With cuisine inspired by European Michelin star restaurants and Palestinian traditional dishes, Alaa Musa makes food that brings both Jews and Arabs (plus tourists) around the table in his trendy restaurant in Acre, a small northern Israeli town situated at the shores of the Mediterranean Sea.
The town of Acre combines old with new– the ancient walled area with its colorful market, and modern buildings elsewhere. It is also known as a town where a mixed population of Jews and Arabs share a delicate coexistence.
Alaa Musa, 35, is a young chef that represents this unique combination of east and west in his restaurant El-Marsa, which means “anchor” in Arabic.
After traveling the world and working in Michelin starred restaurants in Stockholm, Musa started missing the breeze of the Mediterranean sea and the spices and hectic market of his hometown, so he decided to make his way back.
“My vision was to combine the authentic traditional cuisine with the modern new-age style I experienced in Sweden. I aspired to teach people about a different attitude toward food and introduce them to fine European cuisine,” he says.
The plate as a work of art
The culinary experience Musa accumulated in Stockholm’s finest restaurants included molecular cooking and French cuisine.
“These restaurants exposed me to a whole new culture of cooking, demanding high levels of creativity and a professional attitude,” he says. “We used the finest ingredients, such as blue lobsters and white truffles, to create incredible dishes, some of which comprised 12 different elements. This attitude of treating the plate as a work of art became my trademark. There is a certain way to present the food on the plate – first comes the vegetable puree, topped with the main dish, and finally the illustrations.”
It took nerve for Musa, together with his partner and childhood friend Marwan Sawaed, to open a spacious modern restaurant right in the midst of Acre’s port; a restaurant that presented complex and pricey dishes to an audience used to a more common, traditional food. Acre is currently renowned as the culinary capital of the North, but at the time it was a town stuck in a 1980s time warp as far as food went, with most of its restaurants serving the familiar combination of hummus, French fries, and grilled meat or fish.
The audacity paid off. Today, El-Marsa is one of the most popular restaurants in Acre and Musa recently opened another restaurant with the same concept in Haifa (another mixed city).
His dishes make a spectacular display, a mixture of European fine dining with Palestinian traditional tastes. One example is his Seafood kibbeh. Kibbeh is a traditional meat croquette of a bulgur dough stuffed with meat, onions, and mint leaves. In Musa’s version, the meat is replaced with refined and delicately spiced seafood.
“Food can bring people together and in my restaurant one can see Western tourists alongside Israeli tourists and local Arabs sharing the same ambiance, simply enjoying the food and the view of the sea. As long as there is peace and no political tension between Jews and Arabs, people look for an opportunity to go out and enjoy a good meal,” he says.
This wasn’t the situation three years ago, in 2015, when Israel was swept by a wave of violence and the restaurants of Acre were deserted. Tourists were afraid to travel to this town due to its mixed population of Jews and Arabs. It was then when Musa came up with a coexistence initiative along with Jewish-owned restaurants at the old market of Acre, and invited people to a coexistence dinner with Arab and Jewish chefs.
Nowadays, most of the terror is inflicted in Gaza, in the south.
“As long as the terror is restricted to the south we are not affected by its destructive implications on tourism. Our city is a living proof that Jews and Arabs can live together. At the end of the day people just want to make a living and ignore the complexity of the political situation,” Musa says.
One restaurant won’t change the longstanding grievances between Israel and Palestine, but in this town, it’s a start.
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