Eser: Where Anna Ticho's House Found Its Second Voice

The red tuna tartare arrives on a white plate ringed in cobalt blue, the fish glistening pink against a pool of lemon and olive oil, fennel pollen dusted across the top. Behind you, an arched window cut into the original 19th century stone wall frames a slice of olive tree garden, lit warm against the Jerusalem dusk. The room is full but not loud. A pair of architects at the next table share the Jerusalem artichoke tortellini and lower their voices when the plates arrive. A waiter delivers a flamingo pink cocktail to a table near the window, the whole room briefly tinted by its color. You sit down inside what was once Anna Ticho's drawing room, in the year 2024, and Eser begins to make the case that fish, dairy, and Jerusalem can hold a chef restaurant on their own.

Yankale Turjeman, the native Jerusalemite who built 1868 into the city's most enduring kosher meat institution and who runs the Zuta cocktail bar across town, opened Eser in January 2024 because he was tired of telling visitors there was nowhere serious to eat fish in kosher Jerusalem. His own words: a quality kosher fish restaurant was missing in Jerusalem. So he took the upstairs space at Ticho House, the dairy room previously occupied by Anna, and turned it into the dairy and fish counterpart to the 1868 meat program three blocks away.