Long live the Quinoa

Gil Hovav jumped head first to the organic menu of Biala, and found it tasty, original and without vegetarian self-righteousness. The problem was with everything around it.

By Gil Hovav

A few weeks ago a newsbreak came out of the health section (where you find straw recipes and a warning against sodas), when a new research discovered that quinoa isn't very healthy at all. So now we've been eating these crumbs (not even a grain)! from the Incas, training ourselves to like it, and it turns out it's not. Shocking. These researches certainly pull the carpet from under healthy restaurants. It's true that these researches aren't set in stone, but they still make you wonder – how can green-haired waiters or pierced waitresses convince me to eat tapioca / quinoa / seaweed?

For what? To find out they can give me cancer?

Well, I might be exaggerating. Take a restaurant like Biala in Tel Aviv. Sometimes it seems to have more identity problems than a bi-sexual teenager in an orthodox school. On the one hand, it has the proper menu, but on the other hand it looks like a junk-food diner. It is in Israel but it's full of English (tons of stuff on the wall and not a word in the holy language)!, and then again, somehow you expect healthy restaurants to be light and airy and have air imported from mountain tops. The air at Biala came straight from the frying pan in the kitchen.

Yet there were a few advantages: the food was really good and completely unorthodox. There's root salad with chestnuts and warm goat cheese (the best dish in my opinion), there's a nice and tasty chicken curry with red quinoa and black lentils, there's fish and more meat than one would expect. And the food wasn't your ordinary "eat but don't get stuffed" kind of food. Biala serves large and satisfying courses. Yes I know, it's not breaking news. But I can bet some still associate organic restaurants with bird food, but Biala is anything but that.

The waiting staff isn't ordinary either. They're just nice (although not the fastest), and they don't lecture you on Greenpeace or boycotting goose liver. It would be nice if someone could tell them the drinks should come before the food and not 15 minutes later (how should they know? From watching Survivor? I don't think they had an episode on waiting tables). The managers of Biala should train their waiting staff better (unless they're clueless about it as well).

After a great salad and lovely grilled eggplant we had pretty good main courses – I already mentioned the curry, and we also had a big plate of Barramundi fillet (that New Zealand fish) that was quite satisfying. Food is definitely Biala's strong suit (stronger than the upkeep – it wasn't very pleasant to eat under a giant vase of droopy flowers in brownish water). We still decided to skip desserts (call me old-fashioned, but organic desserts don't really do it for me).

Sans desserts, and with a very organic and slightly odd wine from Neot Smadar winery, a meal for two would cost a little less than 200 NIS.