Pizza HaBayta: A Gaza Envelope Food Truck Finds Its Second Home in Hod HaSharon

The taboon door opens and the whole shopfront leans toward the heat. A margherita goes in raw, edge of the disk kissing the coals for a heartbeat, then Ariel Sharabi pivots the peel and slides it deeper into the dome. Ninety seconds later it comes out shouldered with black spots and smelling of the woodsmoke that has followed this couple from the sand roads of Talmei Yosef, through a decade of pop up dinners, all the way to a corner of HaNagar Street opposite the Hod HaSharon Ecological Park. The room is bright, industrial in bones, and small in a way that pushes the oven to the centre of every conversation. This is not a pizza chain. This is a home operation that grew into a fire.

Ariel Sharabi worked construction for seventeen years. Lee Barak, his wife, had the palate. Somewhere during the first COVID lockdown, stuck on Moshav Talmei Yosef in the Chalutza region near the Egyptian border, a plane ticket to Italy expired and the couple decided to eat their way through the trip at home instead. Focaccia one night, cacio e pepe the next, then a taboon assembled in the yard for a Friday. Neighbours came, then neighbours of neighbours, and within a season the taboon was strapped into the back of a truck that spent three years feeding the towns of the western Negev. October 2023 tore that map in half. The couple were evacuated, moved north, and by 2025 they had planted a permanent flag in Ramat HaSharon at Shivtei Israel 106. Pizza HaBayta on HaNagar Street, opened in March 2026, is the sister branch. Same dough, same oven philosophy, different rhythm: this one leans daytime, opposite the park, built for families walking off a Saturday morning bike ride with a pizza box balanced on the handlebars.