Vivian: A Quiet Room for Wine Under the Steakhouse

The glass arrives before the menu. It is a half pour of a red from Emek HaEla, thirteen shekels of oak and cherry set down on a small wooden coaster next to a bowl of olives. The room is dim, the seats are low, and somewhere in the background a DJ has cued a Portuguese fado remix. Above your head, a full steakhouse is roaring through its Thursday night; down here, everyone is speaking a little more slowly. Vivian opened in February 2026 in the DNA group's BSR City compound, one flight below Chef Itay Shalio's Vin & Viande, and it is the rare wine bar in central Israel that does not feel like a restaurant that ran out of tables.

BSR City is a strange place to open a wine bar. The complex sits at Ze'ev Jabotinsky and Yitzhak Rabin, four thirty story office towers stacked over a shopping piazza, ten minutes on foot from the light rail. The lobby of Building C looks like a suburban office lobby anywhere in central Israel. Then you take the stairs down to Vivian and the light drops by half, the ceilings press a little closer, and the noise from the trading floors upstairs dies out completely. The room seats maybe thirty. There is a marble counter along one wall, a scatter of low tables and banquettes, and a wall of bottles that doubles as the design. Ran Dor-Chai, the entrepreneur behind Whisky Bar Museum in Sarona, Oscar Wilde and Kololo, built this room to feel European without cosplaying it, and it works. You could be in Paris off Rue Amelot or in a back street of Trastevere.