Mia: A Kosher Coastline Tucked Into Einstein Street

The lemon arrives before the food does. Sliced thin, marinated in olive oil, fanned across a slate plate, it sits there practically buzzing with citrus. A waiter slides a small dish of cured toro tuna beside it, and suddenly a Tel Aviv afternoon on Einstein Street feels like a noon table in Sorrento. This is Mia at the start of lunch service, when the dining room is still half full and the light through the front windows is doing most of the work. Chef Shahar Ling stands in the open kitchen at the back, calling pickups in calm Hebrew, and a cook to his right pulls a hamachi loin from the cold drawer with the kind of attention people normally reserve for newborns. The first bite tells you the rest of the meal is going to be careful.

Mia is the daylight half of the Bella Mia complex, a 1,700 square meter project built by Shuki Biton, the singer Eden Ben Zaken, and the partners behind Luchina in Raanana and the Fifty and One group. Bella, the Italian dinner room, takes over after six in the evening. Chi, the Japanese izakaya, joins the lineup later. Mia owns the noon to midnight slot, and it owns it as a Mediterranean fish bistro pulled from the coasts of Amalfi, Sicily, and Capri rather than from any single Italian city.