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Akko

Uri Jermeias' Efendi Hotel. Photo by Max Nathans, courtesy Creative Commons 

Uri Jeremias, chef of the restaurant Uri Buri, has taken advantage of Akko’s epic history with his hotel. Built of two merged Ottoman villas overlooking the Mediterranean, the Efendi Hotel has all the luxe, calme et volupté of a Turkish pasha’s sumptuous receiving room.

“Efendi’s rooms are filled with sunlight and bright flowers.”

After years of thinking about moving into the hotel business, Uri rejoiced at his luck finding what he calls “two of the most beautiful buildings in Israel” next door to one another. Under his eye, frescoed cornices were painstakingly repainted, and marble floors were ground down and repolished to a high luster. Conservators were brought in from Italy to get the colors and designs as close as possible to the originals.

Efendi retains many well-preserved remnants of its long history. In the lobby is a deep well that dates back to Roman times. The wine cellar was built around the remains of a Byzantine vault: here, hundreds of bottles of Israeli wines line walls made with stones from the Byzantine, Crusader, and Ottoman periods. The small spa on the hotel’s ground floor is a preserved four-hundred-year-old Turkish hamam. A particularly intriguing feature is the restored nineteenth-century mural in the high-ceilinged reception room, depicting Istanbul, the Bosporus, and the Orient Express. (The painter had apparently never seen an actual railroad: the train resembles a string of covered wagons with smoke billowing overhead.) The hotel’s dozen rooms—many featuring extravagant balconies looking over Akko’s port and the Mediterranean—follow a pale chromatic scheme and are filled with sunlight and bright flowers, with gauzy white curtains that give these spaces the dreamlike air of an ancient fable.

Uri has a theory about the food he cooks at his restaurant: “One: you need good raw materials. And two: don’t ruin what you already have.” Obviously, the same rules apply at the Efendi Hotel.

Efendi Hotel >  

Akko’s Efendi Hotel: Luxe, Calme, et Volupté

Uri Buri: Fish and Seafood cookbook published by Uri Buri Publishing

There is one place in Akko that you are sure to have regular reveries about, long after you return home from Israel. The fish restaurant Uri Buri sits next to the port, in a crumbling Ottoman stone building with high, vaulted ceilings. Each dish at Uri Buri relies on the daily catch and the offerings at the nearby market. Flavors seem to be enhanced when dishes are presented beautifully—but without too much primping—as they are here. While chef Uri Jeremias creates many elaborate dishes with great flair, he clearly likes simplicity best: fresh anchovies, grilled with just a touch of potent olive oil; barramundi pan-cooked in butter with a few sage leaves and a squeeze of lemon; raw crabmeat, carefully removed from its shell and served without any garnish whatsoever.

“Uri’s preference is to speak to his guests and get to know them a little—what they like and don’t—and then send out dish after dish from the kitchen, building an evening’s experience for them.”

Although the restaurant of course has a menu, Uri’s preference is to speak to his guests and get to know them a little—what they like and don’t—and then send out dish after dish from the kitchen, prescribing and building an evening’s experience for them, generally moving from the lightest flavors to the richest. Many of Uri’s dishes draw on his imagination—paper-thin sashimi with an explosive green wasabi sorbet; sea-wolf with chestnut-pumpkin purée; baby tilapia (known here as musht, or St. Peter’s fish) on cubes of red beet and caramel; a dreamy seafood-and-coconut-milk soup laced with ginger, curry, basil, and cilantro—the list goes on.

Making a comprehensive listing of The Great Restaurants of Israel would be like trying to grasp the tail of a beautiful bird in flight. The point we want to make here is that Israel has come to a new understanding about food, offering the best of its many hybrid culinary traditions and—in the hands of great talents like Uri Jeremias, Duhul Safdi, Rama Ben-Zvi, Erez Komarovsky,  and others—brilliant gastronomic innovation.

Uri Buri >

Akko’s Uri Buri: Fish Directly from the Sea

Akkotel Hotel in Akko

Akkotel hotel has a unique place in the city. The hotel is located next to, and in fact partially inside, the thick, ancient fortress wall that surrounds the Old City of Akko. The hotel’s discreet entrance on Salah ad-Din Street leads to a high-ceilinged, much-ornamented lobby where guests are likely to be greeted warmly by owner Ilya Morani, or a member of his family. The hotel, part of which once served as a customs house, has sixteen rooms; each is outfitted simply and uniquely, with wooden furnishings carved by Morani himself. All the rooms have thick exposed-stone walls in which deeply set windows look out onto Akko’s street life. You might hear the call of a fruit seller in the morning before heading down to the Akkotel’s lovely and ample breakfast buffet and then out to explore.

“From the Akkotel rooftop, the sky is an intense azure that competes with the darker blue of the Mediterranean, and the bleached stone cityscape seems near enough to touch with your fingers.”

 Guests can reach the Akkotel rooftop (with a key provided by the Moranis) via a hidden set of stairs from the hotel’s top floor. Here, the sky is an intense azure that competes with the darker blue of the Mediterranean, and the bleached stone cityscape seems near enough to touch with your fingers. At its center is the minaret of the Jezzar-Pasha Mosque, from which the muezzin calls Muslims to prayer with a drone that rings through the streets five times a day. From where you stand, the old wall of the city rolls away in both directions. (Akko is labyrinthine at street level, filled with small alleyways and sharp turns, but if you can find the wall, you can find your way anywhere—or at least from the Akkotel to the Uri Buri restaurant.) At night, seen from this rooftop, the moon completes a picture-perfect dream of what European Romantic painters might have termed “the Orient”: a bright, starry sky above and shadowed archways below, timeless stones, a silhouetted mosque.

