Raw & Cured

We were driving north to the old coastal town of Acre – a beautiful maze of cobbled streets, elegant mosques in their pillared courtyards, arched doorways of Templar churches, all wrapped up in a wall fortified through centuries of fear of marauding fleets, which periodically came charging from the pretty Mediterranean bay beyond.

We came from quite a different place: the sooty, sweaty streets of Tel Aviv, where we lived at the time, a very sad and stressful period for us. I had just stormed out of a job that I loved, ripping ties with friends who were like family, and started a job which I hated. Sarit had just walked out of a business she had set up, leaving when it turned from a boutique bakery to a cookie factory, breaking her heart on the way; she too was in a job she knew was going nowhere. We had been living together for a year then and were very much in love, but we both realised that something had to give. So we drove to Acre for some fun. Cobbled streets and mosques and bays are all fine, but we of course went to eat: this particular bay happens to bring ashore some of the best seafood you can find anywhere, and nowhere does this produce get treated better than in one restaurant in a parking lot overlooking the bay.