OM Cafe: Brown Butter Mornings Beside the Bakery That Built Them

The croque madame arrives with its egg still trembling, the yolk domed and glossy over a blanket of béchamel that has blistered at the edges under the grill. Beneath it the bread gives way with a crackle, and a thin seam of Comté butter runs gold across the plate. Across the table, a skillet of shakshuka baked into bread breathes out steam, two poached eggs sunk into a tomato sauce that has clearly spent hours on the stove. From the Oren Meshi ovens next door drifts the smell of laminated dough, caramelized sugar and the warm yeast of brioche. The sea is a two minute walk down Yafe Nof, close enough that the morning air carries a little salt. It is ten o'clock on a weekday at OM Cafe in Ashkelon, and breakfast here never officially ends.

Yigal and Eti Shlomi opened a small bakery in Ashkelon in 1999, and the family's relationship with flour reaches back further still, to a flour business in Morocco in 1970. Over a quarter century, Oren Meshi grew into a chain of bakeries and patisseries across the south of Israel, from Netivot and Ofakim to Beer Sheva and Kiryat Gat, with half a dozen branches in Ashkelon alone. OM Cafe, which took its current shape last spring beside the chain's Marina patisserie, is the couple's first true sit down kitchen, and the menu reads like bakers deciding what they would most like to put on top of their own bread.