Maree Sky Lounge: A Tel Aviv Dinner Club on the Edge of the Netanya Cliff

The elevator opens onto the fifteenth floor and the first thing you see is the kitchen. Not a window, not a host, not a coat check. A red crown of a hood, the size of a small car, hanging over a 360 degree cooking island while two cooks finish a foie gras carpaccio under it. To the left, the dining room steps down in platforms toward the sea. To the right, three bars and a DJ booth that has not yet started for the evening. Somewhere behind it all, the Mediterranean is still throwing back the last of the daylight. This is what Aviv Moshe and Itzik Russo spent seven million shekels to build, and three years after opening it still reads as the most ambitious kosher rooftop in Israel.

Netanya was never the obvious site for it. The chef who made his name at Messa and at Poupee in Tel Aviv could have picked the Sarona tower or the Carlton roof, and instead he chose the southern cliffs above the Poleg beach, where the Vert Lagoon Hotel rises like a glass slab over the Nat 600 promenade. The bet was that Tel Aviv would come north for the view and the parking, and that observant diners across the Sharon would finally get a chef driven room at this scale. By 2022 the dining room was hosting around three hundred guests a night and weeks of reservations were stacked behind the door. The crowd has not thinned since.