Backyard 51: A Foliage Fringed Garden Behind Nahalat Binyamin's Loudest Block

Step off the pedestrian rush of Nahalat Binyamin, past the front dining room of Fifty and One, and the noise drops by half. A wooden gate opens onto a small courtyard where climbing plants soften the neighboring walls, string lights hang above a scatter of low tables, and the clink of a cocktail shaker cuts through the last of the daylight. This is Backyard 51, the garden bar that Chef Ofek Gilad opened in April 2026 as the summer extension of Bar Israel's Fifty and One kitchen. The concept is simple and unusual for kosher Tel Aviv: a compact sharing menu that lets Italian and Japanese cooking sit side by side on the same table, plated by a dairy kitchen that already knows how to make pasta from scratch.

Nahalat Binyamin is one of the loudest addresses in Tel Aviv. The pedestrian stretch between Allenby and King George pulls in shoppers by day and pours restaurant crowds out onto the tile every night. Backyard 51 sits behind the parquet dining room of Fifty and One at number 51, and the pivot from front to back feels engineered. Inside, rattan seating and warm parquet frame the front pasta counter. Behind, the garden reveals itself in stages: a first cluster of tables under a low pergola, then a second pocket where the string lights concentrate over the bar station. The whole space is intentionally small, maybe thirty covers when the weather cooperates, and the foliage does the work that walls would do elsewhere. You feel enclosed without feeling boxed in.