Last update - 00:00 07/09/2006
A fine kettle of fish
By Alon Hadar
We're somewhere in the 1960s, in a lean-to made of dried palm leaves close to the seashore in Goa. Uri Jeremias builds a fire and grills a suckling pig. Within a few minutes, he's surrounded by hippies who have heard about the rare culinary abilities of the Israeli backpacker with the thick beard. Some of them met him in Kabul, others tasted his fare in Pakistan and India, where he got around in an improvised camper and stopped in local markets to buy unfamiliar produce which he cooked in his minuscule kitchen.
Jeremias' love of cooking did not fade after his globetrotting came to an end. Over the years his beard lengthened, his stomach inflated and he produced hundreds of different dishes. Jeremias, who never studied cooking and never worked in a restaurant, tried everything. He began to delve into his specialty, fish and fruits de mer, as a boy when he spent hours trapping sea urchins, stuffing himself with snails and scouring rare coral reefs.
In 1989 he decided to convert the hobby into a living and opened the Uri Burri seafood restaurant in Nahariya. Jeremias tried to teach Israelis who had been raised on platters of fried mullet, French fries and salad how to cope with lobster. In 1997 the restaurant moved to the Old City of Acre. In the meantime, Jeremias, with others, opened the gourmet market restaurant Carmela Ba'nahala in Tel Aviv, and he is also one of the partners in the prestigious Helena's in Caesarea.
But these days, you're no one without a cookbook - so we now have the publication of "Uri Burri," a guide to fish and fruits de mer (Keter Books), whose cover features two of the author's trademarks: his vast Osho beard and a big expressionless fish.
Catch a falling fish
It's midday on Thursday and Jeremias starts his daily round in the produce market of Old Acre. Ten fish stalls supply most of the restaurant's merchandise. He pries open refrigerators and the dealers update him on what's new and hot. "Why should I commit myself to working with one supplier?" he explains.
"This way I examine all the merchandise that reaches the market myself and choose the best of that day's catch. I used to buy at Dalal, in the wholesale fish market in Haifa, but it's all mafia there. The suppliers didn't like the idea of a restaurateur buying there on a permanent basis. Besides, they sell whole crates there, and I prefer two-three kilos of fish every day."
After a brief tour Jeremias returns to the stall - on the wall is a carpet embroidered with a likeness of King Hussein - and pulls out about a dozen baby anthias from a crate. From another stall he comes away with a blue lobster, takes it apart on the spot and serves its raw meat. Two women gesture to him. "We came to this stall at your recommendation," they say, and immediately receive a portion of fresh lobster. Jeremias now helps out a group of youngsters who recognize him by his beard. He chooses fish for them and checks their freshness.
"Not all the fish in the same crate are worthwhile," he says. "Most of the fish come from the big ships, which do four-day cruises. They sort the fish on the deck according to type and size, not day of catch. So that in one and the same crate you will have fish that were caught yesterday and fish that were caught four days ago." On the way he also pats a few shark heads that are lying in a basket at the entrance to one of the stalls, observing the stunned tourists with an indifferent but sharp look.
The market is filled with baladi (village-grown) produce: green olives for pressing, tiny purple figs, sun-scorched melons and earth-caked cucumbers. Jeremias is not yet satisfied. The pomegranates in the juice stand are not red enough for his taste, and the Persian pine nuts also have an insipid taste. It's only next to the falafel stand that a hearty smile spreads across his face. "I can't resist this," he admits, and orders a half-portion.
After almost a decade in Acre, Jeremias has become part of the local landscape. "Do you have a seller for my apartments?" one of the neighbors asks, and is sent to place a note in the restaurant. At Hamudi's spice stall - one of the finest spice stores in the country - the jars are immediately opened for him. Pungent peppers pierce the nostrils, pure cinnamon burns the tongue.
Adjacent to a crumbling courtyard Jeremias visits the most splendid horses in Acre. "I swear to you by my children," one of the residents says to him - Jeremias hired one of his acquaintances not long ago. "The kid is unfortunate."
"He talks too much," the bearded chef replies.
"I told him, I told him. But bad luck," the neighbor repeats, trying to generate sympathy.
"Most of the workers and waiters in my restaurant are criminals, former drug addicts and people with problems at home," Jeremias says. "I got one of them out of jail to work in the kitchen after he tried to kill a relative who was messing around with a girl. Three are already family men, with a home and a mortgage. This guy came out of prison, kept on using drugs, stole and badmouthed the workers. You have to draw the line somewhere.
