Casa Vina: A Dairy Table Planted in the Middle of the Vineyard

The first thing that hits you at Casa Vina is not the food. It is the geometry. Rows of Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot vines climb the slope of HaRimon at 760 meters above sea level, marching in tight parallel lines toward a low stone building that opens onto the courtyard. You park beside the winery, walk past a stack of French oak barrels, and step into a dining room whose windows frame the vine tips like a series of green paintings. Sunlight filters through the wooden shutters and lands on tables set with linen and wine glasses that already know their job. Somewhere behind the bar, a bottle of Petit Verdot is being uncorked. This is the rare kosher restaurant in the Jerusalem hills where the wine list is not a curated selection but a walk across the courtyard.

Avner Ella planted vines here in 2009 and pressed his first vintage in 2013, a retirement chapter that turned into a boutique winery producing roughly 2,500 numbered bottles a year. Casa Vina is the restaurant that grew out of the winery, a dairy Italian kitchen that lives on the estate and pours the Bordeaux varietals cultivated meters from the pass. The menu leans into pasta, tandoor bakes, and fish, the three columns of a modern Italian dairy kitchen that has more to prove because the wines behind it are already ambitious. Fresh pasta arrives dressed in the kinds of sauces that let the estate reds work: brown butter and sage clinging to ravioli, tomato reductions with a long garlic memory, cream sauces that stay light because the flour and eggs are doing the heavy lifting. The tandoor oven turns out bakes with charred bottoms and airy tops, the kind of bread you tear apart with your hands and use to sweep across an olive oil pool. Fish plates rotate with the market. Desserts are house made and lean toward the traditions the Italian dairy repertoire does best: panna cotta with a wobble, tiramisu with a proper coffee spine, olive oil cake that reads like a slow afternoon.