Brewhaha

Chocolate almond croissant

Place: Roasters, Bezalel pedestrian mall, Jerusalem

When: Thursday, midday

Environment: The very small storefront sits on the corner of a pedestrian walkway and a downtown street. The street is noisy with construction and traffic, including loud horns from impatient trucks. The inside has a counter to order at, some shelves with coffee beans for purchase, and a display case with pastries and sandwiches. Two stools sit at a small counter and face the window. Outside on the dark stone pedestrian street are a dozen small tables with black folding chairs, large umbrellas to provide some shade, and additional chairs beside large canisters that serve as tables. More seating faces the storefront, across the walkway. It’s a bustling area, and not great if you want to focus on anything (reading, working, a conversation) – unless you have excellent powers of concentration. But it does have that urban feel and is a splendid spot for people watching.

My Order: Small cappuccino (NIS 13); chocolate almond croissant (NIS 19).

The low-down: The coffee was excellent. Pretty, hot, heavy on coffee flavor, not washed out by the milk. But full disclosure: I typically buy my coffee beans from Roasters, so I already knew this place delivered on the coffee front. That said, a good cappuccino isn’t always a given. While Roasters offers nice sandwiches (a particular artichoke sandwich really caught my eye), I was in a pastry mood on this visit. I went with the chocolate-almond combo. It was actually a bit chewier than one might expect from a purportedly flaky pastry, but the flavor was good – the sweet almond paste, mixed with the flakey powdered sugar pastry and the (formerly gooey) chocolate inside. The sweetness of the pastry might have been too much, were it not for the bitter coffee to balance it out.

Who else was there: A guy in his late twenties or early thirties sat alone. He wore a light blue t-shirt and khaki-like pants. He had a fresh, close-cropped haircut and short beard. He wore Naot leather slip-on sandals. He kept one hand in his pocket while he read a paperback book. As he read, he faced the pedestrian walkway, but didn’t seem distracted by the pedestrians themselves.

After an entire summer in reserve duty in Gaza, he finally got a little quiet time back home before he resumes his studies in the fall. Tuning out the noise around him is a skill he learned while surrounded by gunfire and explosions. Reading a book on a sunny day is a luxury he earned and savors.