DAW: A Lod Courtyard, Eight Plates, and Live Fire

The gate opens onto a small courtyard strung with low warm lights, and the first thing you register is the smell. Brown butter, charred eggplant, lemon zest cutting through smoke. A counter wraps around an open kitchen where chef Or Bensimon and one cook are already moving fast, ladles in hand, the sound of a pan kissing flame every few seconds. Twenty four chairs face the line. Bottles of natural water and bread plates wait in a neat row. Someone is plating a hamachi sashimi with the kind of focus most kitchens save for a wedding. You sit down on Rivka Imenu street in central Lod, and within ninety seconds you have already stopped thinking about Lod.

The meal opens with a piece of bread that arrives on a flat river stone, still hot from the oven, brushed with miso brown butter that pools into the crust. The bread is dense, almost like a small focaccia, and the miso pushes it past the line where butter usually stops into something nuttier and saltier. The siphon fritter that follows looks like a quenelle of pale foam and breaks open to charred eggplant, preserved peppers, a tiny crown of sea urchin confit, and cold cream. Bensimon is showing his hand early: dairy is not a constraint here, it is the architecture. Every plate uses fat the way a kosher meat kitchen uses bone marrow.