A variety of healthy, homemade, organic spreads and olives at Cafe Louise in Haifa.
Israel has no shortage of organic cuisine. From LovEAT café in Tel Aviv to Mizpe Hayamim in the Galilee and Negev Nectars in the south, this country is chock-full of good organic eatin’.
And here’s one more to add to the list! Café Louise opened in Haifa in 2007 with a vision to offer a natural, healthy culinary experience.
“At the beginning, people didn’t visit because they said ‘It’s healthy, so it must be not be tasty,’” explained founding partner and manager Shay Hamzani. “We wanted to show people that healthy food can be good too.”
Hamzani and his team, which includes a clinical nutritionist who ensures each dish is packed with nutrients as well as flavor, set out to prove these disbelievers wrong. Café Louise prepares meals using whole, fresh ingredients instead of unhealthy ones (translation: lots of whole grains, fruits and vegetables, and olive oil instead of fatty mayo or butter). Almost everything is prepared in-house in a specially equipped kitchen to make sure that every dish meets the highest standards of both taste and healthfulness. And of course, the ingredient list includes a variety of organic ingredients like eggs, pasta, vegetables, coffee, and homemade olives.
Today Café Louise has a rather strong clientel base. The original Haifa branch was so successful, in fact, that the team opened up another branch in the Northern Tel Aviv neighborhood Ramat HaChayal late last year.
The Café Louise team is eager to build a reputation customers trust. “With all of the manipulations in ingredients these days, someone can sit and think he receives the proper nutrition. But he receives less!” says Hamzani. “We don’t want to just use buzzwords. We really want our customers to connect [to our natural, healthy vision], and to value our product.”
Café Louise’s two branches are located at Moriah 58 (Haifa) and Harugey Hamlachut 11 (Ramat HaChayal).
More on organic dining in Israel:
Organic Diet and Health Expert Christina Pirello Visits Israel
Putting on the Organic Ritz at “Mitzpe Hayamim” Organic Restaurant, Hotel and Spa
Tel Aviv’s LovEAT Loves to Drink Organic Coffee
Author: Rachel Bergstein
When her vegan summer camp counselor explained to a fifteen-year-old Rachel how the dairy industry pollutes the groundwater in poor rural communities and causes global warming, there was no turning back. Her green fire lit, Rachel became increasingly passionate about the relationship between human societies and the natural environment, particularly about the systemic injustices associated with environmental degradation. After snagging a B.A. in Peace and Justice Studies at the University of Maryland, where she wrote an undergraduate thesis on water injustice in Israel/Palestine and South Africa, Rachel was awarded the New Israel Fund/Shatil’s Rabbi Richard J. Israel Social Justice Fellowship to come and spread the green gospel in Israel for the 2009-2010 academic year. She currently interns for Friends of the Earth Middle East in their Tel Aviv office. When Rachel is not having anxiety about her ecological footprint, carbon and otherwise, she can be found in hot pursuit of the best vegetarian food Tel Aviv has to offer. She also blogs about her experience as an NIF fellow and environmentalist in Israel at organichummus.wordpress.com. Rachel can be reached at rachelbergstein (at) gmail (dot) com.
had an ok experience with lunch , tapas plate had cpl of cheeses few pieces of not so great smoked salmon , for main dish the hen was tasty . left the place and got back an hour later for desert . i ordered the apple pie which was average and tea with mint. when asked for some more hot water the waitress told me she was sorry ,but she had to charge me an extra cup charge….. first ever !!!!!!!!
i declined and thought that water must be really scarce in Israel and they sure didn’t care if they have a returned customer….
moral of the story:
bring your own hot water