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Not by the window, please

New Statesman - 08.09.2005

Israel so called the land of milk and honey so the food should be good. But how to judge a good restaurant? Returning to the city this year I was an apprehensive visitor. Despite the relative calm of recent months the knowledge of numerous café bombings was to play on my mind. It was at the very least something of an appetite suppressant.

As a child I had visited my redoubtable grandmother at her Jerusalem home several times but some years past her hundredth birthday she eventually died last December. During the Intifida she asked us not to visit as in a country the size of Israel she said the dangers are never far from home. She lived in an established residential area outside the ancient walls, the German Colony. Elsewhere across the city the separatist influence of ultra Orthodox Jewry becomes more palpable with each visit, but here in this cosmopolitan corner with espresso bars and Viennese cake shops there is still something of the old European, secular and liberal world many of the neighbourhood’s now dwindling elderly residents brought with them.

The main street, Emek Rafaim, was a sleepy sidewalk with the odd café. Now it is very fashionable with pavement restaurants and bars that are busy into the night. One of the oldest, Caffit, sits on a corner site with tables and chairs spread across its raised patio. Three years ago a young man walked into Caffit to blow it up. He was spotted by a waiter, wrestled the ground and somehow calamity was avoided. Not so lucky though the diners at Café Hillel just across the road. One of a chain of chic eateries serving all day Israeli breakfasts, lush salads and coffee to rival anywhere in Rome, this addition to the street was new to me. So too the news that, in September 2002, it had also came attack. Again security guards had averted what might even have been a greater disaster but even though they had managed to spot and force a bomber out onto the pavement, he blew himself up killing six diners. So guards can’t guarantee safety but their presence offers some reassurance and is testament too to the Israelis’ admirable practical resolve to get on with life. With that example I’d have felt churlish and cowardly avoiding the town centre restaurants.

In March I arrived during the Jewish holiday Purim. With its emphasis on fancy dress and celebration it was a colourful reminder that this city isn’t all about bad news. We struggled to get a table anywhere near the pedestrianised Ben Yehuda street. Bags searched we eventually made it past a cordon of metal gates and sandbags for an incongruous dinner of steak and cocktails surrounded by cowboys and pirates in a chic bar with a Hebrew name and a hip-hop back beat. Emboldened by a buoyant night out it was back to Emek Rafaim for lunch the next day. We found Caffit unbowed but not as I had remembered it. The terrace, once open to the street, is now caged in and the security more complex even than the night before. Once searched and having got the OK from the guard on the door he radios into staff who operate the heavy metal door by remote control. Across the road at Café Hillel a similar operation reassures its loyal clientele, although given its history they must know that security is as much about vigilance as firepower. Talking of which, perhaps its no surprise that the toughest looking guard sits at the entrance to nearby McDonalds. The golden arches wouldn’t be my usual holiday snackerie but caught out on the Sabbath I was suddenly open to a McKebab. With an airport sized metal detector and a barely concealed weapon this was certainly a different look for Ronald McDonald.

Returning to the city last month during the week of the Gaza pull out it actually seemed less tense even than I had found it in March. Nevertheless dining out at the café closest to Ariel Sharon’s official residence seemed almost daring, but after our the July attacks in London I wanted to express a new sense of solidarity with this city. A small band of orange clad protestors flanked the PM’s house. Perhaps that’s why no one was eating on the nearby terrace outside the Resto Bar. Or maybe it is because the locals remember this once again popular haunt during its previous incarnation as the Café Moment. At the height of tensions back in 2002 it was subject to one of the capital’s bloodiest and fatal café attacks. Along side the bag checking and the metal detectors diners use their own initiative and when tensions are heightened they prefer to eat inside and away from windows. So it was at the Resto Bar while only a few miles away troops began unsettling the settlers. Or perhaps its was just the heat of sweltering August day which meant that the only person considering sitting outside was a mad Englishwoman reassured by the now familiar ritual of passing through a security cordon to eat a meal out.

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