Playground calls for a lunch break. Remember how fun that can be?

Long minutes after what we all defined long ago as peak lunch, the Tel Aviv Midtown complex is still bustling, quite like a high school courtyard that decides on its own to keep the break going, and loudly announce to the world that the bell was meant for it, and for it alone.

All around are groups upon groups, workers and colleagues, who did the right and smart thing and stepped out a bit into the sun. It took this area a long time to be built, and it took the surrounding towers a long time to rise, but the longest time was required to explain to the surroundings, and to the people within the surroundings, that there is something here besides an area and towers – pleasant ground, a place to sit and broadcast a break, and lots of food.

Now, with effective shade that apparently only the skyscrapers surrounding the plaza know how to provide, no more explanations are needed. It clicked, it is clicking, and you can’t blame anyone who wants to extend their lunch at the expense of a few more minutes in front of the screen, upstairs.

Especially if that lunch is happening at Playground.

The beautiful restaurant inside the Play Hotel went through quite a few incarnations and developments until it managed to stabilize on what is right for it, and right for its audience. This is, of course, a completely natural process almost anywhere on the planet, but here, in words written in Hebrew, the keyboard trembles from shock. A place that opened and gradually acclimated – who would have believed it’s possible to do such a thing here without openings-closings, changes-refreshes, and some five pop-ups in the middle?

Inside, this process is realized wonderfully, with a pleasant atmosphere, exactly between internal hoteliness that can sometimes slide into synthetic, and the external bustle that can sometimes slide into food-courtiness. Here, at the bar or on the covered terrace, at the long tables or in one of the elegant seating corners, the lunch break doesn’t stop, it only intensifies.

The sun menu is served here generously in hours and days (Sunday–Thursday, 12:00–15:00), and is accessible to wallets. It uses a familiar format, but one that has almost disappeared from our world, of a small starter of choice together with a main, at the price of the main, and knows how to return to generosity and accessibility with a real size of dishes, and of food.

You can choose here colorful starters of tomato salad with red onion and arugula, outstanding roasted peppers with chunks of plump feta cheese and confit garlic, labneh with curry sauce and freekeh, roasted beets with tzatziki and caramelized hazelnuts, eggplant salad with date syrup and roasted cashews, and also an orange soup, based on sweet potato and carrot, seasoned with Parmesan and curry.

If you came for a meeting, and if you came as a group, it would be completely reasonable to order one of each, wipe it up with the bread that arrives independently, and smile a little. Why not, actually?

From there, almost a dozen mains await in a range of flavors and a range of prices (NIS 79–179), even the highest of which is not really high relative to the value (bone-in sirloin, or entrecote), and relative to the city.

There will be kebab with herb tahini and roasted tomato, Jerusalem artichoke ravioli with sage butter, popular combinations of hamburger-and-fries and schnitzel-and-mash (huge, tasty, spot on), chicken breast for that one who always orders chicken breast, vegan oshplau with Redefine Meat, and also two standouts in the form of chicken in Thai curry on rice and seared sea fish with lemon butter and sautéed green vegetables, executed well and in a size unacceptable for people who still need to work today.

It’s not high-end food, and not pretentious food, but it seems to me that at this lunchtime – and almost every lunchtime, actually – we really don’t want high, and least of all want pretentious. We want schnitzel, and a small, tasty wipe alongside it. We want choice, we want to stick to the budget, including the caloric one. And we want a cocktail. Right. Here an Aperol Spritz costs NIS 31, about half of what you’ll pay in other loathsome places. Cheers.

Playground stretches itself flexibly into the evening hours, taking advantage of its qualities and standing up to the difficult challenge of dealing with a complex that empties of its people, changes its skin, and demands completely different things now.

The central bar fills up, the energy rises and the food also updates a bit, but the main characteristics, the basic characteristics, remain as they were – successful service and a space that makes you want to stay in it, a necessary separation between outside and inside, and a location that makes you think you’ve found a treasure, or a playground, in the heart of the mess. This is a lunch break, and an evening break, and a break in general. We deserve one like this.