Where to stay

Dan Carmel Haifa This elegant hotel high on a hill overlooking the Mediterranean is a perfect base for touring Israel’s north coast. From £170 for two, including breakfast. 85-87 Hanassi Avenue, Haifa, 00 972 4 830 3030, http://danhotels.com

Song of the Sea This is a beautiful historic antidote to the soulless hotel blocks blighting Tiberias; every room is different. From £110 for two, including breakfast. Tiberias, 00 972 4 672 1122, http://shirathayam.org.il

Dan Caesarea This country-club-style hotel in lavish grounds is close to the ancient Herodian port. From £160 for two, including breakfast. Caesarea Maritima, 00 972 4 626 9111, http://danhotels.com

Travel Information

Currency is the Israeli shekel (£1=5ILS). Israel is two hours ahead of GMT.
The sun shines from late February to mid-November, with temperatures ranging from 20˚C to a summer high of 40˚C, but the short winters can be cold and rainy.

GETTING THERE
EL AL (020 7121 1400, elal.co.uk) flies daily from London Heathrow or Luton to Tel Aviv.

RESOURCES
Contact the Israel Government Tourist Office (020 7299 1113, http://thinkisrael.com) for assistance; El Al’s website (http://elal.co.uk) is also packed with information.

Where to eat

Goats with the Wind Both lunch and dinner can be arranged, but the former is recommended to check out the goats and enjoy the fabulous view. Cheese and salad feast about £35 for two. Har Hashabi, Yodfat, Galilee, 00 972 5 0532 7387, http://goatswiththewind.com

Helena Expect innovative takes on local seafood and produce from chef Amos Sion. £70 for two. The Old Town, Caesarea Port, Keisarya, 00 972 4610 1018

Hanamal 24 Haifa’s top restaurant surprises with its assortment of enchanting semi-private rooms and highly original gourmet fare. £75 for two. 24 Hanamal Street, Haifa, 00 972 5 7944 2262, http://namal24.rest-e.co.il

Sinta Bar Buzzy eaterie famous for its steaks and burgers. £50 for two (£25 for burgers). 127 Moria Boulevard, Haifa, 00 972 4 834 1170

Decks This restaurant proves that kosher beef and lamb, all locally raised, can be utterly delicious, especially when served with fine Israeli wines and traditional accompaniments like onion loaf. £60 for two. Gdud Barak Street, Tiberias, 00 972 4 672 1538

Uri Buri The simple setting in an old Turkish house facing Acre’s shore belies the superb seafood, served raw or briefly cooked with Oriental influences. Expect large portions. Up to £100 for two. 93 Haganah Street, Acre, 00 972 4 955 2212

Mizpe Hayamim Almost all the produce for this restaurant, considered one of Israel’s best, is grown on its own organic farm. £80 for two. 89 Safed Road, Rosh Pina, 00 972 469 9455, http://mizpe-hayamim.com

Tishbi At this winery, founded in 1882, and in nearby Zichron Yaakov, Israeli and Mediterranean dishes are served in a casual rustic atmosphere. £30 for two. Binyamina, Haifa, 00 972 4 638 0434, http://tishbi.com

Food Glossary

Labane

Soft cheese made from yoghurt curds, mixed with olive oil, herbs or raw vegetables; it’s a breakfast staple.

Silan

Syrup extracted from dates, also known as date ‘honey’.

Tahini

Sesame paste (an ingredient of hummus also served in Israel on its own) diluted with water and seasoned with lemon juice to make a dip or dressing for raw vegetables.

Hummus

Chickpeas blended with tahini, lemon juice and occasionally garlic. It’s less smooth and spicy than its version in the West and is often served garnished with whole chickpeas and fresh chillies on the side.

Zattar

Wild hyssop, used fresh but more commonly dried and pounded with other seasonings, including sumac and salt, to make a dried topping to sprinkle on hummus, tahini and labane.

Food and Travel Review

There can be few places in the world where staple ingredients enjoyed thousands of years ago are still revered and consumed as avidly as when shepherds watched their flocks by night and a warm cave to dwell in was the height of aspiration.

In the land of milk and honey, the rich dairy treat known as labane,and silan, a superb natural sweetener derived from dates, are still dearly beloved. Both rate a mention in the Bible, along with zattar,the wild hyssop foraged from mountain slopes to be dried, pounded and seasoned into a spicy mix for sprinkling on those other timeless dishes of the Levant: hummus, tahini and goat’s cheese.

