Foodie Moment in Tel Aviv: Tzfon Abraxes

Lest anyone think that all we ate was hummus, Amnon and I took an afternoon off the street food circuit (and the street food is unbelievably good in Israel) to go lunch at a highly rated chef restaurant: Tzfon Abraxes. The chef, Eyal Shani, co-host of Israel's reality cooking show competition, Master Chef Israel, is something of a media bad boy, complete with court cases and questionable instagram posts.

We went for the business lunch to this hip, energetic, chef driven restaurant on Lillienblum 40 and we had a blast. We sat at the bar, which I highly recommend, because you see the kitchen and the food being prepared.

It is not unusual for the cooks to turn up the music and shake their booties as they cook - part of the ambience. The playlist is excellent, we caught the Doors, B.B. King, and other greats.

One of the signature motifs of the restaurant is the use of paper, beginning with the butcher paper mat place settings.

We began with their house refreshment—raspberry soda prepared with a squirt of raspberry syrup and a soda fountain before your eyes.

There is, of course, a very good wine list.

L'chayim

The bread, also served in paper with an onion tucked inside, was unbelievable good. I don't even know how to describe it, but it was dense and had a delicious crust. Served with crème fraîche it is a meal unto itself.

The soup was unbelievable—an onion soup in which the onions were melted into an onion stew, and more of their delicious bread inside.

Next we had our two appetizers, both signature pieces of the restaurant.

 spinach melting into itself

The spinach was delicious—and here is a video explaining how it is made. The video also gives you a glimpse of Shani's evangelical eccentricities, mad mutterings and philospophical pronouncements.

But for me the real winner, the life-changing taste experience, was the roasted cauliflower, also served in paper. I have never tasted anything like it. The cauliflower was soft and melted inside and almost buttery and even the leaves were edible. 

And here you can learn the culinary secrets of how this cauliflower is made, who the real author of the dish is, our secret desire to eat the head of our enemy, and a lot about ego and Israeli hair styling.

After this the afternoon slid a little downhill. It is meat-based menu so we had ordered one of the bean dishes as our "main" along with a second stew. The lima bean dish arrived after a very, very long wait.

It was so delicious that the wait was forgiven.
We were then told, by a very charming and beautiful manager who hadn't said a word to us up until that moment, (all the waiters and waitresses were beautiful young people,) that our main course had been burnt. Oozing charm and attentiveness, he asked — would we like to try something else and they will rush it? Sure we said.

And we waited

and waited....

and waited...

and waited....

and waited.

In the end it took almost an additional 40 minutes, at which point we were no longer hungry and hadn't been particularly interested in that dish anyway. So we grabbed our pudding (comes with biz lunch.)

Amnon rolled up his finished drawing, presented it to the waitress, who was delighted to see herself in the drawing, and we hit the road.

Despite the failed main course and the long wait, which was a bit of a buzz kill, I would highly recommend this—for the vibe, the performance aspect, the novel paper plating, and mostly the really creative food.