Koomzitz: A Forest Full of Smoke, Long Tables, and Fire Artists

The smell reaches you in the parking area, before you have seen a single flame. Eucalyptus smoke, beef fat rendering onto coals, bread blistering somewhere out of sight. You walk down through the Ein Hemed forest under trees lit from below, and the sound arrives next: a bass line, a hundred conversations, and the flat crack of a fire artist snapping a burning baton through the dark. Then the tables appear. Not tables for two, but long communal runs of timber set for dozens, already loaded with roasted breads and small bowls of things to tear them through. Somebody hands you a glass. Somebody else waves you toward a seat between strangers. This is Koomzitz on a Tuesday night in September, and it is not a restaurant in any sense you are used to.

The kitchen works with exactly four tools: an open fire pit, a grill, a deep hole in the ground, and a smoker running eucalyptus wood. Every main course is assigned to one of them, and the chef spends the evening moving between the stations in full view of the room, pulling cuts, resting them, carving, calling out what has been aging and for how long.