Much of Israel is so modern and cosmopolitan, the connection with ancient foods may be barely apparent in its big cities, awash with gourmet restaurants, but the Galilee is a different story. Here, in the arid hinterland punctuated by lush oases, are the goat farms that produce labane, the date palms from which silan is harvested, the orchards groaning with pomegranates, persimmons and other foods with biblical associations as well as the avocados, oranges and grapefruit that are among the country’s most important exports.

And we can’t forget to mention the vineyards producing worldclass wines, and the olive plantations that have been yielding fine oil since before the time of Jesus. Israel’s north is not only the birthplace of Christianity, its Mediterranean coast was also the landing point for the Roman invasion of the Holy Land, followed by the Crusaders a millennium later in a bloody bid to oust the Muslim ‘infidels’ who had seen off indigenous Jews and early Christians.

All these invaders would ultimately give way to Ottoman rule and a period under the British mandate from which the modern state of Israel was forged in the port of Haifa by Holocaust survivors, who fought their way into the Promised Land to join with early pioneers. In a heartbeat, the culinary traditions of northern Europe met the heady spice emporia of the Middle East and, within a decade or two, Iraqi, Yemenite, North African and Russian immigrants would add their own influences to the world’s most diverse cuisine.

Visitors eat well today everywhere in Israel, but nowhere with more variety than in the north, where Jews live side by side with Muslims, Christians and Druze, and Arabic is as widely spoken as Hebrew. While Israeli-Jewish chefs are creating a sophisticated cuisine based on this ethnic melting pot, which is the heritage of a refugee culture, you’ll find that Arabs are still sought after for their hummus, Druze bakers for their delicate, crepe-like wraps and the Jewish kibbutzniks for their dates to make silan.

One of the best places to experience the timeless continuity between the ancients and the culinary innovators of today is Goats with the Wind, a dairy farm high up in the Galilee, where guests are offered a home-made feast. Civilisations collide in the very partnership between Daliah Shpigel, a former journalist from Haifa, who like many stressed urbanites moved to the spiritual Galilee decades ago with other Israeli New Agers, and her partner Amnon Zaldstein, a career shepherd all his life. ‘We arrived with sheep in 1982 but soon realised the land was better for goats,’ says Amnon, who today tends a flock of 200, which produces cheese and labane for the farm and nearby residents, and just 30 sheep, with whose milk the couple make aged blue feta in the months of February and March.

Visitors prepared to book ahead and make the tortuous journey on roads winding up the mountain through Arab townships, eventually cresting it across a dirt track, will find a delight for all the senses unmatched in any of Israel’s more conventional restaurants. The couple have set up seven verandahs overlooking a deep valley on which guests are invited to lounge on colourful cushions atop kilim-lined decks. The low tables are set with water jugs, each containing a bouquet of roses, but to supplement this delicate flavoured water there is also a stone flask containing a fine blend of cabernet sauvignon and merlot from the couple’s grapes.

In a charming rustic kitchen partly open to the elements, Daliah spoons tiny portions of labane into small terracotta saucers and sprinkles them with fresh wild hyssop. ‘This was eaten in Abraham’s time,’ she tells me, ‘but there is very little labane at this time of year because all the goats are pregnant.’

Not that we are going to go short of food. The arid landscape seems as unlikely to yield fruit as wine, but the couple produce quinces from their own orchard sweet enough to shred raw with spinach and fresh ginger into a delicious salad, followed by supersweet red and yellow tomatoes infused with sumptuous golden local olive oil. Then come cheeses, yet more salads, pyramids of hot mashed potato mixed with coconut and stuffed with aubergine, and tiny pecan tarts with strong Turkish-style coffee to fortify us for the ride back to civilisation.

Although Tiberias is also a centre of culinary pilgrimage for Jews who come from all over Israel to enjoy the country’s finest kosher meat at Decks, a barbecue restaurant perched beside the lapping waves of the Galilee shore, this will not be the last we hear of labane. While we savour fabulously sweet lamb chops and succulent steaks from local herds of beef, owner Ido Gross confesses he is not only a carnivore but a labane addict: ‘I buy mine from local Arabs who have been making it for generations, and I eat it three times a day,’ he confesses. It is no surprise to find Ido has left a pot – strong, salty and creamy, all at once – for me to taste at Song of the Sea, a beautifully converted 19th-century stone building situated right on the shore.

The gateway to the Galilee is Haifa, Israel’s third-largest city and its second port. It is also home to a couple of great dining spots. Sinta Bar sits among the smart shops and apartment blocks of Mount Carmel, where Haifa’s affluent converge; it’s the place to people-watch over a steak with smoked marrowbone, or the best burger in town, while savouring the city’s urban buzz.

