Keto Brown Coffee: A keto restaurant thrives in an Afula liquor store - review

A restaurant in Afula tailored to ketogenic diets would be unusual all by itself. After all, “Keto” is far more popular in hip Tel Aviv neighborhoods.

But put that restaurant in a loft suspended above a huge liquor store in small-town Afula, and unusual is too mild a word.

To vastly oversimplify the concept, a keto diet requires the elimination or near-elimination of carbohydrates from the food you eat.

Your brain needs glucose: simple sugar. Carbs are stored sugars. Once you take them out of your diet, your liver will break down glycogen (an excess of which is stored as fat), feeding your brain and body with the sugar it needs to survive.

Ketogenic diets are more popular than ever these days, but they’ve been around for a long time under different names. The Atkins diet is a form of keto, as was “the hot dog diet” of the 1960s, as meat contains no carbs. The Keto Brown Cafe, though, is strictly vegetarian, with plenty of vegan options as well.

A vegetarian keto meal in Afula

Yossi Rafael has owned the Red & Brown liquor store downstairs for several years, but the cafe, which offers a beautiful view of countless bottles of booze, has only been open for less than a year. And the sitting area has only been open for about two months.

Needless to say, this is a difficult time for everyone in Israel. Yossi has an interesting problem: customers are easy to find, but workers are as rare as, for example, a keto restaurant in a liquor store.

If you’re a meat-eater (full disclosure: I am), it’s easy to think that a keto meal will leave you half-empty, or for optimistic carnivores, half-full. But a meal here will quickly change your mind.

WHILE SOME dishes contain a small amount of carbohydrates, a strict keto-enthusiast can find lots of dishes that are carb-free. And dishes that contain carbs are clearly marked on the menu with gram counts.

The Margherita pizza being eaten by the customer next to me looked very tasty. I must have been drooling, since he offered a slice, which it took all my willpower to refuse.

Instead, I opted for the chef’s choice, and Natalie Rafael’s creations did not disappoint. Everything was made with fresh ingredients and, wherever possible, sourced locally.

All menu items are gluten-free and made without refined sugars, and rely instead upon natural sweeteners such as stevia.

Vegetable dishes, of course, require no sweetening, but the desserts here will satisfy any sweet tooth. Although I like sweets, I don’t like cakes and other delicacies that are overly sweet. Fortunately, the desserts I tasted (and I tasted more than a few) were sweetened just right.

There was nothing cloying about the non-dairy ice cream, the chocolate layer cake, the whipped something-or-other with strawberry sauce, the chocolate doo-dad with nuts, or any of the other desserts.

The reader will please forgive the lack of details in this report, but my fingers were a little gooey after the third dessert, which made writing difficult.

In addition to items made to order from the kitchen, the cafe has a full refrigerated section with desserts and other items, plus a bakery with a display of fresh goodies.

You might be surprised to find keto bagels, tortillas and an assortment of other items that are usually made with regular flour, but which are made here from nut flours.

Most entrées cost between NIS 60-80, with many desserts on the lower end of that range.

While everything I saw in the cafe was kosher, it has no kosher certification, and likely never will, as the store in which it is located is open on Shabbat.

• Keto Brown Coffee
• Hamelacha Street 27, Afula
• 04-640-4089
• Sunday-Thursday: 10 a.m. – 6 p.m.
• Friday: 10 a.m. – 2 p.m.
• No kosher certification

The writer was a guest of the restaurant.