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Behind the Kitchen — an independent Hebrew food magazine

Please read this first: this website is an independent Hebrew-language magazine about food and restaurant culture in Tel Aviv and Israel. It is not the Open Restaurants festival, it is not that festival's successor or archive, and it is not run by, affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to that festival or its organisers in any way. It sells no tickets, registers no participants and organises no events.

If you arrived here from an older link or an article about the festival, you have reached a different, unrelated publication that now uses this domain.

What this magazine actually is

It is written in Hebrew, for readers in Israel, and it covers the food scene as journalism rather than as a recommendation list. There are no restaurant reviews, no ratings, no rankings, no prices, no opening hours and no bookings anywhere on the site.

What there is instead: how a professional kitchen is structured and how a service runs; the history behind dishes such as hummus, sabich and falafel; how Israel's markets — Mahane Yehuda, Carmel, Levinsky — developed and what the seasons bring; how neighbourhoods acquire a culinary character; what kashrut means in practice when eating out; how the vegan scene changed restaurant menus here; and what the practical etiquette of eating out is, from reservations to service charges.

Food events and festivals are covered from the outside, as a subject: what the formats are, how such events are generally produced, and what is criticised about them. No event described on this site belongs to it.

Reading it

All articles are in Hebrew. Browser translation handles them well enough for the substance to carry over. The main sections are linked from the homepage.

Contact

Corrections, questions and suggestions are welcome through the contact page. Requests about the festival cannot be answered here — this publication has no connection to it and no information about it.