But for true gourmet fare, you have to brave the dubious port road to an old industrial warehouse where you’ll find Hanamal 24. Here Paul Bocuse graduate Ran Rosh and his partner Guy Avital offer innovative modern cuisine and some very fine wines in a series of delightfully intimate semi-private rooms. We enjoyed a ceviche of local red drum fish with guacamole, followed by goose leg cooked with red wine and Persian lemon and served with parmesan risotto.

Haifa itself is home to many Druze, Christians and Muslims as well as Jews – it is Israel’s most multi-denominational and integrated city – and is also the centre of the Bahá’i faith, which has many holy sites 25km north in Acre. This ancient port, where so many invaders came to grief, is today a Unesco World Heritage site, thanks to its beautifully preserved architecture and fortifications.

Acre is also a treat for gourmands, who need to arrive early to catch a local delicacy only served until 2pm (you’ll need time to digest it in order to enjoy dinner at Israel’s most innovative seafood restaurant, Uri Buri). That lunchtime treat is a bowl of creamy mashed chickpeas, blended with olive oil, lemon juice and the sesame paste known as tahini, from Hummus Said, a market restaurant that shuts up shop before the typically late Israeli lunch hour is over. Business is so good, they don’t have to stay open in the afternoon to make a living. ‘I must make 5,000 to 6,000 pitas every morning,’ says Abu Said, who does the baking. ‘Thank goodness, we close on Saturdays,’ he laughs – it’s a quirk of Israel that this Arab venture chooses to observe the Jewish sabbath as its closing day.

In contrast, Uri Jeremias opens his restaurant from noon to midnight seven days a week to satisfy the demands of customers. The former diver picked up his culinary inspiration from his travels, importing an appreciation of sashimi from Japan, the flavours of coconut milk, lemon grass and ginger in moilees from southern India and chermoula-like stuffings for sardines from North Africa. A ceviche of amberjack marinated with caper paste, lemon, salt, finely chopped onions and olive oil is his own invention. ‘I just started cooking things I liked to eat myself,’ he explains, ‘and if there’s one hallmark here, it’s extreme speed of preparation. Even cooked dishes are ready within three minutes, and in the case of our coconut milk casserole, we don’t even cook the fish – we drop it into the boiling broth and it’s ready by the time it comes to the table.’

Uri is also a partner in the restaurant Helena, down the coast in the port of Caesarea, and where I enjoyed my finest and most inventive meal. Chef Amos Sion, who has cooked in Michelin-starred restaurants in Alsace as well as with Israel’s top chefs, offers a fabulous take on local produce, evident in his wild fennel soup garnished with half a deep-fried artichoke and a slick of melting goat’s cheese. This was followed by a carpaccio of jackfish with fennel sorbet, blue crab straight out of the bay, marinated in aged balsamic and ginger before being slipped briefly in the wood-fired oven, and the lamb-and-veal-stuffed ‘cigars’ of deep-fried pastry that are a modern Israeli favourite. We just about found room for Amos’s tahini and silan ice-cream: a triumph.

It’s easy to stick to the Mediterranean coast, where Caesarea, Haifa and Acre each cry out for a full day to explore, as well as the biblical sites of the Galilee, but it’s well worth a detour to picturesque Safed, where the Kabbalah was born and where the spa hotel Mizpe Hayamim produces virtually all the food for its noted restaurant on its own organic farm. Visit Daliyat El-Carmel to enjoy a wrap of lacy, crepe-like bread cooked over a stone by Druze bakers who sprinkle them with labane and their own secret zattar blend – different at every bakery – before folding them into tasty wraps.

While Daliyat is not exactly scenic, nearby Zichron Yaakov, where Israel’s wine industry was founded, is a beautiful hill village perched high above the Mediterranean, a setting that could have been transplanted from California’s Napa Valley. Here the Tishbi winery serves a mix of dishes straight out of Israel’s melting pot; this is not only the place to enjoy a plate of penne with mushrooms, which looks as if it could have come straight from a Tuscan kitchen, but also the North African dish known as shakshuka – eggs in a spicy tomato sauce – which is Israel’s brunch favourite. Shakshuka, which means ‘all mixed up’ in Hebrew, is a metaphor for Israel itself. Libyan, Tunisian and Moroccan immigrants all lay claim to it, but whatever its origins, shakshuka is as old as the hills, yet loved by today’s Israelis as dearly as labane, hummus and silan. Add to these stalwarts sashimi and sushi, of which Israel is said to be the greatest consumer after New York and Tokyo, and other dishes conceived half a world away, and you have the culinary cornucopia that makes Israel one of the world’s most diverse gourmet destinations.