Café Ramban: Where Pre State Rehavia Returns to the Plate

The queue starts on the wrap around porch and curls down Ramban Street before nine. A man in a kippa rocks his stroller back and forth on the pavement, two French speaking women debate in low voices whether to wait, and inside the open doors a waiter with a tray of cappuccinos slides past a table of poached eggs that have just landed in pools of goat butter yogurt. The air smells of sourdough toasted on butter, of za'atar warming over fennel, of espresso pulled in tight short bursts. Somewhere in the back kitchen a brioche bun is being split for an eggs benedict. This is Café Ramban on a Friday morning, and the line is the shortest part of the experience.

The building has done this before. Beit Molcho, on the corner of Ramban and Ibn Gvirol, was Café Rehavia in the 1930s, one of the first modern cafes in Jerusalem and a meeting room for intellectuals, artists, and British Mandate officers in the years before statehood. After decades of ultra Orthodox protests over its Saturday operation, the original closed. The building stayed. When the Machneyuda Group, led by chefs Assaf Granit and Uri Navon, decided to open a boutique hotel in Rehavia, the choice of address was not accidental. They restored the structure, fitted it with twenty one rooms upstairs, and on the ground floor they reopened the cafe under a new name. The chairs are different. The plates are different. The argument is the same: a Rehavia cafe that takes itself seriously, open to everyone, including on Shabbat.