Zacks Brasserie: Rehovot Finally Gets the Kosher Chef Room It Has Been Waiting For

The bill arrives in a brown paper envelope, the kind a postmaster would have once stamped and slid across a counter in early Rehovot. It is a small gesture, and an easy one to miss after three courses of aged beef, Israeli wine, and almond cream. But it tells you exactly who Zacks Brasserie thinks it is. This restaurant carries a name, the name of Ephraim Zacks, who planted almond groves and built the water lines that turned Rehovot into a city, and it carries that name with full intent. Every dish, every detail, every line on the menu is wired to a story. After two decades of cooking at Moshav Segula, chef Sahar Refael has finally turned the lights on inside a kosher dining room, and the result is the most ambitious kosher opening Rehovot has ever seen.

The approach is unusual. You walk through the marble lobby of the Mediterranean Towers complex on Har HaTzofim, past residents collecting mail, past the concierge desk, and through a discreet door at the back. The transition is jarring on first visit and quickly forgotten. Inside, designer Gad Halperin has built a hushed, low lit room of polished wood, leather, and brushed metal, organized around two centerpieces: a six seat bar where the sommelier holds court, and a floor to ceiling wine monument that climbs the back wall with more than 280 Israeli bottles. White tablecloths catch the warm light. A glass wall on the long side of the room opens onto a lit garden where eucalyptus trees press against the panes. The effect is bucolic and a little surreal, a fine dining room dropped into a residential pocket of west Rehovot, and once you sit down the building around it disappears.