If I understand correctly the business differentiation and personality structure, the Library Bar has consciously and deliberately chosen not to fight or compete for guests entering the Norman Hotel Tel Aviv. It gave up shouting and a PA system, and instead decided to simply stand its ground and declare itself quietly. In a city that does not suffer from a lack of self-confidence, to put it mildly, this is a startling development.
From its perspective, anyone who takes the elevator up to Dinings or turns left to Alena is not committing a dramatic act of betrayal. Up and to the side, it understands, worthy dining scenes are taking place that are part of a larger, respectable hotel envelope. Here and there, everything stays in the family, and you can show appreciation. After that, right here, everyone will come anyway to close the evening, or to start another one anew.
Winter, with regards from spring. Bean stew at the Library
This public library has been a very open secret since it opened alongside the hotel’s flagship restaurant. It is a low-key bar, but very much not a speakeasy. In fact, if you corner it, I estimate it will try to escape all these definitions, and simply do its own thing.
And its thing is more than enough, and then some. It is very pleasant here, mature but not old. There are enough corners to grab and sit, and the bar itself – contrary to what you might imagine – occupies a very small part of the room. It sends you to closed clubs in London and to members-only classics in New York, but here too that is only an image and only your projection onto the space. In practice, welcome and do not make a fuss. Come as you are, and we will all get along with it.
This gap between perception and actual reality quickly spills over into the interaction with the team of Dean Beller, who provide top-level service from A to Z, much warmer than the hottest places in the city right now, more professional than the professionals among them, and friendlier by far than those neighborhood spots that are anything but a friendly relationship.
They mediate and explain, guide and buffer, and are also responsible for a wonderful display of mixing and bartending, on the very specific seam between let us show you what we can do, without saying a word about what we can do. Here too, on this very specific subject, you feel completely refreshed from everything you have experienced in recent years in the scene. The drinks are poured, some as classics and some as a modern take, and at no point in the evening do you feel overwhelmed or conquered by show-off and other nonsense. You come here to drink like human beings and not like extras in a performance. Whatever you drink excels.
And this continues into the menu. Once, the Library had something of its own, unique, but the logic of recent years has led it to focus and sharpen, and so here you eat the food of Daniel Tzur and Omer Shadmi, which is also the food of Alena. It seems to me there are tougher compromises in life.
They made a global tour and returned to an impressive and ongoing tenure at the hotel, but did not disconnect for a moment from the fields of the Jezreel Valley. In the middle of the heart of Tel Aviv, in a hotel that is a bubble, inside a bar that is a bubble within a bubble, food is served that is connected, grounded, completely local and even moving, if you are a person who is moved by such things. If not, go read other things on other channels, with less emotion. Here, the plates make you feel good.
It begins with “small plates” (in fact large, the dishes here are meant to satisfy the hungry, not the opposite, as is customary, NIS 32–98) that alone can make up a full meal, with beets and turnips in brown butter, fresh ricotta with brioche and honey challah, a tall mound of kohlrabi salad full of greens and pine nuts and cheese, and also a playful stew of borlotti beans with tatbila and salsa verde. Winter, with regards from spring.
Alongside these, there are starters that excel on their own (liver pâté, pizzetta with Taleggio cheese and black cabbage, crab brioche, roast beef and Caesar salad), intermediate dishes (NIS 86–130) that wisely offer tempting half portions of pici cacio e pepe, mushroom risotto, mallow tortellini and orecchiette pasta with meatballs, and mains – because you still have not eaten enough – such as pork belly with spaetzle, veal cheek with red wine and root cream, a hamburger and cuts by weight, fish and an octopus skewer with lamb fat and potatoes, yogurt and shouts of joy pickled in a napkin.
The selection is huge in its possibilities, and refuses to trip you up or compromise along with you. The only compromise, if anything, is the compromise of choice that gives up five other options (and additional specials that flashed outside the menu), and that too will sort itself out next time.
The Library has already established itself years ago as an insider urban option, and did not bother – rightly, from its perspective – to pour itself outward in a more active way. The result is an anomaly of a place that everyone knows, and most do not know at all.
The crowd here, between a war menu to days of war to the next war that will come upon us for the worse, manages perfectly well with this position. You can spot important meetings and interesting conversations here, peek over a shoulder, glance, wink and flirt your life.
Everything is possible, and everything is good. It is also possible without all of this, and still with everything. With a cocktail in hand that will not land on your piece of the bar any less than excellent, and next to it plates among the best here, certainly as bar food. This bubble, at this moment, nothing will penetrate.
Library Bar, Norman Hotel, 23–25 Nahmani Street, Tel Aviv, 03-5435555