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Sahara Palace: One of the best restaurants in Israel has just improved, and the "landlord went crazy" - voila! food

2023-06-08T05:03:20.065Z

Highlights: The Sahara Palace Restaurant is an Arabic restaurant in Kfar Nin, led by chef Nashat Abbas. The menu at the Sahara Palace is extensive and you can easily get lost. If you eat kebabs and share two or three salads, you can close the matter for NIS 100-120 per head. Avi Efrati's review of the food, menu, service and price. All the details in Walla's article! Food >>>. The Sahara Palace was a very serious claimant to the best Arab crown in Israel.


The Sahara Palace Restaurant is an Arabic restaurant in Kfar Nin, led by chef Nashat Abbas. Avi Efrati's review of the food, menu, service and price. All the details in Walla's article! Food >>>


Consolidation, focus and refinement in execution. Sahara Palace (Photo: Shani Brill)

A little more than two years have passed since the restaurants opened, with the return of restaurants from the long COVID-19 freeze, the Sahara Palace Restaurant. Chef Nashat Abbas was known until then as the person who, together with his brother Hussam, led Al Babur restaurants for many years. From the outset, it was clear that the Sahara Palace was a very serious claimant to the best Arab crown in Israel. Abbas, it seemed at the time, gathered all his talents, accumulated experience and great meticulousness into a particularly impressive whole, which elevates Arab-Shami-Galilean food with exceptional qualities.

To all Avi Efrati's

food reviews, I visited it several times since then, on my way to or from the north, and all these times it was clear - Abbas is not resting. It was possible to identify a process of crystallization, focus and refinement in execution. A little over two years after my first meal there, documented in this section, I returned to the Sahara Palace to try to understand what is currently going on there; And to understand whether the great pretender to the throne is indeed now fulfilling the great promise that was inherent in her.

Huge table, and certainly not "mezes". Sahara Palace (Photo: Shani Brill)

If you eat kebabs and share two or three salads, you can close the matter for NIS 100-120 per head. Possible, but a bit of a shame

The menu at the Sahara Palace is extensive and you can easily get lost. You can also stay in the generic dishes of the genre and go for hummus, fattoush and kebabs. If you eat kebabs and share two or three salads, you can close the matter for NIS 100-120 per head. It's possible, but a bit of a shame. We debated for a moment about the identity of the route we would choose and went for the large and extensive option: the Sultan's meal, basically a nine-stage tasting menu, priced at NIS 220 per diner.

Listing the meal on its designated menu page implies a good and respectable amount of food. It seems quite a lot, but not something diners with capacity are unable to accommodate. When the food started arriving at the table we were a bit startled by the quantity. What is innocently described on the menu as "beginners with mezes" turned out to be a huge table full of appetizers, none of which are out of proportion to us as "meze."

There were lots of salads and appetizers, each in a large bowl - great greens, bursting with umbrellas and quality, on yogurt; Bloody tomato salad with onions, slightly spicy, with really enormous tomatoes; excellent birch with wild mustard leaves; Artichoke salad with a gentle and good smoking touch; salad made from basil leaves and grapes; Macados (pickled eggplant) excellent sour-spicy; avocado salad; Pita bread and focaccia, pickles and a plate of wonderful vine leaves on goat yogurt.

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Madness on the table. Sahara Palace (Photo: Shani Brill)

Here we no longer held back and finished everything. It was so delicious. We realized we were at a rolling food event of the not entirely sane kind and released the brakes, followed by the flood

In this baggage, hereinafter referred to as "mezes", there was more than enough food for two hungry people. We began to understand that this was an event we had never imagined. We had the Sultan's dinner on our first visit here. It didn't include that many appetizers then. We realized that it was worth stopping and saving room for the future. We ate a third of the mass, maybe less, and the rest came - the Acre Stew, the famous wild thorn known in Hebrew as the round acre; A long platter with well-made meat kobe, two kinds of cheese pastries, very good, and three plates stuffed with zucchini in rice, with yogurt sauce, eggplant stuffed with meat and pumpkin stuffed with meat. The last two are good, the first is wonderful. Here, too, we realized that it was worth tasting only, because there is still a lot ahead of us.

Another stuffed one arrived - a large portion of Kobe with smoked meat deconstructed with stuffing and freaky in a shell. It was especially tasty but we also tasted olive from it because we haven't gotten to the mains yet. As at the end of the meze episode, here too - if we had finished this Kobe Friki we could have closed the set, completely satisfied.

