Quaffable Art
“Wine was served in goblets of gold, each one different from the other, and the royal wine was abundant, in keeping with the king’s liberality.” Esther 1:7
Stuffing the gnomic into gastronomic, palette to palate, culinary art courageously curated, platefuls of luxury signifiers. Outside may be sweating 39 degrees Celsius but inside this sanctum a coolly slick multisensory performance is underway. Welcome to the great indoors. The dining room and bar are reassuringly luxurious and luxuriously reassuring. Upmarket upscale top drawer top notch high class high octane, Shila on Ben Yehuda Street is a byword for brilliance, a deliverer of orchidaceous new delights. The ravishing people are here and there are some rather attractive couples at the other tables too. So … drum roll … the food is a triumph! Israeli fayre with an international sensibility personalised by local legendary Chef Sharon Cohen who knows his spring onions and summer truffle and cuts the mustard, never overegging the soufflé. It’s not cheap but what price umami? Worth every shekel.
Shila surpasses our wildest expectations and our expectations are pretty wild. Taste good dining in a good taste dining room. Flam Blanc from the Judean Hills, le goût de l’été, arrives in glasses big enough to swim in, capturing the lingering essence and aromatic bouquet of the grape. Knight that vintner! B’tayavon! L’chaim! Breathe in. Our amuse gueules, such appetising appetisers, are veritable constructs that look good enough to wear. Appealing to our inner epicureans are the Mexican fish burger, sea fish tartare on brioche and jalapeño aioli (Frances Scott Fitzgerald’s description in his short story My Lost City springs to mind: “a brilliant flag of food, called an hors d’oeuvre”). The main event is prawn and asparagus gnocchi with fresh tomato salsa, an engaging marriage of sea and farm, another orthonasal olfactory hit. Hervé This comes from a molecular gastronomy angle in Molecular Gastronomy, 2008, “As early as 1651 Nicholas de Bonnefons mentions small pieces of dough that have been ‘scalded’ in boiling water … from the oldest échaudés to potato gnocchi and gnocchi à la Parisienne the principle is the same: one begins with a dough composed of starch, egg, and water.”
“It is nearly impossible to not eat well in Israel,” raves local commentator Claudia Stein. Pudding, like revenge, is best served cold. Lemon and raspberry sorbet is as welcome as a snow-cooled drink at harvest time. Breathe out. Such a bacchanalian bout of riotous Augustan reminiscence! Our long languorous lunch, a carefully coordinated culinary voyage from primacy to regency, is coming to a climax. Service is so smooth. Ding-a-ling! You can get the staff these days. A postprandial elixir of strawberry daiquiri appears … ecstasy extended. It’s enough to stimulate the dopaminergic neurons of our ventral tegmental area into overdrive.
The beautiful changes. Later, much later, backed by the certainty of chance, we will ride through Tel Aviv in a sports car with the warm wind in our hair, channelling our inner Tamara in a Green Bugatti (she who was, “Possessed of a dazzling talent, a striking beauty, and an irresistible force of personality,”) sucking on our cheroot in a sherut, driving through the hazy mist of sweltering heat, finding forever in a fleeting moment, tasting the salty sultriness while nebulous desires persist and pursue us across a restless afternoon. Friday Street, plus one. Gilded days, halcyon days, hallowed days, happy days, hosted days, ordained days, salad days. Spinning round in the fields of freedom. The whole shebang and shenanigans. Such seductiveness; a momentary embrace; a dalliance to the cadence of time. A dynamic magnetised meeting. A hookah. A hooley. A hooray. As Elizabeth Bowen quipped in The House in Paris, “Any year of one’s life has to be lived.” In Bowen’s Court and Seven Winters she goes further, “no Irish people – Irish or Anglo-Irish – live a day unconsciously … for generations they have been lived at high pitch.” Our time is now. Élan has a new.
“People will come from east and west and north and south, and will take their places at the feast in the kingdom of God.” Luke 13:29
(Extract with alternative imagery from the bestseller SABBATH PLUS ONE Jerusalem and Tel Aviv).
