Pricey, but Worth It: This May Have Been the Best Meal of My Life
I will dream about it on full-moon nights. Cherry salad / PR
For years, the restaurant Turkiz was one of my home ports on the way to a winery in the north, on the way back to Tel Aviv, or when meeting someone coming from outside the city who would announce in advance, “I don’t feel like going into Tel Aviv.” I would stop by Turkiz whenever I did not need to drive, which opened up the option of sipping a little cognac at the bar in the middle of the day, usually from the bottle that was routinely in the hands of Eitan Vardi, a familiar figure in Tel Aviv nightlife and once the partner of the owner, Eli Samari, back in the days of Turkiz in Jaffa.
I will never forget my first visit to the place, less because of the food and more because of the atmosphere. I was then working at Globes, which used illustrations instead of photos, and suddenly it seemed to me that all the illustrations from the business daily had come to life before my eyes. In a bizarre way, the evening crowd made me embrace Turkiz דווקא in the mornings, for what came to be known as “breakfast that gets complicated.” The meaning was: eat every dish on the breakfast menu until the lunch menu arrives, and accompany it with “sandwiches,” the nickname for a cup of espresso between two shots of Hennessy.
Since then, COVID and war hit us, and the restaurant began operating only from lunchtime. The new opening hours, together with the distance from where I live in the south of the city, plus the fact that I am not part of the business milieu that characterizes much of the clientele, explain why I stopped being one of the regulars, despite my affection for the quality of the food and the spirit of the team. And yet, even as I said goodbye, I still remembered in my heart why I fell in love with it almost from the first bite. It was not only the turquoise strip resembling a seashore, visible from the bar and from many of the tables, but also the very tasty food.
This isn’t meant to become the whole emotional biography of “Turkiz and me,” but rather to say that when Y, also known as B, invited us to lunch, expectations were sky-high. Nearly a year had passed since my last visit, the kitchen had passed into the hands of a new chef, Guy Cohen, whose professional résumé includes North Abraxas, and I was genuinely excited, to the point where the only direction left was down, or so I thought.
We waited for Y at the bar with small glasses of draft Guinness, after all, it was already lunchtime and we had not drunk since morning, and almonds in water, the place’s standard welcome. Y, who is also the restaurant’s wine consultant, arrived with two bottles: the “new” Chenin Blanc, meaning the 2024 vintage, from winemaker Gabi Sadan of Kerem Shevo Winery, a wine that is always a great joy, and another one that, even if I combined all the knowledge I have accumulated over the years about wine, I would only remember as being a bit funky and French. After a small beer and a few glasses of wine, it is fair to say we had earned a few bites, so it was time to dive into the menu.
We started with two tuna dishes: tuna sashimi with zucchini, pistachios and labneh (96 shekels), and tuna tataki with corn, chili and bottarga (also 96 shekels). We tasted a bite of this and a bite of that, and decided to finish the sashimi first because of its delicate and elegant flavors. “Delicate” does this excellent dish an injustice, because it is more accurate to say that if it were not for the pistachios, one could have placed a thin carving of zucchini on the tongue, a piece of tuna on top of it, and let them melt away in the mouth on their own. The pleasant tartness of the labneh together with the nutty taste of the pistachio completed a wonderful dish.
After this tuna trip, we moved on to the tataki, seared tuna on a bed of corn. Here I almost screamed with joy. The tuna was thick and meaty, the corn beneath it sweet, the use of bottarga, which has a strong sea flavor, as seasoning testified to the precise hand of someone who knows what they are doing, and the chili gave such a sharp kick that we kept dipping bread into the dish, a ritual that repeated itself with several other dishes, so as not to lose a single drop of the sauce. Flavors of a holiday in Thailand.
We stayed with fish, but changed direction with a grouper skewer on pak bong and cashews, a dish that is “like Thai food,” mainly thanks to the pak bong, also known as Thai spinach. You know the saying that you can’t go wrong with a grouper skewer? Well, that rule, which holds even for beginner cooks, certainly applies to professionals, and even more pleasing was the fact that the soft flavors of the pak bong and cashews only helped this king of fish remain at the center of the dish.
