Leo: Eilat's New Brasserie That Lights the Match After Midnight

The foie gras arrives on a slab of brioche so freshly toasted that the butter still puddles at the edges, a glossy comma of berry compote curling alongside. Across the dining room, a hostess weaves between tiered banquettes carrying a board of beef carpaccio, paper thin discs of meat fanned around a clutch of basil and pine nuts. The lights are low, the music is louder than at most chef restaurants, and somewhere past the open bar a DJ is queueing the first track of the night. Outside, the bones of the old Eilat airport runway lie under the new EXPO complex. Inside Leo, a different kind of takeoff is about to happen.

Chef Vanessa Vidal Abittan is the engine here. The French born, Israel raised cook took the MasterChef Israel crown in 2019 and spent the years since refining a kitchen voice that pulls Parisian brasserie discipline into a vocabulary of Israeli fire and citrus. At Leo she is finally given a room large enough to test that voice at scale, and she has built a sharing format menu that asks the table to order wide.