Shoshana: The Pita That Made Pardes Hanna's Old Market Worth Driving For

Step into the Old Market courtyard on a Thursday evening and the scent hits before the sign does. It is the smell of a Josper oven that never really rests: charred lamb fat, cumin, smoke from oak lump charcoal that has been feeding the box since before lunch. Under a string of soft bulbs slung between the restored stone arches, four cooks work behind a low counter. One is chopping charred red peppers into a pool of olive oil. Another peels a whole cauliflower shawarma off a vertical spit and sends it through the slicer. A third pulls a rack of chicken liver skewers out of the fire, salt and pepper only, and lets them rest on a cedar board while the fat continues to bead. This is Shoshana on a service night, and the entire operation is designed around one deceptively simple deliverable: a pita that stops conversation.

Pardes Hanna's Old Market is a story in itself. For years the courtyard sat abandoned, a beautiful shell of Ottoman era stonework in the middle of the moshava with nothing inside it. The Nishev Maleh group, a collective of four partners including three lifelong Pardes Hanna residents, took on the restoration and turned it into a mixed use village of food, drink, and culture that closes on Shabbat because the whole complex is kosher. Shoshana is its flagship kitchen. Alongside a sister cocktail bar called Simcha, a plant nursery, jewelry workshops, and a rotating calendar of jazz nights and DJ evenings, it has given the town its most confident food destination since Guy Ben Asher started smashing burgers up the road.