Berta: Yossi Shitrit's Quiet Comeback Above the Mall Escalators

The focaccia lands first, blistered and still steaming, its top crackled where the taboon caught it. A tiny copper bowl of harissa aioli arrives alongside, the chili oil already pooling in the seams. Around you the new restaurant floor of Ramat Aviv Mall hums with the soft glitter of shopping bags and conversation, but here at the chef counter, the noise narrows to the slap of dough against marble and the hiss of olive oil hitting iron. A cook in white slides a sea bream onto a skewer, salts it, and tucks it inside the central taboon. Watching him work, you forget you are in a shopping mall in north Tel Aviv.

Chef Yossi Shitrit, the one who built David and Yossef on Montefiore Street and not the television personality who shares his name, spent the war years cooking out of a food truck on a religious moshav near Atlit. He called that truck Berta, after an old motorcycle. The name has followed him back to the city. After two years of plating Neapolitan pizzas onto picnic tables under almond trees, Shitrit has rebuilt his kitchen on the second floor of Ramat Aviv Mall, in the dedicated restaurant section that the Ofer Group carved out of the old upper level. He has kept the format simple: a long bar facing the open kitchen, a separated dining room for the families who arrive after school, and a single wood fired oven at the center of everything.