Our unimaginable reality continues to hit and hit the restaurant world. A young reservist whose business ran into great financial difficulties and needs donations after not leaving Gaza for many weeks, for example, or a military man who left a complete set of equipment ready for the event and traveled under fire to rescue it, and the stories don't stop coming.
Of course, the security situation also affects veteran restaurateurs. More precisely, a veteran restaurateur from the north of the Golan Heights, Shifra Michaelovich, who is a 21-year-old one-woman culinary establishment in the beautiful Kibbutz Merom Golan.
"It all started with Corona," Shafra says candidly, "the situation was a catastrophe and I literally saw with my own eyes tourism companies that I worked with in hosting groups going bankrupt. Everything like that is connections that were and disappeared. I worked very hard to re-establish all these connections, and October 23 It was supposed to be my best month since then until it all stopped."
She stopped cooking even though the north of the Golan Heights remained relatively quiet. "When you hear that the north is being bombed, no one opens a map to check where Kibbutz Marom Golan is and if there were any alarms there, but we didn't receive any support from the government, and my diary was completely empty again."
She waited for everything to be over, and when she understood the situation to its fullest, she decided to support herself. "When my son was working in Corona in the plantations of the kibbutz, he would ask me for sandwiches for the workday. I would make him wonderful sandwiches that provoked a lot of reactions, and that's how I got the idea to go back to it."
Thus, what started as a movement designed to "keep your head above water", gained momentum and fans, and has now also rolled into the DNA Activitani complex on the ground floor of the Azrieli Mall in Tel Aviv. "They heard about my story, invited me to be a guest, and then we'll see," she smiles.
She settled in the Food Trucks complex and keeps the same smile from there. Under the sign "Atuf Beleham", it delivers from 12:00 hungry office workers, starving soldiers and anyone who enters between these groups - from the light or heavy rail, and just passers-by. "Bread accepts everything, and you can also put your soul into it," she described.
The menu is not large - a total of four options, two meat and two vegan, which are also suitable for carnivores - and in any case, it is better to let Shafra put together the perfect sandwich for you.
The base is crackling and warm ciabatta.
The first sandwich, "Man Haaretz", contains, for example, red cabbage baked in wine and spices, pumpkin and cumin cream, coriander, hot pepper, rocket, raw tahini and fried walnut pieces.
"Bloody cream eggplant" combines pickled lemon, yarrow, raw tahini, nuts, sour herb salad, radish and hot pepper (NIS 55).
In the meat section, you will find "long-cooked Ontario psalm", no less, with pickled onion, sriracha mayonnaise, cilantro, rocket, green onion and radish, while "roast beef smoky turnips" comes with lemon mayonnaise, mustard, tomatoes, onion, green onion and rocket (NIS 58) - and in return will also satisfy the hungry and the hungry among you.