Fringe: The Levant Rewritten at the Edge of the Stage

The taboun sits behind the bar like a piece of set design, its mouth glowing orange, and every few minutes a cook reaches in with a long peel and pulls out something blistered and steaming. Tonight it is a sweet pepper, collapsed and charred nearly to surrender, which reaches the table under a drift of feta and toasted pine nuts. Beyond the partition, the Jerusalem Theatre lobby fills with people checking their watches before curtain. Inside the dining room the pace is slower, deliberately so. Chef Nir Levy moves between tables in the half light, stopping to explain why the zucchini tastes sour. This is Fringe on a Tuesday evening in Talbiya, a restaurant named for the experimental edge of the stage it shares a building with, and cooking a menu built on the same premise.

The premise is literal. Fringe theatre works at the edge of the repertoire, staging what the main house will not, and Chef Nir Levy applies that logic to the Levantine kitchen. He goes looking for the dishes nobody plates seriously: the stuffed vegetable, the boiled dumpling, the flatbread stuffed and folded on a griddle. Then he cooks them as though they were the centre of the menu, because at Fringe they are.