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"FacebookPinterest\n\nAny worries I had that Bar Bolonat might not be an authentic Israeli restaurant vanished the moment I walked in the door.\u00A0 At the first table sat a sockless fellow wearing open-toed leather sandals\u2014had he been wearing white socks under the sandals, I'd have figured it for a German restaurant.\n\n The sandals were identical to the ones I bought on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv forty years ago and still wear. These days, Israeli sandals aren't nearly as good as they used to be. The food, however, is much better.\n\n On that trip, I encountered no recognizable provisions other than eggplant, hummus, and orange juice. Since I didn't care for the first two, I existed on a liquid diet. Israel has now developed a cuisine all its own\u2014modern, innovative, and entirely admirable. I call it Israeli-Mediterranean, others prefer Modern Israeli. The country has all but abandoned the food that came on the boats with the early immigrants, the ponderous but beloved Eastern European cooking of Jewish legend and Passover tables, anchored by brisket and potato kugel. Now you'll find salads, grains, fresh vegetables, local spices and spice blends, grilled fish and lamb\u2014and just as much hummus as ever. Permit me to add to the tensions of the Middle East by suggesting that Israel has the best food in the region.\n\n At Bar Bolonat, chef Einat Admony, once a cook in the Israeli Army, shows off her own personal interpretation of this cuisine, not quite what you'll find in her hometown of Tel Aviv but close. Hers is more personal and perhaps more suited to New York tastes, with plenty of large-scale proteins. You'll want to begin your meal with a Jerusalem Bagel, oversized and slightly oblong, bejeweled with sesame seeds and accompanied by two condiments\u2014olive oil and za'atar, the omnipresent Middle Eastern spice blend. You can find similar bagels at stands just inside the gates of the old city of Jerusalem.\n\n Bar Bolonat isn't really a bar. It's a restaurant, although the bar is large and dominates the square room. Everything is found in that one room\u2014kitchen, bar, restrooms, tables. The kitchen juts out from the back wall and the bar is next in line, much as Brooklyn is followed by Long Island on a single neck of land. The bar has seats all around it, leaving little room for tables. They are lined up along the walls, one-deep.\n\n You can look into the semi-open kitchen by peering across the bar and through the shelves holding the bottles of liquor. I asked our very accommodating waitress if she could point out Admony for me. She replied, \"You can't see her. She's too short.\"\u00A0\n\n The drinks aren't particularly tasty or interesting, although they have terrific names: Shiksa, Simcha, and the only one I liked, a play on Sazerac called Saz-Arak that oddly contained no arak, the Middle Eastern anise-flavored spirit. The wine list is intriguing but expensive, the mark-ups extremely high\u2014a $97 Israeli Chenin Blanc called Shvo retails for about $30. Perhaps none of that matters, because Jews aren't known to be heavy drinkers and most of the customers seated at the bar were eating when I was there. As the seminal Jewish comedian Jackie Mason once told me, \"Jews have one thing on their mind: food. At five o'clock, when Gentiles are thinking, \u2018I want a drink,' Jews are thinking, 'I want to eat.'\"\n\n On my first visit, very late on a Friday night, every square centimeter of space was packed, customers standing two deep at the bar, the standees clamoring for a drink. Okay, maybe all the customers aren't Jewish. I ordered a Goldstar lager, happy to try Israeli beer, while my friend had the 961 Beer LPA, which stands for Lebanese Pale Ale, lightly spiced and far more refreshing than the dull and slightly sweet Israeli stuff. I mentioned this to the waitress, and she replied, \"People think it's funny that we serve it. It's kind of the Budweiser of Israel.\"\n\n The dinner menu is divided into three categories I'd describe as small, medium, and large, sixteen items in all. The Japanese eggplant, in the first grouping, is so succulent and so reasonably priced at $11 that I couldn't stop eating it. It's gorgeously cooked and beautifully presented, but I can say that about almost every dish here, even the few I didn't particularly enjoy.\u00A0 I can't speak Hebrew\u2014I flunked Hebrew School\u2014but I know a few words of Yiddish, and most of the dishes I didn't admire were a little ongepotchket, fussed over too much.