At culinary festival, chefs focus on home cooking under shadow of war

Chef Nurit Hertz wasn’t doing much cooking in the days and weeks after the Hamas attacks of October 7.

Hertz, like so many others, was trying to make it through each day. Her husband, a reservist officer, had been called up on October 7, leaving her at home with three kids who hadn’t had school for nearly a month.

She volunteered in the kitchen of the Offaime cafes owned by her friend and neighbor Hedai Offaim, cooking for soldiers and evacuees, while her kids helped pack boxes in another room.

By the time culinary guide David Kichka called her about the Israeli Cuisine Festival, rescheduled for the end of March from its usual November slot, she felt more prepared.

Her husband was home for the time being, the kids were back at school and guests were returning to her open-air foraging tours followed by multi-course, plant-based meals created from foraged treasures and served in the shade of her Matat home terrace.

“I was able to think about hosting something, for the first time in a while,” said Hertz.

Most restaurants, cafes and eateries were closed in the first days and weeks following the Hamas attacks on Israel.

In those first weeks, dozens of chefs cooked in their restaurant kitchens for the 360,000 reservists who were called up, and for the thousands of evacuees from the north and south, staying in hotels in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa and other cities.

It took a couple of months but the cafes and restaurants slowly reopened, and customers returned, eager to eat out and support those businesses.

Culinary expert David Kichka, founder of the Israeli Cuisine Festival, felt that the gradual return to dining out meant he could reschedule the annual event.

The festival, opening March 27 and running through April 12, includes two weeks of unique chef dinners, workshops, tours and open kitchens, taking place for the third year running, and in a range of locations, from Tel Aviv and Jaffa, Jerusalem and Haifa to Mazkeret Batya, Emek Hefer, Ein Hod and Caesarea.

“We felt that people have to continue living, that life calls to us and restaurants need support and customers,” said Kichka.

The theme of this year’s festival is “home,” originally set last spring, but with an entirely new meaning after the events of October 7.

“There are the evacuees who aren’t living at home, or the foods that remind them of home, and that’s their identity,” he said. “It’s about doing what we can, now.”

Plant-based chef Hertz, who was born and raised in Kibbutz Kvutzat Yavne, near the Gaza border communities, and spent her high school years with her friends who came from those kibbutzim and moshavim, has struggled to reconcile her thoughts and feelings about home since the October 7 attacks.

“Kibbutznikim like me are having a tough time right now,” said Hertz.

She left the kibbutz long ago, seeking a different kind of home than the one where she was raised, one where the kitchen, for instance, is front and center.

“I told David, I have a problem with the home kitchen as a kibbutznik,” said Hertz, whose mother, a biologist, first taught her about foraging. “Sure, I foraged as a kid, but my mother didn’t cook, she thinks of soup powder as a spice. She’d make an omelet in the microwave.”

With her own kitchen heavily based on what grows around her home, Hertz will host two events that include foraging, and a menu that connects her to the sense of home that she’s created as an adult, seating her guests under the mulberry tree in her back garden, a tree that she remembers fondly from her own childhood.

Nearly every participating chef in the Israeli Cuisine Festival has a story to share from October 7.

Ohad Levi, an award-winning chef from the Mamo restaurant in Eilat hasn’t been able to reopen since October 7 and is being hosted in a pop-up at the Danon cooking school for two nights (at NIS 290 per person).

Zakai Houja, owner and chef at Jerusalem’s Jacko Street, was also busy cooking for reservists and evacuees after October 7, while dealing with the renovation of his new restaurant, Super Hamizrach, and a planned expansion of Jacko Street, situated on Mahane Yehuda’s Agrippas Street.

Jacko Street, a culinary collaboration with his mother and cooking muse, Ilana Houja, has been around for 13 years, serving a sophisticated fusion of Kurdish cuisine in the noisy, music-filled atmosphere. The Jacko Street team had decided to enlarge the kosher restaurant and open an Asian-focused eatery on Bethlehem Road, when the attacks of October 7 took place.

Half of Houja’s staff was pressed into reserve duty while he stayed in the kitchen, taking part in the massive volunteer cooking effort to feed the sudden large number of reservists called up.

He eventually reopened and his customers returned, including soldiers and reservists on weekends off, asking him to turn the music up, to “help them air out” from the stress of the battlefront.

“I kept on asking them, ‘Are you sure? Music?’, but I was thrilled that they came,” he said. “Jacko Street is 50 percent atmosphere, and I wasn’t sure they’d want that.”

Houja was surprised by his customers’ desire to eat and drink, given the sense of mourning, loss, and tragedy that is so prevalent in Israel right now. He recalled that during the last year, as Israelis battled over the planned judicial reforms and split in society, “People were not so fun, they didn’t want to let loose.”

In fact, his customers have returned, and in great numbers on most nights, filling all of the 200 seats in the newly enlarged space that includes a spacious bar and quieter, swanky dining area for 30, with rounded banquettes and built-in ice buckets.

Some of the regulars are a little peeved that he has changed the menu, taking off the famed meat-filled cigars and asado bruschetta, but they’re sticking around.

“Jerusalemites are such a great crowd, they always have your back,” said Houja. “They come no matter the situation, no matter what attacks have taken place.”

For the festival, he and his mother created a menu focused on the foods that feel like home to them, a rice-stuffed kube dish usually made on Passover, fried Iraqi fish and a dessert of Tripoli tea and peanuts (NIS 230 ($64) per person).

“We talked and talked and I wanted the foods that mean home to her,” said Houja, who was first exposed to the food business while working in his father’s Mahane Yehuda fish store before attending cooking school and then working at Jerusalem’s best restaurants for a decade.

When he decided to open Jacko Street, it was obvious that his mother, a talented home chef, would come to cook with him.

“It’s always great cooking next to her,” he said. “Her cooking is my home base.”

More information and reservations can be made at the Israeli Cuisine Festival website. Tours, such as cookbook author Adeena Sussman’s tour in English in the Carmel Market, chef Tali Friedman in Mahane Yehuda and Nurit Hertz’s foraging tour and meal cost NIS 240 (around $67) per person.

Food luminaries, bloggers and experts such as Rotem Lieberson, Nufar Zohar and Rinat Zadok are hosting meals at their homes as part of the Open Kitchens portion of the festival, co-sponsored by the Sugat food company and costing NIS 250 (around $70) per person.