Ida’s Café: A perfect, stylish eating emporium in Ra’anana - review

It is a truth universally acknowledged that most people start their slimming diets on a Sunday. As that was the day we were invited to inspect Ida’s Café in Ra’anana, it seemed a perfect arrangement, as salads feature high on the menu of this small but stylish eating emporium in the heart of the town.

Owner, chef, and chief cook and bottle-washer is Shimon Bouskila, who credits his grandmother Ida with having taught him how to cook and had a very positive influence on his life: hence the tribute to his beloved grannie in the name of the café.

The place has a welcoming indoor area as well as outside tables where window boxes of petunias struggle against the strong winds that happen to be blowing around on this cold Sunday morning. Inside, the café is snug and attractive with pale green leather chairs and yellow faux marble round tables.

Eating in a stylish Israeli restaurant

We ordered two salads – my companion chose the Greek salad while I, feeling adventurous, picked the signature dish and something I had never tasted – a Tunisian dish called Brik (pronounced “break”) which consists of an egg baked inside a filo crust with salad. The idea of the dish is that as you cut into the egg, the yolk will spill over the salad producing an unusual dressing (NIS 59 for salads). Due to a minor miscalculation, the egg was not runny enough to do its job. But the combination of crispy filo and cooked egg was really good.

The two salads were quite different. My salad consisted of lettuce, sliced radish, red and white shredded cabbage, cubed raw carrot, black olives, corn kernels, and bean sprouts with a good vinaigrette. My companion’s salad had raw mushrooms and a creamy dressing. Both were served with triangles of toasted bread along with optional toppings of black olive tapenade, pesto, and what might have been horseradish.

Both salads were of such generous proportions that I was unable to finish everything on the plate, as good as it was.

We shared a piece of cheesecake which Shimon recommended. It was not as much a cake as an assemblage of slightly sweetened creamy cheese with a sprinkling of crumbs above and below. My companion, a connoisseur of cheesecake, thought it was delicious.

Two excellent cappuccinos accompanied this interesting meal (NIS 12/15). 

The café also does a brisk trade in takeaway and the menu features an assortment of pizzas, pasta dishes, and quiches at very reasonable prices.

Shimon tells us that Ida’s Café Boutique has been open for just over a year. With its good location in the center of town, its menu of tasty and unusual dishes and its personal service, Ida’s Café is well worth a visit.

• Ida’s Café Boutique
• Rehov Bar-Ilan, 1
• Ra’anana
• 054 5415493
• Open: Sun.-Thu. 7 a.m.- 10 p.m; Fri.:7 a.m.-3 p.m.; Shabbat: closed
• Kashrut: Ra’anana Rabbinate
• The writer was a guest of the restaurant