Opa: Vegan stylings in Tel Aviv - restaurant review

Dining at Opa is like playing a very sophisticated game. The 11-dish vegan tasting menu consists of 22 different dishes, with two items in every course.

No explanation is given as to what you are eating. Only once you have finished the course are you told what you have just consumed because it’s almost impossible to guess. The only constraint is that everything is plant-based.

Opa, in Tel Aviv’s Levinsky Market, is one of the most intriguing restaurants you will ever visit. It is owned and run by twin sisters Shirel and Sharona Berger. Shirel is the chef, and Sharona is more of the front woman who receives the customers. They were born in Israel to parents who made aliyah from the US. They named the restaurant Opa (German for “grandfather”) after theirs, whom they remember as being a great cook.

This was the second time I have visited Opa, accompanied by my vegan son, David. The place was packed. Sharona told us that many of the diners are not vegan but love good food served in a very aesthetic environment.

There’s a cocktail menu, but we went straight for the white wine – an Ozambik and a Chardonnay. These proved to be the perfect drink, offsetting the extraordinary flavors the chef seems able to extract from the plant kingdom.

The first course was a bowl of purple and white – something. We had no idea as we spooned our way into sweet and sour fruit-like chunks, with a creamy-white side of what looked like a piece of cheese. It turned out to have been raspberries and cherry tomatoes with almond panna cotta. The second dish was the same panna cotta, turned into foam. Interesting.

Item three was a raw green leaf on a red sauce to wrap around grated turnip. The sweet sauce was made from pomegranates, aged mushrooms, and cured lemon; the leaf was a very pungent turnip leaf.

The next dish looked like schmaltz herring (no such luck!) but was made from eggplant. On the side was fermented quince, which was sweet and, apparently, took two years to reach the stage of being fermented and therefore edible. (Fermentation is done on the restaurant’s roof garden.)

Next was a fruit and ice-cream dish, except that the fruit was actually caramelized fennel, and the ice cream wasn’t sweet. Then came a bowl of what looked like leather – black on one side, cream color on the other. This turned out to be mangold, a beet relative. This was good and almost “meaty.”

Two skewers that were actually real twigs appeared next, with cabbage and mustard leaves in place of meat, and a really good sweet sauce.

Having finished nine savory courses, we also had to consume two desserts. One was white foam with toffee-like crumbs; the other was a sticky concoction with a good crispy tuile on the side.

We got up from this 11-course feast feeling quite light and not at all bloated – one advantage, among many, of vegan food.

Well done, Berger sisters. As Sharona pointed out, Opa offers fine dining, and the fact that it is vegan is irrelevant.