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When Saul’s Restaurant & Delicatessen opened 25 years ago in Berkeley’s iconic Gourmet Ghetto, chef-owner Peter Levitt didn’t think twice about putting hummus and falafel on the farm-to-table menu alongside Jewish deli staples, like his soon-to-be famous pastrami.
“Hummus in particular was part of a living cuisine in Israel, still geographically connected to its origin and source in the shuk, and this amazing mix of Jewish and Arab cuisines,” he says. “It was important to have.”
Levitt was ahead of his time. But look around the Bay Area now and you’ll find a slew of Israeli dishes on Jewish deli menus — Levitt has since added shakshuka, the now-trendy baked egg dish; sabich, a fresh-baked Israeli-Iraqi pita sandwich with eggplant and hard-boiled eggs; and ice cream topped with local halvah — as well as a serious uptick in dedicated Israeli restaurants.
There’s San Francisco hot pita bar Sababa. Oren’s Hummus has three locations in the South Bay. Palo Alto’s Babka by Ayelet, a bakery devoted to Israel’s most popular cake, opened earlier this year. And then there’s crazy-popular AL’s Deli, the street food eatery from Aaron London of Michelin-starred AL’s Place, in the Mission.
Several more are set to open by year’s end, including the highly-anticipated Pomella from Israeli chef Mica Talmor, who ran Oakland’s now-shuttered Ba-Bite for three years.
Why the falafel fever? Many reasons. Several chefs, including Levitt, credit Yotam Ottolenghi, Michael Solomonov and, more recently, Adeena Sussman, who have shared their recipes and experiences from Tel Aviv’s colorful Carmel Market, or shuk. Others say that the mish-mash of cuisines — Jewish and Arab residents from numerous countries call Israel home — inherently appeals to Bay Area diners. So do all those vegetables.
Israeli food, Levitt says, “reflects the change that’s happening in our society, with people wanting to eat less meat and more vegetables.”
The veggies drew London. His background in plant-based cuisine — before opening AL’s Place, he was the chef at Napa’s veggie-centric Ubuntu — and his drive to create a better falafel than the dry pucks and paper-thin pitas he ate as a kid, growing up in West Sonoma, drove him to create AL’s Deli. The years he spent cooking in New York and Montreal, down the street from the famed Schwartz’s Deli, influenced him, as did the formative culinary trip he took to Israel a few years ago.
“The first time I had good falafel was eye-opening for me,” London recalls. “I had this sandwich on pita that was fluffy, chewy and airy with light, yet creamy-unctuous tahini-rich hummus dripping down my face — and fried cauliflower and three types of pickles. It went from being something like a health food to something that was, as a chef, very craveable for me.”
The interior of AL’s Deli, which opened in July, is a technicolor Miami dreamscape, with plants, pink flamingos and London’s signature shade of sky blue from AL’s Place. And the freshly-baked pita sandwiches are just as epic as London’s first. They come stuffed with smoked brisket, biodynamic herb-loaded falafel or blistered eggplant topped with schug, a Yemeni hot sauce.
You can order extra schug, say, to eat with your shawarma-spiced rotisserie chicken, or London’s other addictive sauces, like the amba made with stone-fruit instead of mango. “Unlike the Israeli desert, we don’t grow mangos here,” he says.
There are other chef-y things you’d expect from a creative like London, technical one-of-a-kinds, like deep-fried and lox-stuffed potato latke pockets, shaped with custom silicone molds that took London six months to get right, and frozen sumac-tinged labneh — as soft serve.
“That was tricky,” he says. “We had to experiment with salting, hanging and blending the cheese to get it the right texture for the soft-serve machine.”
At Oakland’s forthcoming Pomella, Talmor will offer a frozen treat, too — soft-serve greek yogurt with baklava toppings — plus fresh-pressed juices similar to the drinks served at the falafel stands she grew up with in Israel. The 3,000-square-foot, fast-casual concept, complete with a market for grab-and-go items, will open in the Piedmont storefront that shares space with Dona Tomas’ Dona. It’s the same neighborhood where Ba-Bite garnered a reputation for some of the best hummus in the Bay Area.
The hummus will be back, along with shakshuka, salads and wraps, North African tagines and Jewish specialities during the holidays, like brisket, babka and matzoh ball soup, all made with local and seasonal organic ingredients.
“I’m trying to re-create the home that we had at Ba-Bite,” she says, “where we knew people by name and exactly what they were going to order.”
