Cafe Lalush Kiryat Ono: An Oven at the Centre of the New Ono

The taboon door swings open and heat rolls across the room, carrying the smell of scorched flour and mozzarella going glossy at the edges. A pizza rides out on a long wooden peel, its rim blistered dark in three or four places, and travels the short distance to a table where two women with office badges are already clearing space for it. It is one in the afternoon on HaSderah HaAkademit, the boulevard of new towers at Savyon Junction where Kiryat Ono, Or Yehuda and Yehud all meet. Students from the Ono Academic Campus have taken the long tables. Someone at the counter is still working through a breakfast plate an hour after the kitchen would rather have moved on. Nobody is being hurried. The oven does not stop.

Cafe Lalush belongs to a brasserie chain founded in 2015 by Eyal Eliyahu and David Gera, and the chain has one structural idea that it repeats in every branch: the oven goes in the middle of the room, not behind a wall. Everything else follows from that decision. The heat is public. So is the noise, the scrape of the peel, the sudden orange flare when a door opens. At the Kiryat Ono branch the oven is the reason a room full of office workers looks up at intervals, and it is the reason the pizzas here taste like pizzas rather than like bread carrying toppings.