Some months ago, when my good friend in the UK told me that she was coming to Israel for the
Eurovision Song Contest, I suggested to her that we do a Tel Aviv vegan tour together. I had read about the tours a long time ago but Mister Handmade in Israel is neither vegetarian nor vegan, so I knew it would be wasted on him! Fortunately my friend was keen to join me - and even better, she suggested it would be a nice birthday treat for me!
We took the TLVEG Vegan Tour of Tel Aviv run by
Be Tel Aviv Tours last month. It was a lot of fun and rather yummy to boot. The aim of the tour was to expose us to the best vegan places in the city and break all the myths about veganism. Whilst I am not a vegan - I am a
pescatarian - I did not feel judged at all and we learnt so much about
veganism and vegan food in Israel.
Israel has the highest percentage of vegans globally, with an estimated 5 to 8 percent of the entire population being vegan, an estimated 400,000 people and growing. Many of these vegans live in Tel Aviv and the city is ranked in the Top 10 Cities for Vegans according to
Happy Cow, the online service that lists sources of vegan, vegetarian and healthy food. There are over 50 fully vegan restaurants in the city, mostly concentrated within a 1-mile radius of the city centre. Most of the restaurants serve a combination of Israeli / Middle Eastern / Mediterranean cuisine with some western influence. Our tour saw us visiting three of these vegan restaurants, starting with a breakfast menu and ending with dessert. In each place we tasted a few yummy vegan dishes and moved on.
Our first stop was at
Zakaim, considered one of the top vegan places to eat in the city, with a menu featuring Persian and Middle Eastern fine dining. Opened by the two sisters and one brother of the Zakaim family in 2013 and under new management since 2017, the restaurant offers kosher food made from local and seasonal products. The restaurant is an ecological space where all of the materials, dishes and furniture are secondhand. We tried the hand-torn chips and a wonderful vegan
shakshuka. It was a great way to start the tour.
Our next stop was at
Citizen Garden, a
superfood boutique café. Whilst Zakaim served typical Israeli dishes, all made from scratch at the restaurant, Citizen Garden felt more like a trendy cafe serving complex super bowls combining different flavours. It was also buzzing on a weekday morning! We tried the Waldorf Skordalia toast made from a creamy almond paste with apples, walnuts, celery and pineapple, and the Salmani's bowl with sweet potato, broccoli, edamame, kale, carrot, cabbage, radish, cherry tomatoes, hazelnuts and tahini. It looked beautiful! If you like vegetables and fruit in a pure and natural form, this is the place for you.
Our final visit of the day was to
Meshek Barzilay, an organic vegetarian restaurant in the heart of Tel Aviv's Neve Tzedek neighbourhood. When I walked in, I realised that I had in fact eaten there before but, no matter, with our guide teaching us about the food and what we were tasting, it was a different experience altogether.
Meshek Barzilay is regarded as one of the leading organic vegetarian restaurants in Israel and is open for breakfast, lunch and dinner. We sat in the restaurant's sunlit patio and enjoyed the most incredible mushroom risotto made with a chestnut and walnut cream sauce and forbidden rice, also called
black rice. In addition we were served a delicious
bulgur salad, which I frankly could have kept picking at all day!
We finished our tour with vegan cheescake in honour of the forthcoming holiday of
Shavuot. Shavuot is a holiday celebrating nature, agriculture and typically dairy foods. The cheesecake we enjoyed at Meshek Barzilay was made from coconut milk amongst other ingredients and was out of this world! It was a fabulous way to end our tour.
My friend and I both really enjoyed our vegan tour. The food was wonderful and our guide, Yaniv, was very pleasant as he explained about the food, restaurants and the area. There was no judgement - though vegan himself, we did not get the impression that he was trying to turn us vegan. The tour was simply a celebration of vegan food and a lesson in veganism and the philosophy behind it.
Instead of committing to a full meal at a single restaurant, we had visited three foodie hotspots for each of the three courses and had eaten a full lunch. The quality of the food had been incredible and we left feeling very full. It was a good thing that we had come hungry!
An interesting aside, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) is considered to be the most vegan army in the world, with 1 out of 18 soldiers declaring themselves as vegan, according to Army Radio. It provides vegan meals, wool-free berets and leather-free boots and helmets to vegan soldiers. In addition, international pizza delivery service Domino's offers vegan cheese at all of their branches in Tel Aviv
and throughout Israel.
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