Caffe Cavalli: A Florence Lifestyle Cafe Lands Kosher in the Holon Industrial Zone

The taboon glows orange at the back of the dining room, a flame held under a dome of stone, and the first thing that reaches the table is the smell of warm focaccia and tomato sauce reducing under garlic confit. The chairs are full wooden, the tables stone topped, the light golden and low, and on the small inner garden side a row of cypress shoots stretch toward the late afternoon sun. A waitress slides over a fish cigar, crisp and slim, a streak of meshweyya cream running across the plate beside it. This is Caffe Cavalli on a Thursday evening in Holon, the first Roberto Cavalli lifestyle cafe in Israel and, more quietly, the first room in the global Cavalli Caffe network to carry a kosher hechsher.

The brand started in Florence in 2002 as a side project of Italian fashion designer Roberto Cavalli, who died in 2024. Over two decades the cafe concept ran outposts in Milan, Beirut, Kuwait, Dubai, New Delhi, and Saint Tropez, always pitched as a lifestyle extension of the fashion house: a place where the Cavalli aesthetic translates into espresso bars, lacquered finishes, and a vitrine of pastries. The Israeli franchise holder invested between five and six million NIS to build the Holon room and chose, against the usual pattern of Italian lifestyle brands in Israel, to certify it Mehadrin from day one.