Next dish was Mashuka kebab - charcoal-grilled kebab patties on hummus and tahini. The hummus was unconventional. It seemed that the granules were deliberately cooked not to soften completely but to a kind of "al dente" and instead of being ground they underwent a kind of breakage. On them was tahini with strong smoking flavors. Together with the wonderful kebab, whose lamb flavors were dominant, it was a really crazy dish and it also belonged in terms of place for the foreplay, not yet a main one. Here we no longer held back and finished everything. It was so delicious. We realized that we were at a rolling food event of the not entirely sane kind and released the brakes, followed by the flood.

At its peak. Abbas (Photo: Shani Brill)

It was not a dish for two who had already eaten everything described so far, it was a main for two for all intents and purposes

Now it's been time for mains - jumbo shrimp on lentil stew with fennel leaves and raisins. It was not a dish for two who had already eaten everything described so far, it was a main for two for all intents and purposes. The shrimps were very high quality, the touch of the coals gave them an extra round of flavor and they too you couldn't stop eating, but we stopped anyway, because we couldn't anymore.

A huge lamb chop for each, on lots of freaky cooked in chicken broth, was the sequel. Surprisingly, it was the least good portion of the meal. The meat was not mellow enough, it may have been seared a little too much on the grill.

Last main - lamb ossobuco madonna who spent six hours in a pit of whispering coals in the ground, with lots of rice and hot yogurt sauce. Incredibly tasty but here we already really tasted olive and asked to pack. We desserted in a variation on basbosa, with a base of cream, milk, kaimek and ricotta baked with semolina on top. Really tasty. We were already blown away but desserts, so the cliché goes, have a separate digestive system.

Nothing short of wonderful. Sahara Palace (Photo: Shani Brill)

Most columns in this section describe far fewer servings, with each receiving much more text. Detailing in the usual resolutions of all the dishes of this sultan's meal would have created an archaic and tedious effect. That's why I went into little detail, but you can also write such an inclusive statement - except for the lamb chop, which was less good, and two of the stuffed ones that were "fine", the rest of the food soars to the sky.

meticulous attention to the raw materials, meticulous execution down to the smallest details, sharpness and accuracy of the food; All these together give eating here an X factor that elevates the seemingly popular Shami food to the high, high-end cuisine.

Chef Abbas has definitely come a long way in the two years since he opened the Sahara Palace and the food he puts there today is nothing short of wonderful. The amounts in the meal? There is no doubt that this is a deal from the "landlord went crazy" genre. Everything we left and there was no fresh vegetable was packed and we went home with two large bags. We heated the madonna, for example, the next day and ate as a large main for two, preceded by cubes, cheese pastries, vine leaves, labneh, hummus and smoked tahini.

Sultan dinner indeed. The account at Sahara Palace (Photo: ShutterStock)

Not only does quantity not compromise quality; The quality resonates with each and every dish

Even if it were only half of what was showered on our table, it would be satisfying. As I said, I'm used to writing about a lot less food that costs a lot more. What's significant here is that, unlike places that give a lot of food, not only does the quantity not harm the quality; The quality resonates from each and every dish almost in a way that is impossible not to take your hat off to Abbas, who for many years hid behind his older brother and is now in his prime.

Classic Shami cuisine, with occasional updates, arrives at the Sahara Palace to the top of its show. It's a bit of a shame that for religious reasons it was impossible to accompany this meal with good arak with ice. She undoubtedly deserves it.

What is more, and if possible of course, it is better not to come there during the peak hours of activity of the restaurant - Friday evening or Saturdays. It's a huge place that is probably much more pleasant to be in more relaxed time slots.

It's hard to compare different restaurant genres when chef restaurants, bistros, wine bars, pan-Asian restaurants and Arabic restaurants are on the agenda. The attempt to quantify factors into absolute values is complex, and certainly not science.

Nonetheless, sometimes there is no choice and it is necessary to generalize. I guess at the moment for quantity and touch on quality only - the so excellent Shami food we met at Sultan Barman Sahara's dinner reflects a restaurant that is undoubtedly one of the best in Israel at the moment, in absolute values. Foodies, please note.

Sahara Palace, Nin, 04-6935101

  • food
  • Food reviews
  • Avi Efrati

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  • Restaurant review

Source: walla

All life articles on 2023-06-08

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