"I developed a method for getting people off the street. You buy eggs with him, teach him to make an omelet with olive oil, mint and onion. Then you sit down and eat with him. He realizes that he's a success, his adrenaline shoots up. In my place, every worker knows what the restaurant's turnover is."
You have a gourmet restaurant in a city with a very high unemployment rate. Do the locals eat at your place? Or do you succeed in selling authenticity only to Tel Avivians?
"The diners aren't from Acre, but the majority of my staff is from the city. There isn't a chef in any of the restaurants in Acre who hasn't worked for me. You are influenced by everything. And I really love to eat and try things. Look at my stomach. When I go to France, I sleep in hostels but I eat in top-flight restaurants. You also won't see me in a 'Tamagucci' suit that's woven by a Kazakhstani worm for a thousand dollars."
A Mediterranean education
The origins of Jeremias' creative and original restaurant lie in a rollicking, world-embracing life story. Jeremias, 61, was born in Nahariya to Binyamin, an agricultural instructor, and Hanna, who cared for and hosted dozens of children and guests a month.
"I grew up in a crazy house," he recalls. "My parents collected children from the whole world. This was before the state was created, and there were no institutions that dealt with children who had family problems. We had the daughter of a British soldier and a mother who became depressed after giving birth. There was a Polish girl who saw her parents murdered before her eyes and was raped by a partisan. My mother also opened a kindergarten that Michael Strauss and the Zoglobek children attended" - referring to two families that own, respectively, a huge dairy and a meat processing empire.
Did your parents have time for you, with all those adopted children around?
"That's why I learned German at mother-tongue level. I wanted to communicate with my parents in a different way, so I could have an independent thing with them. But then my sisters also started to learn German."
He hardly attended school. "I have a Mediterranean education. Even in elementary school I spent most of my time on the seashore. There were periods when we searched for spies and dove into sunken submarines. We investigated the sea: oysters, sea anemones. I tried to eat snails. I would go fishing with my father, sometimes with an underwater pistol. My mother didn't like fish, so I had to clean them already at the sea."
The many visitors from abroad made Uri curious to see the world. At 16, he packed a knapsack and set sail for Italy and from there hitchhiked to Germany. "I was fed up with school, so I went traveling. I had total confidence, like nothing could happen. It wasn't because of the adrenaline - I'm not an adventurer - but because of the curiosity. In the 1950s I met people here from Germany, some of whom had been in the Hitler Youth. I didn't understand how a nation that was raised on Schiller could be involved in atrocity stories like that. So I decided to go and investigate first-hand."
A few months later he returned home, enrolled in the Air Force Technical School and did his army service as an aircraft mechanic. After his service he again boarded a boat for Europe. In northern Germany he worked as a lumberjack and in installing chimneys. With the money he earned, he bought a Volkswagen van, converted it into a camper and crisscrossed the Balkans. It was then that he started to grow his beard, after making a bet with a buddy on the trip about which of them would let his hair grow longer. "They wouldn't let me into Greece because of the beard," he relates. "It was the time of the generals and they thought I was a hippie. I went to a different border crossing, put on a hat and said I was an Orthodox Jew."
Adventures were not lacking. Jeremias and his buddy rented a car and traveled to East Asia via Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal. "I was the only Israeli who got to the Israeli Embassy in Nepal. They wrote in my passport that I had reached the roof of the world. I didn't meet any Israelis at all on the trip. And I didn't have a guide in Israel, either. I sold jewelry to pay for the trip. A dollar a day was all I needed, so every few weeks I would sell and buy again."
What did your parents think about your wanderlust?
"They had no problem with it. I went to the ship fair in Kiel, Germany. From there I wanted to go visit a lady friend in Hamburg. I got a lift but had to get off in the middle of the highway. Cars were flying by at 180 kph. Suddenly I hear someone shouting 'Uri! Uri! Get into the car this instant!' I didn't recognize him. He told me that a few weeks earlier he had been a guest of my father, who told him that if he should see a guy with a beard wandering around Europe - that's my son."
As one of the first Israeli backpackers, what do you think of the current crop in Israel?
"At the age of 24 I went backpacking in South America. I was there for months and didn't meet any Israelis. There was just one place that was packed with them and I felt like I was in the reserves. The young kids go like blind people to the same places, get high, meet up in another hostel and get high again. When something individualist becomes a fashion, the level has to go down and the average dominates."
