Cafe Salvador: The Jacko's Street Group Plants Its Italian Flag at Cinema City

The espresso machine sighs, a wedge of focaccia lands warm on a marble counter, and somewhere behind you the doors of one of nineteen cinema halls open to let out a Thursday afternoon crowd. You are inside the Cinema City Jerusalem mall, on the retail floor that used to belong to a waffle shop, and the Jacko's Street group has just opened the room you are standing in. Cafe Salvador is the polite name. The actual ambition is something else: take the Kurdish-Jerusalem precision that made Jacko's Street a touchstone of the city's kosher chef scene, lift it whole, drop it into a dairy Italian register, and serve it to a mall crowd that did not necessarily ask for chef food. The bet is that they will recognise it once they taste it.

The operators are Zackai Hujja and Rafi Ravivo, two of the three founding partners behind Jacko's Street on Agripas in the Mahane Yehuda quarter, along with Yotam Nisim. Hujja came up through the kitchens of Canela, Angelica and Lara before working with the veteran Israeli chef Shalom Kadosh, then opened Jacko's Street in 2013. From there the group built a small, deliberate Jerusalem map: the original chef's restaurant on Agripas, the Jacko San bar, and then in early 2024 the Super HaMizrach project, an Asian restaurant tucked invisibly inside a working Asian grocery in the shuk. Cafe Salvador is the latest move and, according to the group's own framing, the first of three near-simultaneous openings, the others a meat Asian-Israeli restaurant and a dairy rooftop cocktail bar at the Rose Garden compound opposite the Knesset. The cafe at Cinema City is the easiest of the three to walk into and the most exposed. Everyone is watching.