\n\n The eggplant was sliced thick and cooked to a magical state of sweet firmness. Atop it was a dash of sheep's milk yogurt and under it a spicy vinaigrette made with Aleppo peppers, an alluring source of heat named for the once-great Syrian city now almost in ruins. A salad of intertwined asparagus and ramps seemed unlikely to be of Israeli origin, inasmuch as Israel is devoid of the wooded forests where ramps thrive, but the two idiosyncratic vegetables worked well together, thanks to a Meyer lemon puree that could rescue any improbable combination. Grilled baby artichokes, at best inoffensive, were the only dish that looked bland and tasted the same. Everyday cauliflower was beautiful, a ridge of golden chunks strung out along an elongated slate plate, but the vegetables were tasteless and one of the accompaniments was Bamba, an Israeli junk food made from peanut-butter flavored puffed corn, a kind of unholy amalgam of Nutter Butter and Kix.\n\n Near the end of that first meal, a fight broke out.\n\n It wasn't much, no rampage, and surely not a result of Middle East tensions, particularly since the language was pure New York\u2014\"Fuck you,\" followed by, \"No, fuck you,\" the poetry of inebriation. A couple guys standing by the bar had started arguing over space. It's worth knowing that Bar Bolonat is located below 14th Street, the demarcation line for late-night bad behavior.\n\n A little later, at a table occupied by two couples, the women drunk and men goading them on, one woman started screaming, \"We need shots!\" Should you choose to patronize Bar Bolonat, it's also good to remember that people tend to behave differently when they walk into places called bars, as opposed to those that call themselves restaurants. Early in the evening, Bar Bolonat tends to be a picture-postcard neighborhood spot. The floor may be cement and the look somewhat industrial, but in those early hours, when the tables are filled with mature customers, the place is chic and not without warmth.\n\n The dish almost every couple should order is poussin, a plump hen similar in appearance but perhaps not in breeding to America's very own Cornish game hen, glazed with pomegranate, then cooked and presented in an iron pot. It's downright romantic, and best shared. Under the hen is rice and potatoes, the rice with brittle socarrat-like scrapings, the potatoes crispy around the edges\u2014rice is rather fortunate to have such a wonderful word to describe its crunch. Also present are candied walnuts, a peculiar addition, so I again asked a waitress for assistance. She explained that when Admony and her sister were children, her mother made poussin in this way and the kids fought over the walnuts. Also a product of mom's kitchen is the Hudson Street kibbeh, ground hangar steak enclosed in a shell of bulgur wheat, resulting in a Middle Eastern dish that resembles Scotch eggs. I expected lamb within, but I was told that Admony's mother is Iranian and her recipes are based on beef. (For more about the family, visit Balaboosta, one of Admony's other restaurants, where Aunt Hanna's photo is on the menu cover.)\n\n The hand-cut pasta is as lovely as a colorless dish can be, the noodles intertwirled with chiles, garlic, and ricotta yogurt, which is far better than pure yogurt atop noodles\u2014I've traveled frequently in the Middle East, and seeing that pasta preparation was my most terrifying experience. The portion is too much for one but makes a perfect middle course for three or four to share. The two major meat dishes, lamb belly &amp;amp; shoulder and the minute steak, are skillfully cooked, but the soft, deeply flavored lamb obliterates its accompaniments, whereas the skirt steak has the opposite problem: It's overwhelmed by the toppings and sides, which include a complex salad, spring onions, and tahini, the sesame seed paste.\u00A0\n\n Desserts are both unnecessary and unconvincing. Tea gelato offers little pleasure, and the baklava accompanying it was dense and hard, everything baklava shouldn't be. A few years ago Israelis started placing halva, the sesame-seed candy, into all manner of sweets. I never liked the idea, and I don't feel differently after tasting Bar Bolonat's halva cr\u00E8me br\u00FBl\u00E9e. I didn't order the third dessert, chocolate falafel. I lacked the courage.\n\n I love that Bar Bolonat takes you to Israel, and also to unknown lands, where ramps and asparagus, pasta and ricotta yogurt, and even beef and tahini co-exist, mostly in harmony but sometimes not. Admony is fortunate, because she opened Bar Bolonat at a time when Middle Eastern food has never been more desirable around here, but she's also confident and deft. She is one of the few chefs in this city cooking Middle Eastern food not because it's trendy to do so, but because she knows how.\n\nRating: Two Stars.\n\n  Don't Miss This... Cocktail: Saz-Arak (rye, cassis, grapefruit bitters, Angostura bitters), $13\n\n White Wine: 2013 Gai'A\u00A0 Thalassitis, Santorini, $65\n\n Red Wine: 2008 Meishar #41, Israel, $63 / bottle; $16 / glass\n\n First Course: Japanese Eggplant, $11\n\n Second Course: Hudson Street Kibbeh, $15\n\n Main Course: Poussin, $31"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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