Steakiya: A Lost Jerusalem Tradition Roars Back to Life on Charcoal

The first thing you notice at Steakiya is the smoke. It curls out of the open kitchen and drapes itself across the dining room like a memory, carrying the scent of charred lamb fat, fenugreek, and bread blistering on a taboon stone. A waiter sweeps past with eleven small salads stacked on a single tray, slides them across the table in a single motion, and disappears. Behind the pass, butcher Kamal Al-Salmon flips a chalawiyat over white coals while Asaf Granit yells something in Hebrew at a cook holding a tomahawk on a hook. Outside, a queue of walk-ins presses against the glass doors. This is Wednesday night at Ha-Dekel 1.

Steakiya is a deliberate act of remembrance. When Asaf Granit and Uri Navon decided to convert the Tzemach vegetarian space into a kosher meat pop-up in November 2025, they were chasing a culinary ghost. The old Jerusalem shipudia, the kind once anchored by Sami, Sima, Morris, and Haim Pinto, had been quietly extinct for years. The neighborhood that invented the skewer-and-pita combination had lost its grammar. Granit said so plainly when the doors opened: there were no places like this left in Jerusalem.