Yehudit Restaurant: Homemade comfort food in Jerusalem's shuk - review

Walking into Yehudit Restaurant just off Agripas Street, I was greeted by Yehudit herself who has been cooking here for 39 years. The food is homemade comfort food like your mother used to make – if your mother was a Kurdish lady who loved to cook.

“First you’ll eat and then we’ll talk,” she ordered as soon as I sat down.

We started off with an array of salatim which were all good and fresh although nothing was really outstanding. The humus with meat was made with kebab meat instead of minced meat and was good.

Yehudit also served us homemade grape leaves stuffed with rice that I especially liked, and a kadeh, a Kurdish pastry usually made with cheese but this time with meat.

It was in the main courses that the food really shone.

Fantastic main courses

I’m not usually a fan of kebab, but Yehudit’s kebab, which she says is famous all over Jerusalem, was juicy and delicately spiced. The pargit (dark chicken meat) was also juicy and the entrecote skewer was cooked medium rare as it should be. The side dishes she served were also excellent – a homemade majadara with fried onions and lentils, rice, and beans, and very good chips.

Yehudit makes everything fresh every day and gets a lot of satisfaction from seeing customers enjoy her food.

“I have a radar and I can see every table at the same time,” she said. “Sometimes my usual customers come in and if I’m not here they don’t know what to order. They say, “Yehudit knows what I like.”

On a recent Tuesday night, the restaurant had few customers. The war has really hurt business, she said, as well as put an end to the tourist groups who used to come for lunch or dinner. But there is still a fair amount of take-out business, especially for her famous kebabs.

“Do you have soup?” a bespectacled man eating alone asked.

“Lentil or bean,” she replied.

“Wow!” he said after tasting the bean soup.

“I make everything from scratch,” she told him proudly.

It turns out that the sole diner, Sharon Shwartz, a doctor from Kfar Saba, had dropped his wife and kids off at a family function and had some time to explore Jerusalem. When he got hungry, he wandered into Yehudit’s.

“At first I was sad that I hadn’t ordered two portions of soup but then the kebab came, and I wasn’t sad anymore,” he told me as Yehudit beamed.

The prices are reasonable for this kind of all-inclusive meal. If you have a vegetarian with you, the salads and side dishes – with unlimited refills – are just NIS 45. Two skewers of kebab or pargit with salads and a side dish are NIS 88. Premium meats like the entrecote or mullard breast are pricier.

There is also a children’s menu for NIS 55 and a business lunch that is worth checking out.

• Yehudit Restaurant
• Ha’armonim 5
• Hours: Sun.-Thu., 12 p.m.-10 p.m.,
• Kashrut: Rabbanut Yerushalayim

The writer was a guest of the restaurant.