Jerusalem’s iconic shuk risks being overwhelmed by the bar scene that revived it

It’s a Thursday night, and the Mahane Yehuda market is hopping.

Customers are seated along the sides of the covered market’s main street, some at tables and others perched on stools at hole-in-the-wall pubs and bars. With beers on tap, the music is blasting from speakers set up on tables that held mounds of tomatoes and cucumbers just a few hours earlier.

Nearby, foodies congregate at some of the city’s best restaurants, lining up at famed culinary mecca Mahneyuda or kosher steakhouse Jacko’s Street, or opting for Kurdish meat turnovers at Ishtabach or pizza pies at Flora Pizzeria.

The crowds are all welcome, or at least mostly welcome, said Ofer Berkovitch, Jerusalem’s deputy mayor and a key figure in the market’s ongoing evolution.

“The culinary and cultural developments in the shuk are all positive. They’ve made this a happening place during the day, and at night,” said Berkovitch, standing outside a branch of the Aroma coffee chain in the market on a busy afternoon in October. “I’m all for that. But in the last year or two, there’s been an overstepping of the balance. I don’t want the traditional businesses to close and to have only bars in the market.”

The shift away from tomatoes and cucumbers and toward cafes and bars, artisanal cheeses and sourdough breads, has been taking place for the last 15 years.

During the Second Intifada, when suicide bombings hit the market and Jerusalemites stayed away, Eli Mizrachi, whose family had long owned a dried goods stall in the market, opened a small cafe and baking supplies store, eventually expanding it into a larger cafe and opening a nearby bistro as well.

That first cafe spawned several others, as well as higher-end bakeries, restaurants, boutiques and then bars, until market regulars began looking around and seeing more pubs and bistros than stands selling produce and fresh spices.

There’s nothing wrong with many of the shifts in the market, said Berkovitch. The addition of stalls like Basher, known for its huge selection of artisanal cheeses; Cafelix, a favorite of coffee drinkers; and the facing restaurants of Fishenchips and Pasta Basta, have brought in new customers to the market who stop for lunch along with their food shopping.

Visitors come for tasting tours as well, crowding behind guides and culinary experts as they sample cheeses and cubes of halva.

“From the point of view of the city, I want people to shop here, but there’s value to tourists, too,” said Berkovitch. “The market is a place that brings people to Jerusalem.”

But food stall owners don’t want to clean up beer bottles on Friday mornings or detect the odor of urine lurking in the hidden corners of the market. Some bars lack the proper permits, and others want to take over adjoining alleys and areas that aren’t theirs.

“If people are opening pirate bars and not following the law, that’s a problem,” said Berkovitch. He wants to freeze the number of bars and perhaps encourage some to open up on nearby Agrippas Street, which is next to the market but not in it.

“We need the stall owners — the guys selling beans — and the guys who own the bars to get along with each other,” added Nino Peretz, the new chairman of the Mahane Yehuda board of directors, who owns a small supermarket in the unroofed section of the market.

Berkovitch is working closely with Peretz, who represents the 270 sellers in the shuk, to streamline the rules and regulations of the market and make it business-friendly for all the stall owners and operators.

There are changes afoot. Stalls used to close at 8 p.m. and bars would open two hours later at 10 p.m., but now they’re trying to open the bars at 9 p.m. in order to lengthen their business time. They are also working on expanding parking options, opening an underground parking lot on Agrippas, fixing the roofs of the market, and offering better cleaning and maintenance. The municipality has hired Haifa-based economic consulting firm Czmanski and Ben Shahar in order to better figure out what the market needs in order to survive and prosper.

“We’re trying to help the market to develop and gain the right answers for 2016,” said Berkovitch. “This is one of the most important sites in Jerusalem. It’s not the Western Wall or Knesset, but we don’t want to ruin it.”

Peretz, for his part, said he “welcomes the bars.”

“The younger generation didn’t know about the shuk,” he said. “Now they come on Thursdays, and Fridays, they live in Nahlaot and hang out here all the time. Yes, we have to formalize the bars so that they don’t bother the sellers or the buyers. You can’t have the music going full volume next to the butcher on Thursday night. It bothers the shoppers. But you can figure that stuff out.”

Some of the newcomers make efforts to honor the delicate balance of the market’s forces. Adi Talmor — a Jerusalem restaurateur who co-owns the Sushi Rechavia chain, French steakhouse Angelica and popular cafes Grand Cafe and Cafe de Paris — has just opened Wok Market, an Asian eatery that has the feel of a stall and comprises six former market stalls.

“There was hummus and Ishtabach and pizza and falafel and Rachmu and Mordoch [eateries] and kubbeh, but there was nothing Asian, and you know what? People love Asian food, even after eating baklava and cheese and halva,” said Talmor.

He serves sushi rolls incorporating the market’s Middle Eastern flavors, and so far the falafel, sabich, falafel and chraime rolls — the latter two based on the popular fried eggplant-and-egg sandwich (sabich) and Moroccan fish in a spicy tomato sauce (chraime) — are the restaurant’s bestsellers.

He also offers his own beer and shelves of Asian food products for purchase, all in a sleek, lengthy stall that spans two side streets of the market and was renovated for NIS 2 million ($524,000). He made sure to avoid making the restaurant look like another Sushi Rechavia outlet, and created a generic, albeit large, storefront that blends into the surrounding stalls.

“We wanted to come here for a long time, but we needed a strategic plan in order to access six stalls, so we needed information and tactics,” he said. “We waited for the right moment.”

Yet now that he’s open, Talmor said, he’s bothered by what he sees around him. He doesn’t like the copycat bars or the “childish neighbors” who bring beer and an amplifier and “call it a bar.”

“Be more creative,” he said. “Do a burger bar or a whisky bar, open something different, offer some added value. I’m bothered by what I see here, and if I’d known, I’m not sure I would have done this.”

The shuk, said Peretz, who owned a supermarket in Pisgat Ze’ev before moving to Mahane Yehuda 12 years ago, is struggling with other market forces along with finding the right balance between produce stalls and cafes and bars. Prices are higher than they once were because stalls are more expensive to rent and the market is more focused on quality and selection than the cheapest prices.

The shuk, said Peretz, is not a regular supermarket.

“You have to be able to earn money on the five items that you’re selling,” he said. “We have to be competitive on our specialties, the legumes and nuts and baked goods. You come here because we have seven types of tomatoes; the supermarket only has one.”

Ditto with the market’s customers.

“We have to fit ourselves to who comes here,” said Peretz. “We have to be competitive on what we offer, whether it’s tomatoes or steaks or beer. We’re the shuk.”