LE House of Asia: The Best Argument for Eating Dinner in a Business Park

At 12:40 on a Tuesday the room is full of lanyards. Two women from a logistics firm on the fourth floor of the building opposite are splitting a fish tempura salad, arguing about a shipment. A table of six in quarter zip fleeces has ordered enough bao that the runner needs both hands. Somewhere past them a wok catches, and the sound carries: that hard metallic gasp of very hot steel meeting cold oil, followed by the smell of charred shallot and fish sauce rolling across the dining room. The windows run tall along one wall and the light falling through them is the flat white light of a Tel Aviv coastal plain afternoon, bouncing off pale wood and landing on a plate of rice noodles the colour of burnt caramel. Nobody in this room looks like they are having a special occasion. Everybody in this room is eating extremely well.

This is the paradox that has followed LE House of Asia since it opened on HaNegev 2 in July 2023. It sits inside Airport City, the 750 dunam business and hi tech park built on rezoned farmland east of Highway 40, in the hinterland of Ben Gurion Airport. Motorola is here. DHL is here. Elbit is here. Roughly 420,000 square meters of offices, warehousing and logistics, and in the middle of it, a serious pan Asian kitchen. Channel 13 put it plainly when it covered the place: the location is strange, the execution is not.