The Israeli Dishes You Should Actually Try

There is a long argument about whether Israeli food exists as a cuisine, and it is not a trivial one. Most of what gets called Israeli food is Palestinian, Levantine, Yemenite, Iraqi, Moroccan, Persian or Balkan in origin, brought by people who moved here — sometimes fleeing, sometimes arriving, sometimes already here — and then changed by seventy-odd years of living alongside each other.

What is genuinely local is the combination: the specific set of dishes that ended up on the same streets, and the way they get eaten. That is worth understanding before you order, because the most common visitor mistakes here are about timing and format rather than taste.

Here is what to eat, what it is, and how not to get it wrong.

Hummus

Not a dip. In Israel hummus is a lunch dish: a warm bowl of it, eaten with pita, raw onion and pickles, and that is the meal. A serious hummusiya makes one batch in the morning and closes when it runs out — frequently by 2pm, sometimes earlier.

Order by the topping. Plain comes with olive oil and paprika; masabacha has whole warm chickpeas stirred through; ful adds stewed fava beans. Ask for mishlash and you get all three in one bowl. Everything else — the pita, the onion, the pickles — is free and unlimited.

You eat it with torn pita as a scoop, working from the edge inwards, and you finish by wiping the bowl clean. There is a verb for that: lenagev.

The single most common mistake visitors make is turning up at 7pm expecting hummus for dinner. See the best hummus in Israel for where to go, and go before lunch.

Falafel

Fried chickpea balls, in a pita, with hummus, tahini, chopped salad, pickles, cabbage and — standard, not eccentric — chips inside the bread.

The whole thing costs under ₪30, it is vegan by default, and it is available at any hour. Quality is entirely about freshness: falafel is good for roughly five minutes after it leaves the fryer, so choose the counter that is rolling and frying constantly over the one with the famous name and a tray under a lamp.

Ask for amba (pickled mango sauce) and harif (chilli). Most counters will hand you a spare ball to eat while they build the pita. Where to eat it.

Sabich

The one to try if you have never heard of it. A pita packed with fried aubergine, hard-boiled egg, hummus, tahini, chopped salad, pickles and amba.

It came with Iraqi Jews as a Shabbat breakfast — everything in it can be cooked before Friday sundown — and moved onto the street from there. The test is the aubergine: properly fried and soft, not greasy, not grey. The amba is not optional; without it this is a different and lesser sandwich.

Shakshuka

Eggs poached in a spiced tomato and pepper sauce, served in the pan with bread to mop it up. North African in origin, now the default Israeli breakfast dish and on essentially every cafe menu, usually in a red version and a green one made with herbs, spinach or tomatillo.

It is eaten at any hour. Nobody will think it odd to order it at 9pm.

The Israeli breakfast

Not a dish but a format, and one worth understanding. Eggs cooked to order, a finely chopped cucumber-and-tomato salad, several soft cheeses, olives, sometimes herring or tuna, fresh bread, butter, jam, and bottomless coffee.

It descends from kibbutz dining halls, where the eggs, dairy and vegetables came from the farm outside. The kibbutz guesthouses still serve the most generous version. In cities it is a cafe meal served until noon or later, and on Friday and Saturday it runs long and needs booking. More on Israeli breakfast.

Shawarma

Usually turkey here rather than lamb, stacked on a vertical spit and carved into a laffa — the large flatbread — with hummus, tahini, chopped salad, pickles, onion and chips.

Ask for a laffa, not a pita. A pita physically cannot hold a proper portion and you will spend the meal repairing it. Look for a counter carving to order rather than one holding pre-cut meat warm. Where to go.

Jachnun, kubaneh and malawach

The Yemenite trio, and the other Israeli breakfast.

Jachnun is a tightly rolled pastry baked overnight at very low heat until it turns deep brown and dense. Kubaneh is a pull-apart bread from the same overnight method. Malawach is the fried, flaky, immediate cousin of both.

All three are served the same way: with grated fresh tomato, a hard-boiled egg that has browned through the same long cooking, and skhug, the Yemenite chilli paste. Skhug is much hotter than it looks — ask for it on the side the first time.

These exist because of Shabbat. Cooking is prohibited on Saturday, so the food goes into a low oven on Friday afternoon and comes out on Saturday morning. Traditionally a Saturday food; several places now sell it all week.

Bourekas

Flaky Balkan pastry filled with salty cheese, potato, spinach or mushroom, sold by the piece at every bakery in the country.

Order it "with everything" and you get a working breakfast: the pastry split open, a hard-boiled egg crushed over it, a spoon of chopped tomato salad, and a pickle. The pickle is not decoration — it cuts the pastry and the egg, and the whole thing is unbalanced without it.

Under ₪20, assembled in forty seconds, and probably the most-eaten breakfast in Israel. The bakeries.

Salatim

The small dishes that arrive before a meal at any Middle Eastern restaurant here — sometimes five, sometimes fifteen. Pickles, tahini, hummus, roasted peppers, beetroot, cabbage, aubergine in various forms, matbucha.

Two things to know. They are usually included rather than ordered, and they are usually refillable. And they will fill you up entirely if you let them, which is the trap. Eat a third of what arrives.

Malabi

A cold set milk pudding in a plastic cup, under rose or raspberry syrup, with crushed peanuts and shredded coconut on top. Sold from street windows for the price of a coffee.

There is no upmarket version worth seeking out — the street cup is the correct format. Ask for extra peanuts; the crunch against the pudding is the entire design. Non-dairy versions are widely available.

Knafeh

Stretchy white cheese under shredded orange pastry, baked, drenched in sugar syrup, scattered with pistachio, and cut to order from trays the size of a table.

Served hot, enormously sweet, and meant to be shared with coffee. The best versions in Israel are in the Arab towns and quarters — Jaffa, Akko, Nazareth, East Jerusalem — and it does not survive reheating, so only eat it fresh from the tray.

Sufganiyot and the calendar

Israeli food is heavily seasonal in a way that is about the calendar rather than the harvest.

Sufganiyot — filled fried doughnuts — appear in every bakery window for the weeks around Chanukah in December, escalating well past jam into pistachio cream, halva and salted caramel. Out of season they are ordinary supermarket doughnuts.

At Pesach in spring, leavened bread disappears from kosher shops for a week and the bakeries close or switch to matzah. This catches out visitors every year. Arab-owned bakeries and non-kosher places carry on, so bread is findable — just not where you expect it.

Practical notes for ordering

• Timing. Hummus is lunch and sells out. Falafel and shawarma are any hour. Dinner starts late — 8pm is early, 9pm is normal.
• Shabbat. From Friday afternoon to Saturday night, Jewish-owned kosher places close and buses stop. Tel Aviv, Jaffa, Haifa's Wadi Nisnas, Akko and East Jerusalem stay open.
• Kosher separation. A dairy restaurant serves no meat at all, which is why so many Israeli restaurants are accidentally vegetarian. A meat restaurant serves no cheese, which is why kosher burgers have no cheeseburger.
• Vegan. Genuinely easy. Falafel, hummus, sabich without the egg, tahini, most salads, bourekas, malabi and halva are all plant-based. Israel is one of the best countries in the world for this.
• Tap water is safe everywhere and free.
• Tipping is around 12% in restaurants and often not included in the bill.

Where to start

If you have one day: hummus for lunch before 1pm, a sabich or a falafel in the afternoon, and dinner somewhere with salatim. If you have a weekend, add an Israeli breakfast on Saturday morning and knafeh in Jaffa.

More: Israeli street food, the best sandwiches, the markets, or build a whole trip with our free Israel itinerary builder.