Azura: Machane Yehuda's Copper Pots Find Their Tel Aviv Address

The sofrito arrives in a bowl that looks heavier than it is, the broth still trembling from the spoon, beef pulling apart at the slightest pressure, potatoes the color of saffron from hours in turmeric and onion. Around the room, lunch is in full swing: a man in a hi-vis vest nurses a coffee at the counter, two women in business suits dissect a plate of stuffed eggplant, a couple at the next table debate whether the beet kubeh is better than the hamusta. Somewhere behind the open kitchen, a copper pot the size of a snare drum is being lifted off a low flame. This is Azura, lunchtime, on a Tuesday in central Tel Aviv. The Shrefler family kitchen has been doing exactly this since the early 1950s in Jerusalem. The Tel Aviv address is younger, but the ritual is identical.

The Tel Aviv branch is run by Elran Shrefler, the youngest of the nine children of Ezra Shrefler, who founded the original Azura inside the Iraqi quarter of Machane Yehuda market. Ezra immigrated from Diarbekir in 1949 at sixteen, started as a dishwasher, and by the early 1950s was cooking Kurdish, Turkish, and Iraqi food for market porters. He died in December 2022, but the family kept the pots on the heat. When Elran opened the Tel Aviv outpost in 2015, the brief was simple: replicate Jerusalem, do not reinvent it.