Brisket: A good way to dine - review

While the mood of the country is not exactly euphoric, many people still like to dine out. That’s the conclusion I came to after visiting the carnivore heaven that is Brisket, a smoked meat emporium on Highway 4, just south of Hadera.

The place is a no-frills, family-friendly restaurant, where the service is so good you get the feeling they would like you to guzzle up the food and vanish. You are left with a somewhat ambiguous residual feeling – it’s great not to have to wait for your order, but when the main course arrives before you have finished the starter you begin to feel insecure.

Eating meat at Brisket

And so to the food. We decided to share a starter, and found the menu of starters to be rather thin. It included soup, pickles and bread, and the only actual dishes were chicken wings (NIS 25) and the dish we chose, choucroute garnie (NIS 28), sauerkraut in English. (That was a joke.)

A cast-iron frying pan perched on an old-style circular breadboard came to our table. The contents were sizzling merrily away and consisted of chopped cabbage, which wasn’t very sour, topped with a fat juicy sausage. It all tasted great.

The main dish we chose was a platter of various grilled meats. We chose the 105 NIS one, the smallest amount, and were surprised at how much meat it included. There were slices of asado, brisket, and another sausage, and we added a helping of lamb which would have cost another NIS 22. It was a part of the lamb of which the animal, when alive, had least reason to be proud. (Yes, I’ve used that great line from Dickens before, but not for many years.)

For sides there was a green salad, coleslaw, chimichurri, and very thin fries.

All the meat was tender, faintly smoked but not oppressively so. And we tucked in with fervor, savoring every mouthful.

The dessert menu (NIS 28/38) offered several attractive choices, including churros, fried dough strips rolled in sugar and cinnamon, but we plumped for hot chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream and two spoons. It was not quite a cake and not quite a mousse but something in between, a melt-in-the-mouth chocolaty combination which we both liked. It came with some vanilla ice cream and streusel crumbs for variety.

We drank draft beer, red wine, ice water, and a postprandial black coffee for my companion and a mint tea for me.

Brisket has been around for years, and it’s easy to understand its popularity. It’s cheap and cheerful, great for families, and now provides a good if temporary respite from the reality of the war.

• Brisket
• Sonol, Hadera
• Tel: (04) 375-0015
• Open: Sun.-Thurs.,12 noon-10 p.m.; Fri., 11 a.m.-2:30 p.m.
• Kashrut: Hadera Rabbinate
• Wheelchair accessible
• The writer was a guest of the restaurant.