“Fast food = healthy food? Two culinary worlds come together as Shifra Tzach samples the house specials at Eat Right in Tel Aviv.”
I hadn’t seen Beth in ages – not since she got permission from the city to start building her long awaited house. I did get an affirmative when I asked her out for a quick lunch, but was told it had to be ‘quick’ (Ok.) And ‘vegetarian’. (Ok.) And it also had to be healthy food that would give her lots of energy and not put her to sleep for the rest of the day. I took all her requirements into consideration and took us to Eat Right, a restaurant that combines what most people think of as polar opposites – health food and fast food.
From the fast perspective, Eat Right has an open counter filled with various ingredients from which the polite staff are ready to help you create your dish. From the health perspective, Eat Right is all about eating right and living right – including ecologically sound building, consulting with a dietitian when constructing the menu, large charts on the wall from which you can learn what the various ingredients give your body, tips for healthier living and recommendations for nutrition throughout the day. And all this comes in a cheerful and colourful package – which is why Eat Right is a much-loved local amongst all the nearby office workers. In the morning, Eat Right offers nutritious and especially inexpensive take away breakfasts – sandwiches for NIS 13 or a ‘meal-in-a-cup,’ made up of yogurt and various colourful toppings for NIS 16. The lunch prices are also very reasonable – NIS 30-40 for a full-meal dish like a salad, hummus plate or burrito.
Our lunch at Eat Right started with two types of daily soup – lentil with turmeric and ginger for Beth and tomato soup with rice for me. Beth declares both of the soups ‘homey’ and means it as a compliment – rich, flavourful and thick, without the industrial taste that accompany many restaurant soups. The organic and slightly pale delicate hummus doesn’t look like any competition for the famous hummus places in Jaffa, gets a flavour boost with a lentil stew that sits under the hummus. The whole-wheat pita that accompanies is a pleasant surprise in terms of taste and texture – certainly not the thing you have in mind if you’ve ever bought whole-wheat pitas at the grocery store. The bowl of salad that came afterwards was screaming freshness, due in large part to the fact that salads are chopped to order and dressed in a light and refreshing salad sauce. A generous sprinkling of protein rich cubed chicken breast sits atop the salad. In the meantime, Beth is getting to know her vegetarian burrito – a green spinach tortilla enveloping white beans in sauce, cubes of tofu, avocado, lettuce, tomatoes, carrot and peppers.
In the instructions, which accompany each Eat Right dish, it says: ‘An enjoyable Latin experience, good for the heart and sugar levels.’ And indeed it does seem that Beth’s heart is doing well, because she even agrees to sit for another few minutes to enjoy a fruit shake for dessert – peach-mango-banana-orange-coconut milk for her and orange-banana-strawberry-date for me, another does of vitamins and energy from the house of Eat Right, strengthening us for the daily challenges that await us out the door.
Eat Right
54 Ahad Ha’am, Tel Aviv
Tel: 03-5661344
