Les: How a Beer Sheva Chef Built a Wine Temple on Negev Soil

The sommelier moves through the courtyard the way a librarian moves through stacks, pausing at one of 150 wine barrels to draw a bottle that costs more than the table next to you spent on dinner. Above him, an Ottoman stone arch frames a slice of the Negev sky, and the smell of charcoal drifts in from the open kitchen where a goose shoulder is finishing in a Josper oven. Linen napkins. Riedel crystal. A cigar lounge waiting for after the meal. This is Les, and on a Tuesday night in the Old City of Beer Sheva, it is doing something that should not exist this far south: serving a fine dining menu in a city that has, until now, never had a kosher chef restaurant of its own.

Yakir Masrati ran Authentia, sometimes spelled Otentit, for eleven years at the other end of the Old City. At its peak, the kitchen plated for 300 seats with a brigade of 60 cooks and servers. Then October 7, 2023 changed the math. Half the staff was called up, tourism collapsed, and within months Masrati was washing dishes himself three nights a week. He closed Authentia at the end of 2024 with a public goodbye that read like a love letter to the south. Most chefs would have moved north. Masrati moved exactly seven minutes across town.