A Local's Guide to Florentin

Florentin is a grid of low buildings in the south of Tel Aviv, about fifteen minutes' walk from the Carmel Market, and it is the neighbourhood people mean when they say Tel Aviv is interesting rather than just pleasant.

It is also, crucially, a working neighbourhood. Behind most of the painted shutters are printers, upholsterers, furniture makers, metalworkers and carpenters, many of them second- or third-generation. The street art, the bars and the vegan restaurants arrived later and sit on top of that, not instead of it. Understanding this is most of what separates a good visit from a disappointing one.

Here is how to do it properly.

What Florentin actually is

The neighbourhood was built in the 1920s and 30s by Greek and Balkan Jewish immigrants — many from Salonica — and named after David Florentin, one of the developers. It was working-class from the start: small workshops on the ground floor, families above, a synagogue on most streets.

It stayed that way, and declined, for most of the twentieth century. In the 1990s the cheap rents brought artists and students, and it became the standard young-Tel-Aviv neighbourhood — a role it has now held long enough to be under real gentrification pressure, with new towers going up on the edges and the workshops slowly being priced out.

That tension is visible on every street, and it is what makes the place worth walking rather than just drinking in.

The one thing you must get right: go on a Saturday

Half of Florentin's street art is painted on roller shutters. When the workshops are open — which is most of the working week — those shutters are up and the art is invisible.

So: go on Saturday, when everything is closed, or early on a Friday, or in the evening after the workshops shut. Walk the same street on a Wednesday afternoon and a Saturday morning and you are looking at two different neighbourhoods. This is the single most useful piece of local knowledge about the place.

The street art

Florentin holds the densest concentration of street art in Israel, and it turns over constantly — large commissioned murals last a few years, stencils and paste-ups often a few months.

The artists to look for:

Broken Fingaz, the Haifa crew, whose dense psychedelic, cartoonish, frequently explicit murals are internationally known.
Know Hope, whose spare line drawings of thin elongated figures, usually paired with a handwritten line of text, are all over the south of the city. Quiet, melancholic and consistently about displacement and holding on.
Dede Bandaid, whose recurring motif is an adhesive bandage — a plaster — painted at scale on walls. A temporary fix over a wound that has not healed, applied over and over.

Walk Florentin Street itself, then Vital, Abarbanel and the lanes between them. The big-format work is mostly on the gable walls along Herzl, on the corridor between Florentin and Levinsky market.

A guided tour is worth it here more than in most places, because the work is heavily coded and much of the meaning is invisible without someone pointing it out. Our street art guide has more on where to walk.

Where to eat

Florentin's food splits into three categories.

The old neighbourhood places. Hummus, grills, bakeries and juice stands that were here before any of this, serving the people who work in the workshops. These are cheap, good and open at lunchtime, and they are the ones most likely to disappear next.

The vegan restaurants. Florentin is the centre of Tel Aviv's vegan scene, which is saying something in one of the most vegan cities in the world. There are fully plant-based restaurants doing everything from Israeli comfort food to burgers, ramen and proper tasting menus. Turnover is high enough that naming specific places dates fast — the reliable method is to walk the main streets after 8pm and pick from what is full. More on eating vegan in Tel Aviv.

The late-night counters. Pizza, sabich, falafel and shawarma running past 2am, because the bars do. This is a genuine food category here, not an afterthought.

Immediately west, Levinsky market is the spice street — Balkan bureka bakeries, Iraqi fried fish sandwiches, Persian dried fruit, spice shops that will blend za'atar to order. It is a ten-minute walk and it is the best food shopping in Tel Aviv. The market guide.

Where to drink

Florentin's bars are the counterweight to the polished rooms on Rothschild: cheaper, louder, with pavement seating and no interest in closing early.

There are proper cocktail bars mixed in among the beer bars and the dives, and several of them do serious work without the price tag. There are also bars that are essentially a fridge and a doorway, and on a warm night those are frequently the better option.

Two things to know:

Nothing starts before 10pm. A Florentin bar at 9pm is empty. It fills around 11 and runs past 2. Turning up early gets you a seat and nothing else.
Thursday is the big night, because the Israeli weekend is Friday and Saturday. Thursday in Florentin is the equivalent of a Friday elsewhere and the streets themselves become the venue.

The wider cocktail bar guide covers where the technique is best.

A walking route

If you have three hours, this works:

Start at Levinsky market in the late afternoon. Eat a bureka with an egg, buy tahini and spices, look at the Balkan bakeries.
Walk east along Herzl into Florentin, looking at the large-format murals on the gable walls.
Do the Florentin / Vital / Abarbanel grid slowly. This is the dense part. Look up, and look at the shutters.
Eat around 8pm — vegan, or a late-night counter, depending on what you want.
Stay for a drink after 10pm, when the neighbourhood actually starts.

On a Saturday, do the same route in the morning instead, when the shutters are down and the light is better, and finish with lunch.

What else is nearby

Florentin sits between several things worth combining:

Levinsky market — ten minutes west. Spices, bakeries, the best food shopping in the city.
Kiryat HaMelacha — the gallery and artist-studio district, a few minutes away, where the street artists and the gallery artists share a postcode. The galleries guide.
Neve Tzedek — twenty minutes northwest, and the exact opposite: restored, pretty, expensive, and the loveliest streets in Tel Aviv.
Jaffa — twenty-five minutes southwest along the water, for the flea market, the port and the old city.

An honest note

Florentin is being gentrified, visibly and fast. The towers on the edges, the rising rents and the slow disappearance of the workshops are the actual story of the neighbourhood right now, and the street art scene that draws visitors is part of the mechanism, not separate from it.

None of that is a reason not to go. It is a reason to notice that the printer whose shutter you are photographing is running a business, and that the neighbourhood is somebody's home and workplace before it is anybody's content.

Walk it, eat in it, drink in it, and buy something from a shop while you are there.

More Tel Aviv: 48 hours in the city, the best street food, the nightlife guide, or build your days with our free Israel itinerary builder.