Israeli breakfast and Israeli food in general
Americans have plagiarized the great foods of the world and put their own twist on original seasonings to make them more palatable to our whimpy taste buds. Yeah, we have great beef, but our real contribution to cuisine is the American breakfast. It is a combination of fresh fruits, eggs prepared a multitude of ways, salty breakfast meats (all pork), hash browns that look like the potatoes they are, sweet hot breads like French toast, pancakes, waffles, or cinnamon rolls , and lots of basic black gut-rot coffee. Where else do you get such a substantial meal that is such an interesting combination of salty and sweet? You don’t really appreciate how great our breakfasts are until you eat breakfast in another country. What you get in another country is a breakfast that is basically nothing, or you get a giant buffet of weird stuff.
Israel falls in the giant buffet of weird stuff category. Let me say, I am not a vegetable hater. I love weird vegetables like Brussel sprouts or beets. But vegetables have to know their place and breakfast is not it. Eggplant for breakfast? Has a limper vegetable ever been invented? Seared cauliflower? Roast pepper? Baked sweet potato bites? Carrot sticks and radishes? These would be great appetizers for dinner, but not for breakfast. At breakfast, there are bowls of cooked mixed vegetable that looks like stew and has a smell that is off putting to me. Potatoes that look au gratin with weird seasoning. There are bowls of diced cucumber and tomatoes. There is humus. Smoked salmon. Unsweetend yogurt. No matter what hotel we were in there was a casserole dish filled with something that looks like poached eggs floating in marina sauce. At all of the hotels we stayed in, I could not recognize 40% of the items. The one thing I did love at the buffets was Tahini Halva. At least you get dessert with your vegetables.
This is the buffet at the Fabric Hotel. As the reviews claimed, it was pretty good. Same weird stuff, just higher quality.
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These are the eggs poached in tomato sauce and God knows what. Note the mystery dish in the upper right.
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Don’t expect fruit. Don’t expect to find any sausage or bacon. That is not happening. They don’t even bother to fake with it with turkey-based bacon and sausage. To make things worse, it was Passover, so there was no leavened bread. Six-inch square crackers for breakfast were enough to make my throat close in revolt.
At dinner, some restaurants did have potato bread. I would order extra and take it with me to have at breakfast the next day.
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Israelis try to cook eggs, and by and large, they are miserable at it. Very often, in addition to the buffet food, you can order either an omelet or scrambled eggs. The omelet often tastes as I imagine it would taste to lick a cold hamburger grill—ode de burnt oil. The scrambled eggs are often so dry that they are tasteless little crumbles. The scrambled eggs at the hotel in Eilat were so bad, I wouldn’t try eggs at subsequent hotels for about 3 days.
The weirdest thing of all is there is no urn of coffee. There were urns of hot water. In some hotels they expected you to use instant coffee. The horror of it all. Most hotels had a machine that would make you the fancy coffee of your preference, like cappuccino or a latte (provided the machine was working, but that could not be counted on). Some hotels bring you the fancy coffee of your choice, but you feel guilty guzzling coffee when someone has to make it for you by the cup. In Israel, you could get great cappuccino everywhere, including gas stations, but Israelis just don’t do black coffee, much less out of a coffee pot. They don’t even have coffee pots in the room—they have expresso machines.
This was breakfast at a restaurant in Haifa, so it was not a buffet technically, but it was like a mini buffet brought to the table. Everything struck me as not something I wanted to eat, so as a last resort, I ate the big bowl of diced cucumbers and tomatoes. It was quite heavy on the parsley.
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On the flight home, El Al served us these ice cold mini peppers and cherry tomato as part of breakfast.
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Until we got to Tel Aviv, I did not like the food in Israel. I mean no offense to anyone with that statement. The seasoning was just not my taste. Dinner is almost indistinguishable from breakfast. The meals come with “Israeli salad” which is 5 or 6 bowls of stuff like breakfast but with worse seasoning. Because I was so unenthusiastic about the food, I didn’t take but a few pictures. DH ordered steak when he could. I think I had lamb. Honestly I can’t remember what I ordered.
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The most noteworthy things about our meals in Israel was trying to read the check. We would stare at them. Turn them upside down. Stare more. We could not even figure out what was the top. We would finally find some number that was darker than the rest and figure that was the total. On this receipt, you can see a total of 345. That is shekels, not dollars. It is about $100. It is weird to read menus with entrée prices of 85-140 shekels.
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It was not until our last day in Israel that I broke the code looking at the McDonald’s receipt at the airport. This is a ridiculously long receipt for a McDouble and a coke. It dawned on me that Israelis write right to left so the total is on the left side! Also they charge 17% VAT tax.
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Israel is a middle Eastern country on the Mediterranean. I think Greek food is great. I liked the food in Turkey and in Egypt. The Israeli food is the same, but not. The menu is often a choice of kebobs: many chicken choices, lamb, fish choices, and if you are lucky a beef choice. Kebob does not mean the meat with be on a stick. Sometimes it is some heavily seasoned meatballs. They HAMMER everything with whatever spice is involved, whether it is lemon juice, olive oil, garlic, basil, parsley, or whatever. Israeli cooks seem to ascribe to the attitude of “go big or go home.” Things were just too over seasoned for me. One place I ordered humus and it came with a giant pool of olive oil in the middle on top. I ate around the edges.
In Jerusalem, I ordered sea bass at a high-end hotel restaurant called “Happy Fish”. When it came, the fish had the eyes looking at me. That fish did not look happy. I have no clue how they cooked it. It did not taste like any sea bass I have ever eaten. After that, I refused to eat fish in Israel, that is, until we went to a sushi bar.
On vacation we always get homesick for American food. At that point, we start looking for a sushi bar or an ice cream shop. (Yes, I know that sushi is Japanese, but Americans have stolen it and made it our own). Usually, sushi is fairly uniform all over the world. Israel is the first place that the sushi didn’t look or taste recognizable. They even ruined the miso soup which is hard to do. They put a different kind of seaweed in it and put so much seaweed in it, it ruined it for me.
After all this complaining about Israeli food, the food in Tel Aviv was delicious. I am going to show you the good stuff in the context of where I ate it.
The forum and I are fighting over the location of the picture below. I wanted it up at the top with the buffet at the hotel. The forum wants it here. I delete it and the forum puts it back.
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