Neya: Tel Aviv Cooking on a Surfside Sidewalk

The pita reaches the table before anything else, blistered and puffed from the coal fired oven you can see working at the back of the room, and it deflates with a sigh when you tear it. Around it the small plates start landing: hummus under a slick of sehug, dates split open and packed with brie, a plate of crispy rice topped with tuna and lemon aioli. It is nine on a Saturday night in Surfside, an hour after Shabbat has ended, and Harding Avenue has emptied its living rooms onto this block. The dining room is full of families in Shabbat clothes, couples on second dates, tables of friends ordering arak cocktails. Neya feeds a neighbourhood, and on this one night of the week you can watch it happen.

Executive Chef Ben Siman Tov, an Israeli native, cooks a menu with no meat on it at all, which turns out to be the most interesting thing about the kitchen. A dairy restaurant in the kosher world usually means pizza and pasta and an apology. Neya treats the constraint as a brief. The raw section alone runs to five dishes: yellow tail sashimi with prickly pear, Jerusalem artichoke and white truffle juice; hamachi carpaccio set against grapes, feta and pine nuts; branzino served with falafel, tahini, amba and cucumber, which is a Tel Aviv street sandwich taken apart and rebuilt on a plate.