The saying goes that there are many fish in the sea, and we were determined to eat most of them. So we continued with more grouper, this time crispy, on an aromatic leaf mixture with Asian sauce (120 shekels). What can be said? Whoever assembled this dish is a genius, because it is basically a kind of salad of green leaves with an amazing crunch from the fried grouper pieces. Here came another big fish, this time scumbria, a type of mackerel that some call white palamida, cured over thick slices of potatoes, dill and sour cream (88 shekels). One bite, and the mouth gets a wink from classic Eastern Europe, almost begging for a shot of vodka alongside it.
From there we cut into non-kosher territory with a six-oyster plate, Gillardeau, 260 shekels, one of my favorite foods, the only thing standing between it and me being a paywall. On the coast of Portugal, for example, there is happy hour where each oyster costs only one euro. Even in pricier France, I have eaten in La Rochelle in the Bay of Biscay and in Trouville-sur-Mer in Normandy, entire platters of this natural aphrodisiac for the price of a six-pack in Israel. To Turkiz’s credit, the oysters managed to preserve their flavors, as if they had just been plucked from the Normandy coast this morning, style included.
We continued with calamari on the plancha over a cucumber salad and nam pla (88 shekels). It was simply impossible to stop eating this dish, and we were glad to discover that the “bottarga rule” I invented a few paragraphs earlier was also valid here, in the case of a fish sauce that was easy to get carried away by but was perfectly balanced.
We wanted to move on to the meat section of the starters, but could not resist delaying the transition through what is called at Turkiz: a summer salad with cherries, kharus, fakus and Saint Angel cheese (78 shekels). What can be said about the cheapest dish we ate in this meal? Well, one word is enough: perfect. The cherries shone with sour and sweet flavors, enjoying the natural meeting with the kharus and fakus, since all three are native to this land, and alongside them the guest from France, a triple cream cheese that I am ready at any moment to marry its sister, Delice de Bourgogne, even while knowing that if you close your eyes and listen carefully, you can hear the blood vessels in your body clogging from the fat content. I began with one word, and I will end with one word as well: wow!
Cheap this is not.
We had promised a bit of meat, so here is another local treat in the form of thin slices of Golan Heights bresaola (88 shekels), a meat dish that made me think, “How good that I still have a small pint of Guinness,” before we moved on to the heavier artillery. By that stage we were already quite full, but just to complete the experience, we skipped to the main courses section of the menu with grouper pieces on pappardelle and roasted leeks (230 shekels), and a rack of lamb in the form of four sliced chops served on a salad of endive and grapes (245 shekels). Since these are the two most expensive dishes we ate at Turkiz, I think this is a good time to address the issue.
Turkiz is not a cheap restaurant, to put it mildly. Its clientele has a high economic profile, it is located on the ground floor of a luxury project, and above all, the service and the commitment to the quality of the staff, in days when the least available resource in the restaurant industry is quality labor, are phenomenal. When you add the uncompromising quality of the ingredients, you understand that cheap this cannot be. And yet, despite everything written in the previous paragraph, this restaurant has an advantage you do not find in other high-end places: the portions are generous. A couple sitting here for three starters, bread, served with tomato salsa and hot pepper in olive oil, and a bottle of wine at an accessible price, may finish a meal for 500 shekels. In a city where a single person walking into a cafe for a sandwich or salad, along with an iced coffee and a bottle of mineral water, can easily end up with a two-digit bill, one cannot complain about this pricing. One can, but one probably should not.
A blessing that is a curse upon us
We are not people who usually go for dessert, but as they say, “a pogrom is a pogrom,” and so we sampled two desserts: the first was an excellent lemon tart. The second was a halva brulee that managed to be both rich and not excessive, with the burned top replaced by a round sesame cracker topped with greenish ice cream, forgive me food gods, but after so much alcohol I could not identify it, though I would guess something in the range between matcha and green tea.
Half an hour later we could barely walk twenty steps and another twenty stairs separating the taxi door from our front door. I collapsed into the TV chair and heard my other half collapse onto the bed in the bedroom. Two hours later, when we opened our eyes, we said almost together that we no longer remembered when we had enjoyed a meal this much, and we did not know whether the fact that we live at the opposite end, literally, of the city is a curse or a blessing.
Turkiz, Sea and Sun complex, 8 Herzl Rosenblum, Tel Aviv