'Uzi buzi'
He acquired his cooking skills in the farthest and most exotic corners of the globe. "From Afghanistan to Iraq, you can't eat at all. The hygiene level is catastrophic. So I bought fresh meat and vegetables in the markets and cooked. You park for the night and other people gather around and you feed them. You start to get a reputation and that gives you strength and status in the trekking community, as someone who can cook. Everyone looks up to you. Your confidence rises."
It was not an overnight thing. When he got back to Israel, at the end of the 1960s, he worked with his father as a gas company salesman in the north. That bored him, so he became a buyer for the United Nations forces in the Middle East and supplied them with equipment. But he did not forsake the sea for an instant. He bought a racing boat, sailed on ships and entered rowing competitions. In 1988 he decided to get acquainted with the food industry and became the manager of the newly opened branch of the Kapulsky cafe chain in Nahariya.
A year later he decided to open Uri Burri. The origin of the name? One day his yekke mother asked him and his friend Uzi, just back from another day of fishing, what they had caught. "I caught a lot of burri [grey mullet] and Uzi caught nothing," Uri replied. "Uzi buzi and Uri burri," his mother shot back.
From the first he decided that the restaurant would be based on a permanent team. One of the waitresses has been with him for seven years, and Bashir, the cook, started out as an odd-jobs man back in Nahariya. There is no chef or sous-chef in the restaurant; every working cook knows how to prepare all the dishes, including the manager, who during the war in the North had to grab the frying pans and also act as a waiter. He moved the business out of Nahariya, where he still lives, with his family, after a series of bureaucratic wrangles with the municipality. "They just didn't want me there," he says.
In Acre he bought a small space adjacent to the market and the sea. There, too, he notes, he did not get a candy-and-flowers reception. "Because the neighbors had problems with the restaurant that previously occupied my space, I had 22 windows, a toilet and mirrors smashed on the first day. I went to the neighbors, introduced myself and said we had to look after one another. The next day the neighbor woman greeted me with coffee and cookies. Today there is a great deal of respect. It was a lot worse with the Jews in Nahariya."
The kitchen itself is tiny. The pastry shop, where ice cream and sherbets are made (samples: Arak sherbet in marzipan and wasabi ice cream), is in a rented building. The fish storage site is across the alley and the wine cellar is in some other hole. The crumbling walls of buildings in Old Acre have made him an expert in local construction. He conducted a series of experiments in producing a type of plaster that would stick on the building's stones, which draw the salt of the sea, and he registered a patent on the material two weeks ago.
Jeremias is not bothered by the young chefs who come back to Israel laden with knowledge from international cooking courses. "Guys after the army work for two weeks in a restaurant in France, open a restaurant in Israel and close it after a few weeks. The ones who say they learned how to cook from their grandmother do nothing for me, either."
If things are so good in Acre, why did you become a partner in Carmela in Tel Aviv and in Helena's?
"I had a business opportunity and I decided to take advantage of it. In Tel Aviv, I discovered things we don't have here, such as egos and wars. I said that I don't intend to stay in that battleground."
Corn ice cream with coriander
The sun slides into the sea and the restaurant fills up. Jeremias recommends a tasting menu of half-portions, NIS 300-400 per couple (including a bottle of wine). He doesn't want to hear about business lunches. This stubbornness has cost him customers, who labeled him pompous and of serving modest dishes at exorbitant prices. "You don't ask for a menu here," he says. "The waitress will create the meal for you. The big difficulty is creating the right order. I don't try to be different and sophisticated, like lamb in halva. People like gimmicks, not flavors. Once I made corn ice cream with coriander seeds, as smooth as Vaseline on a baby's bottom. For a whole month people called, wanting corn ice cream. Interesting, but hardly wow."
Still, the food does not leave the diners indifferent. The menu includes fresh anchovies in yogurt, thick fish soup based on coconut milk, grilled fish (barramundi), anthias with creamy spinach in Pecorino cheese and mussels in vegetable stock, onions and sour cream. It's a kitchen of sea people, creative, provocative and rife with unexpected flavors, not necessarily fashionable. Plenty of sauces made of sour cream and butter, as in classic French cuisine. Basic bread does its work in wiping the plate clean. "Trout? I don't know how to fry it so it comes out tasty."
What's next?
"I'm working on developing a boutique hotel, which will open in August 2008. I bought an ancient castle in Acre and I'm renovating it. I want to build 12 suites and a kitchen for 24 people, where cooking courses with expert chefs will be held. At the same time, we'll have seminars on the Crusades."W