is part of the secret of success here.
It lacked a degree of fluidity in the middle and had a hint of over-sweetness but bottom line it was a big and proper cheesecake, which we devoured with pleasure.
Although we gave up one main course, we finished the meal full.
In addition to the all-embracing menu, which leaves no one - including the grandmother, the aunt and the vegan teenager - without several choices, the nice size of many of the dishes is also a factor in success.
We were not charged for the goulash we didn't eat and the meter stopped at NIS 440 for three, before drinks and service.
With the goulash we would reach 536.
Not much in terms of chef restaurants.
Expensive in terms of basic and generic food.
If all the dishes, or at least most of them, were in line with the successful parts of the meal, it would be great and worth it.
Grand Cafe is built as a restaurant for the whole family.
In light of the multiple zigzags of qualities, there is no choice but to determine that a family belonging to the connoisseur side of the scale will leave a meal there with noticeable differences in the diner's experience and an overall feeling of so-and-so.
Grand Cafe Turquoise, Einstein 40, Ramat Aviv Mall
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