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Friday May 27, 2005

Evolving Israeli tastes reshape the falafel ball

by talya halkin
jerusalem post service

jerusalem | The ever-changing chickpea fritter reflects Israel’s shifting mores

Ido Shapira, the chef at one of Israel’s finest catering companies, Katlit, was quick to correct me when I called him up to ask about what I referred to as his “tuna falafel.”

“I actually call it a tuna beignet,” he said, before launching into an explanation of how he mixes fresh fish with a variety of spices and shapes it into small balls. After deep-frying them in a coat of breadcrumbs, he nestles each one in a martini glass, where it floats in a pool of mango salsa.

“But,” he added helpfully, “I do make a dessert I call ‘chocolate falafel,’ which is a chocolate truffle deep-fried in a coat of breadcrumbs and nuts. People love it. After all, falafel is still one of the most popular foods in Israel.”

When Shapira undertook a survey recently to find out what his clients’ favorite dishes were, the list included goose liver confit, an entrecote steak in a Dijon mustard and chimichuri sauce, and squab glazed in date syrup.

“In general,” Shapira told me, “Israelis expect to constantly be excited with new dishes. I would say that one of the defining traits of Israeli taste today is the enjoyment of culinary wit and the constant desire for innovation.”

Although they hail from the high end of the Israeli culinary industry, the favorite dishes chosen by Shapira’s customers make a general statement about the state of contemporary Israeli taste. More than any other dish, however, it is the transformation of the falafel ball — reincarnated, in this case, as a sophisticated appetizer and dessert — that charts the vicissitudes of Israeli taste.

In an article titled “Falafel: A National Icon,” food scholar Yael Raviv has charted the process through which, in the first decades of the last century, falafel was gradually disassociated from its Arab origins and self-consciously made into a symbol of national Israeli cuisine. For Jewish pioneers in the years before Israeli independence, Raviv writes, culinary refinement and home cooking were repudiated as the markers of an abandoned bourgeois existence, which had been replaced with ideals of productivity and efficiency.

“As a quick, no-frills, affordable and satisfying dish,” writes Raviv, “falafel accorded with those ideals.”

Israeli taste, like Israeli culture in general, has come a long way over the past 50-odd years. The very same fritter that was once a symbol of simple, functional food has been transformed through a quest for refined indulgence.

Yaser Taha, the current doyen of the Abu Shukri restaurant in Jerusalem’s Old City, shook his head in dismay when I mentioned chocolate falafel to him, and turned to the six falafel balls placed like an offering on the small plate in front of us. Hot and crispy, they were made to order from chickpeas he had pounded himself.

Until not so long ago, humus, falafel and schnitzel were considered the holy trinity of Israeli cuisine. Beginning in the mid-1980s, however, Israeli taste was jolted by a series of culinary revolutions. As Israelis began to travel abroad more frequently and to eat in better restaurants, they became increasingly sophisticated diners who expected finer products and wider culinary variety.

Eyal Shani’s now-defunct Jerusalem restaurant Oceanus became the mecca for an increasingly sophisticated and wealthy clientele, which happily traded in the values of thrift, frugality and modesty for the world of luxury dining.

A little over a decade ago, Shani’s shrimp falafel, which vied for attention with his crabmeat kebab, was the first Trojan horse to infiltrate the domain of traditional falafel. Shortly after, Orna Agmon and Ella Shine, the owners of the upscale and consistently popular Orna and Ella cafe on Tel Aviv’s Rehov Sheinkin, began thinking about opening their own falafel place. For three years, they researched both this dish’s origins and the series of grassroots transformations it had undergone in the hands of Israeli falafel stand owners.

“We were constantly thinking about how to innovate while preserving the essence of falafel-ness,” Shine explains. “We wanted to maintain a certain kind of integrity, not to mix everything with everything. There were certain boundaries we felt we wouldn’t cross … The generation that followed us already did much crazier things.”

ISRAEL IN THE GARDENS

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