Tel Aviv’s food scene has always been a reflection of its diversity – Russian groceries next to Yemenite spice shops, Ethiopian restaurants around the corner from French bakeries. But lately, a different kind of restaurant has been popping up across the city. These aren’t places trying to impress you with unlikely combinations or shock value fusion. They’re personal projects by people navigating between the cultures they inherited and the city they live in now. A Vietnamese-Filipino couple who met at Israeli scouts. An Ethiopian-Israeli chef adding tahini to his grandmother’s recipes. A Russian immigrant who became obsessed with making Japanese gyoza. These restaurants exist in the spaces between defined cuisines, creating food that makes sense only here, in this particular moment, in this surprising city.
El Mano (46 Yesod HaMa’ala Street, Neve Sha’anan) is the brainchild of Ann Ho and John Bautista, a couple whose love story started at Israeli scouts when they were teenagers. Ann’s parents were Vietnamese refugees, John’s were Filipino migrant workers, and together they’ve created a restaurant that reflects both their backgrounds and their Tel Aviv upbringing. The menu reads like a conversation between Saigon and Manila: aromatic pho shares space with hearty Filipino bulalo, fresh Vietnamese summer rolls sit next to crispy sisig, and somehow it all makes perfect sense.
Ann, who worked her way through Tel Aviv’s restaurant scene from age 15, wanted to serve the food she grew up eating at home, recipes learned by watching her mother cook without any written instructions. The restaurant opened in 2019 and quickly became a neighborhood favorite, serving both the local immigrant communities and adventurous Israelis looking for flavors beyond the usual Tel Aviv offerings. There’s something naturally Israeli about this place – two kids who met at a youth movement, grew up here, and are now serving their parents’ food with their own twist to a new generation of Tel Avivis.
Studio Gursha (Derech Salame 13, South Tel Aviv) is where Chef Elazar Tamano explores what he calls “Ethiopian with an Israeli accent.” Tamano’s culinary style reflects his unique position: born in Israel to Ethiopian parents, he grew up feeling caught between cultures, more comfortable in Hebrew than Amharic, yet deeply connected to the flavors of his heritage.
The restaurant presents Pan-African cuisine that ventures far beyond traditional Ethiopian offerings, incorporating influences from the Caribbean, Middle East, and Europe. Here, classic doro wat might be finished with tahini, injera becomes crispy art on the plate, and traditional shiro gets reimagined with the texture of hummus. The menu changes frequently, but signature dishes include beef tartare with Ethiopian spices, crispy fish with peanut sauce that nods to West Africa, and desserts that blend French technique with African flavors. The space itself, designed as a lively bar-restaurant, attracts an equally diverse crowd, and people can’t stop talking about how wonderful and unique this restaurant is in the Tel Aviv landscape.
San Mai Gyoza Bar (17 Yom Tov Street, Carmel Market) might be the most unexpected entry in Tel Aviv’s dumpling scene. Vadim Kondratyev, who immigrated from Russia just two and a half years ago, turned a COVID lockdown hobby into a thriving business at the edge of the bustling market. What started as him and his wife teaching themselves to make gyoza in Russia has evolved into a focused menu that puts these Japanese dumplings center stage: not as an appetizer, but as the main event.
The classic version features chicken with cabbage and ginger in a delicate wrapper, but Kondratyev’s creativity shines in unexpected variations: beef gyoza in Filipino adobo sauce wrapped in turmeric-tinted dough, vegan versions with quinoa and shiitake in spinach-green wrappers, and his nostalgic Soviet interpretation with potatoes and mushrooms served with sour cream. The tiny spot has already gained a following for its handcrafted approach – every dumpling is personally folded by Kondratyev. And yes, there’s kombucha on tap, because this is still Tel Aviv after all.
What’s Next?
These three restaurants represent something new in the city’s food landscape: places where authenticity isn’t about perfectly replicating traditional recipes, but about honestly expressing what it means to carry multiple cultures at once. In a city where everyone’s from somewhere else and creating something new, these in-between spaces feel exactly right. The food might not be what you’d find in Hanoi, Addis Ababa, or Tokyo, but that’s the point. It belongs here, in Israel, where identities fuse and clash all the time.
