My birthday and my daughter, Merav’s birthday are only a week apart. So, this year, we decided to celebrate together by taking the whole family out to dinner at Janjaria, the over-the-top chef restaurant in the boutique Ramban Hotel in central Jerusalem. Janjaria is operated by the Mahaneyuda Group which has expanded in recent years to offer a number of kosher establishments as well as its traditional treife ones.
Janjaria is the kind of place that is frequently sold out, so we were fortunate to find a table for all seven of us. The wait staff pulls up a chair to explain what’s on offer, especially since the menu changes frequently (perhaps not daily as in TV’s The Bear).
We ordered several cocktails, starters including focaccia with homemade humus and muhamarrah (a dip with dried peppers, walnuts and pomegranate molasses), tuna tartare (which, as raw fish, I’m not allowed to eat for another three months following my cancer treatment) and two plates of chickpea-filled sambusak.
For main dishes, I opted for the Spaghettini Arrabiatia – which featured a spicy fish broth, shredded sea bass and cilantro on top of pasta – Merav and Aviv both had butcher block skewers of shishlik on a bed of roasted cabbage (my favorite of all the dishes I sampled from my kids), Gabe had a steak, Jody had a whole piece of lavrak (more sea bass), and Amir went for lamb neck siniyah plate – also outstanding. To end it all – since the evening was to mark our birthdays – there was the obligatory chocolate mousse with a candle on top and seven spoons.
The music was loud – that’s the vibe at all Mahaneyuda Group restaurants – and when we asked, the manager refused to turn it down, so this is not the best place for intimate conversations. But the food was as out of-this-world as was the final bill, which was probably the most we’d ever spent on a single night of fine dining.
Everything should have been perfect. And then we heard it on Merav’s mobile phone – the scritch-scratch warning that everyone in Israel is intimately familiar with now – an alert indicating “incoming missiles; take shelter.”
Darn Houthis again.
You get the scritch-scratch on your phone whether you want it or not. The only way to not hear it is to put your phone on airplane mode, which I do in any case when I go to sleep. (Save your chiding. My wife, Jody, leaves her phone on.)
When we’d hear the scritch-scratch at home, we developed a system. If it was an attack from Iran, we’d immediately head down to our apartment’s shared safe space. But Iran hasn’t attacked with its highly precise and lethal weapons since June – all the ballistic missiles and drones heading our way these days are from the Houthis in Yemen whose aim has been notoriously wonky (a direct hit on Ramon Airport and a hotel in Eilat do not make for a formidable terrorist force, just one that can annoy the heck out of you).
To appropriate my favorite quote from Nuchem Shtisel, who plays Akiva’s shifty uncle and father of his bride, Libby, in the Israeli TV series Shtisel, when the Houthis come a ‘calling, I want to scream out “reshoim arurim,” meaning, in Nuchem’s colorful Yiddish, “Damned wicked people” or “Cursed villains.” Seems appropriate.
The phone alert covers a wide area, but air raid sirens only sound if the missile is headed your way – and with the Houthis, many if not most would be intercepted outside of Israeli airspace or would fall in a location other than where we are in Jerusalem. So, we could be woken up by an alert but not actually need to rush to the shelter.
Jody, being an alert-abiding citizen, would bolt out of bed (for a while, the ideal missile arrival time seemed to be 4:30 am) and head to the shelter when and if the siren sounded. I would usually only get as far as the top of the staircase outside our front door, which was fine until the Houthis started using cluster bombs which can cause more damage over a wider area. At that point, I considered going down the two flights to the shelter, but the siren always seems to stop by the time I get to the stairs and then it seems silly to keep going, with our neighbors already heading back, even though those are the “rules.”
I’ve had sirens sound several times while I was hospitalized, but never in a restaurant. What would we do? I wondered. Could we stay in our seats and pretend it was already over, like at home? Would this ruin the evening?
The wait staff was as clear as the hospital nurses: Head to the safe space … now! I didn’t hear any sirens in the din of hundreds of diners getting up from their tables, although Merav says she did.
What happened next never happens at home.
Most of the restaurant’s patrons were congregated in the stairwell into which pranced the wait staff carrying trays of alcohol – arak and tequila, specifically. They turned the Houthi missiles into an opportunity for additional inebriation. They had obviously discussed and practiced this maneuver.
I hadn’t drunk any alcohol in ages – it doesn’t tend to mix well with my meds – but this time I nursed a shot of tequila. I think we all earned it.
I thought Janjaria’s freshly proffered shots were one-of-a-kind, but my friend Sarah Tuttle Singer was dining at another top-ranked Jerusalem restaurant, Eucalyptus, at the same hour, and there, too, the wait staff brought arak into the safe room.
“We cursed the Houthis, and toasted one another,” Sarah summed up her evening.
Yet another way Israelis are coping with a situation – missiles during dinner – that may be unique in the world.
I first wrote about missiles from Yemen and tequila from Israel for The Jerusalem Post.
Photo by Andrew Svk on Unsplash
