Meryam: Haim Cohen's First Kosher Kitchen, Built Entirely From the Sea

A cube of laminated pastry lands on the table still ticking as it cools. Break it and the shell shatters into a hundred buttery leaves, and underneath the crumb is soft enough to soak up the spreads that arrive beside it, with a slice of challah waiting to finish the job. Behind you, through a wall of glass, a thirty four storey office tower goes about its Tuesday evening. In front of you, cooks work a stainless steel pass that runs most of the length of the room, and one of them is Haim Cohen, sleeves pushed up, plating a grouper cigar with the concentration of a man who has done this several thousand times and still checks. This is Meryam at eight o'clock, and it is the first kosher restaurant Cohen has opened in his life.

The menu runs to roughly thirty dishes and contains no meat and no poultry at all. Every protein came out of the Mediterranean, and the fish and produce arrive each morning from the port and the local markets. That constraint turns out to be the premise rather than the compromise.