The chef and owner, Omar Alelam, opened his doors last year with the goal of merging molecular gastronomy with the flavors his Syrian-born grandmother taught him growing up in Ein Mahil, an Arab village near Nazareth.
“Arab food in the north was stuck with a stigma that it’s hummus, meat and salad,” Mr. Alelam told us after we worked our way through a bright, fire-roasted eggplant starter, an impossibly buttery lamb neck sous-vide for 72 hours, and a surprising crème brûlée in which tahini had been used in place of the traditional egg. “I know there’s more modern, innovative Palestinian food, and I wanted to be the one who brought it.”
Mr. Alelam, big and burly, is well known to Israeli foodies after appearing on the first season of the cooking competition “Game of Chefs.” Arab food in Israel is modernizing, he said, because the Arab community is modernizing, its once-insular towns and villages slowly expanding toward the Jewish-majority cities that surround them.
As for how to categorize his cuisine, however, Mr. Alelam had less to say. “I don’t involve politics with my food. It’s not Palestinian or Syrian, it’s modern Arab food,” he said. “It’s a problem for me, trying to define it, because it’s updated but still very old. I’m still debating with myself how to call it.”
