I’ve only been to one Michelin-starred restaurant in my life – a Buddhist vegetarian one-star restaurant in Japan. My experience at the newly opened Picuel in Rishon Lezion rivals the one in Japan, and I can’t stop thinking about the food.
This is not an inexpensive evening. Until the end of August, the meal is NIS 395 per person, and in September it goes up to NIS 450 per person, not including wine (which happens to be reasonably priced). Despite the high price, I think it offers good value for money.
There is only one service each night at 8:30 p.m. (almost bedtime for those in my age bracket). In the afternoon, I got a call from the restaurant asking me not to be late as they want to start on time. I invited my favorite daughter, Rafaella, to celebrate her finishing her master’s degree in public health.
The restaurant is tucked away in an area with a lot of other restaurants but does come up on Google Maps. Once you’re inside, all hassles of the day fade away. The design of the restaurant is beautiful, with soft lighting and an open kitchen where 25-year-old Dor Binyamin works his magic. The tables are spaced far apart to enable conversation. Rafaella and I were there for three hours, and the time just flew. I can’t remember the last time I spent three hours at a restaurant.
An olive theme in ten courses
Picuel is a type of olive, and the restaurant pays homage to olives and, through olives, to the Land of Israel. The menu offered is a tasting menu of 10 courses, several of which are bite-sized in true Michelin-style fashion. By the end of the meal, I was pleasantly full but not stuffed.
The meal started even before we sat down at our table with a small cracker topped with fermented cashew cream and sun-dried tomatoes balanced on stones amid an olive tree. Rafaella is allergic to tomatoes (not an easy allergy to have in Israel), and I had forgotten to tell the restaurant. The waiter quickly asked them to make her one without tomatoes, and the problem was solved.
The reservation for the meal specifically says there will be no substitutions in the dishes, and I was concerned that Rafaella would not be able to enjoy several of the courses. But other than the opening course, there were no tomatoes in anything else, to our good luck.
It’s impossible to describe each course, but here is one example of a large white fish where Chef Dor asked all the diners to gather around in the middle as he served it.
“The fish is cooked in a salt crust mixed with ground picuel leaves and buried in a firepit,” he explained. “It is served on a crisped lachuch (a traditional Yemenite bread) with a fermented chili aioli, greens, and olives, topped with yuzu gel.”
Each course was a unique combination of ingredients, and each was beautifully served. The olive theme was repeated in each course.
There was also a raw beef tartlet with ground horseradish root on top, on a bed of black sesame. Diners were instructed to sprinkle the black sesame on top, smell the dish first, and then eat it. It was an explosion of flavors.
There’s also some liquid nitrogen at the end of the meal.
Chef Dor (did I mention he’s 25 years old?) has tattoos and several earrings, and has cooked in non-kosher restaurants for years. This is his first kosher restaurant, and he said he decided to go kosher even before he met his current partner, who is observant. Owner Itzik Kadosh says opening the restaurant came out of the war with Hamas.
“We wanted to deepen our ties to Eretz Yisrael,” he told me. “What we eat is an expression of who we are, and we wanted to bring fine dining to the kosher market.”
It was Rafaella who said it best: “This may be the best meal I’ve had in my entire life.”
Picuel
8 Barshavski, Rishon Lezion
Monday–Thursday 8:30 p.m. to 11:30 p.m.
Phone: (077) 880-1060 (Reservations mandatory)
picual-rest.co.il
Kashrut: Mehadrin
The writer was a guest of the restaurant.