Akkotel > 

Akkotel: An Inn Built into Akko’s Foundations

Akko coastline. Photo by Max Nathans, courtesy Creative Commons

Akko (also known as Acco, Acre) is stunning and storied old city, run through with ancient stone alleyways and built on layers of civilizations.

“Akko is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world.”

Though small, it contains so much: a cultural mix of people living in relative ease with one another; a zigzagging history of governing bodies stretching back to something like 3000 bce (a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Akko is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world); and beautiful buildings that have survived from Akko’s many moments of glory through the ages. It has hosted such historical superstars as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Saint Francis of Assisi, and Marco Polo—it was less welcoming to Napoléon Bonaparte, who was drastically defeated here by the Ottomans in 1799. The city’s location, at the northernmost point of Haifa Bay, is visually stunning and served as a tactical advantage to clans and factions through the ages, from the Phoenicians to the ancient tribe of Asher to the Assyrians to the Rashidun caliphate to the Crusaders, the Mamluks, the Ottomans, and onward.

All these periods are visible in the city’s streets and buildings, and beneath them, too, in a web of underground tunnels and cavernous rooms built in the twelfth century by the Crusaders. The medieval structures were erected on the shoulders of Roman ruins, and on top of them in turn stand the Ottoman edifices that prevail aboveground today, many of which were constructed under the rule of the bloody-minded Ahmed al-Jezzar Pasha (known to his friends as “the Butcher”). Like so many places in Israel, its ground is striated with a variety of governments. A stroll through Akko is like walking through history—and provides a humbling lesson in the transitory nature of power and dominion.

Today, Akko is one of Israel’s more heterogeneously populated cities: a 70–30 percent mix of Jews to Arabs, and a true cultural hodgepodge. It is real, alive, and pulsing with energy. It is very much a place to experience now.

Akko marketplace. Photo by Bon Adrien, courtesy Creative Commons

 

Akko: A Storied City and a Cultural Crossroads

Uri Jeremias of Uri Buri restaurant and Efendi Hotel, Akko. Photo by and © Vision Studio

Uri Jermias (owner of Uri Buri restaurant and the Efendi Hotel , both in Akko) is a formidable figure: tall, broad, white haired, with a benevolent face and a white beard that reaches to his waist. Uri is nearly always visible at his restaurant, moving pots and pans in the kitchen with the assurance of a masterly orchestra conductor, or strolling among the tables advising guests about how to structure their meal.

“Uri Jeremias is nearly always visible at his restaurant, moving pots and pans in the kitchen with the assurance of a masterly orchestra conductor.”

Like Erez Komarovsky, Uri is a consummate and resourceful extemporizer. His chief collaborator is the sea. Like all great cooks, Uri knows when a perfect ingredient should be allowed to shine on its own: “Simple fish made in the most basic manner,” he says, “can be enjoyed no less, and perhaps even more, than Black Sea caviar, or a blowfish arriving on a direct flight from Tokyo (flying business class, of course).”

We keep Uri Jeremias’s Uri Buri cookbook at hand in our own kitchens—partly because of Uri’s culinary philosophy. Yes, there are recipes in the book, but more than half of it deals with how to think about food—fish in particular—once you know some basic rules, how to be discriminating, respectful, and inventive in the kitchen. Like love, these things come through in the dishes you serve.

Uri’s interest in ad-libbing started early. He tells a story:

When I was young, I hitchhiked around Europe, and I decided not to have any plans. When someone asked me: ‘Where are you going?’ I’d say: ‘Wherever you’re going.’ I traveled to different cities, met lots of people, and so on. After a few months, I came home, and friends asked me, ‘Did you see Mont St. Michel?’ or ‘Did you see this or that?’ I said no. My way of traveling was completely different. It was not about seeing the wonders of the world. It was to meet life.

It is with this same sense of adventure that Uri cooks—and we, his lucky guests, get to be his fellow travelers.

Uri Buri >

Efendi Hotel >


Hotelier and Restaurateur Uri Jeremias

Happy customers at the Sa’id hummus shop, Akko. Photo by and © Vision Studio 

At Sa’id hummus shop in Akko, there is always a line to get in, but things move quickly, as the establishment specializes in only three perfect dishes, which are always ready for the table: hummus, foul (a rough mash of warm fava beans and spices), and mashawsha (a still rougher mash of warm chickpeas and spices), served in small hillocks on the plate and liberally drizzled with rich, dark olive oil, along with pickles, onions, vegetables, and a hot pile of freshly baked pita.

“Sa’id specializes in only three perfect dishes, which are always ready for the table: hummus, foul, and mashawsha.”

Guests sit at shared tables, eat quickly, and watch the process in the kitchen: vast pots of chickpeas and favas being systematically cooked, drained, mashed, spiced, and served. At Sa’id, the daily service ends abruptly when they run out of hummus, which is often in the early afternoon.

Sa’id Hummus >

 

Akko's Sa’id Hummus Shop