Feel at Home

Green shakshuka

Place: Les Jumelles, Beit Nekofa

When: Late Monday morning

Environment: When you walk up to the front porch of the café, it’s not all that special. A few tables, a long, shared bar, and some food displays. Then you walk further into the café and it’s like someone’s grandmother’s living room, with eclectic, somewhat ornate furnishings. There’s a high-backed couch with a coffee table to eat off, and some other regular-height tables with curlicue metal legs. The seating is some wooden chairs, and some upholstered ones. The thing that really stops you in your tracks is the very fancy desserts lining the fridges, freezers, and oven racks. The decision becomes impossible before you even sit down. Since the place isn’t huge (and closes pretty early), it’s often full. There were a few empty spots when I visited, but not many. Oddly, it emptied out a bit just around lunchtime. When I asked the waitress whether it was normally like that, she said it was a fluke. The atmosphere (and temperature) inside was warm, in a pleasant way.

My Order: Green shakshuka (NIS 66); small cappuccino (NIS 13); pecan bar (NIS 41).

The low-down: The shakshuka was served in a scalding hot pan and the appealing, peppery scent of Swiss chard wafted right up. The dish had spinach, Swiss chard, eggs, cream, melty cheese, and all kinds of goodies. It was served with big chunks of warm, toasted challah, and a green side salad with a crunchy mixture of nuts on top, as well as a little dish of tehina, and another dish of olives and grated carrots. It was decadence without being too heavy. One of my pet peeves with shakshuka is when it feels like I’m eating a sauce instead of a food. Since this shakshuka was so full of greens, it actually had some mass to it. Though I prefer my eggs more runny, at least these weren’t overcooked to the point of dry – the yolks were still a bit creamy. Trying to pick a dessert was nearly as hard as trying to pick an entrée. Everything in the cases was beautiful and appealing. In the end, I settled on the pecan bar, despite the waitress’s recommendation to go with the crack pie or St. Honoré. The dessert was served on someone’s grandmother’s dishes, seeing as I was in her living room. The cappuccino was good and bitter, with a surprising hint of cinnamon (I wasn’t clear if that was intentional or unintentional, but it worked either way). The pecan bar was a multilayered concoction of pecans and cake and cream, enrobed in milk chocolate and topped with cream and caramel. It was like a luxury candy bar, and not cloyingly sweet. As I ate my dessert, I watched some patrons at another table with their monstrously large slices of lemon meringue pie and felt wistful. But let’s be honest: chocolate trumps lemon any day.

Who else was there: A mother, her sister, and her preteen daughter sat together at a table. The mother was somewhat incongruously dressed in a chunky sweater, shiny leggings, black socks, and silver mule sandals. She (and her sister) wore her hair down. The sister was a bit more put-together, in tucked-in white long sleeve shirt, velour pants, running shoes and gym socks; she had a non-traditional-colored, fuzzy, leopard-print jacket draped over the back of her chair. The daughter had thick bangs and a ponytail, and she wore a gray sweatshirt and gray sweatpants, with gym shoes.

The daughter generally looked bored and kept resting her head on her mom’s lap. She was taking a sick day from school, but rather than stay home alone, she opted to join her mother and aunt on their weekly meetup. However, between the adult conversation and the virus in her system, she just wanted to go home and watch TV in bed. She barely even touched her pasta, not to mention the dessert.