Jerusalem may still be reeling from a near-epidemic spate of knife attacks, but the ever-embattled Holy Land has yet another conflict brewing, and it’s causing Israelis to draw a jagged line in the sand—albeit without any of the horrific violence with which the region is normally plagued.
The problem Israelis are witness to now? Somebody is actually trying to sell them toast and call it steak.
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That’s right, Tel Aviv’s own Zekaim-Original Vegan Boutique is facing an Internet backlash after announcing last week that one of their weekly specials would consist of “bread steak that comes out of the oven crispy and hot.”
No shit.
The dish in question consists of one perfectly browned piece of toast sitting atop a puddle of delicate aioli sauce and finished off with a few leaves of lettuce. This blatant deconstruction of a Caesar salad is being sold for 39 shekels—or $10—and was announced to much chagrin on the restaurant’s Facebook page last week. No one is buying this bread-as-steak business.
The Tel Aviv eatery has not-so-shockingly received a shitload of flack for the dish on Israeli social media, with several hundred comments appearing on the restaurant’s own page and other sites like the Hebrew-language Facebook page Vegans That Make Me Sad.
In honor of the bread-as-steak naming debacle, Facebook user Hezi Zar, for instance, uploaded a really unfortunate looking pile of ripped-up bread smeared with ketchup and named it as follows: “Filet of wonder bread on a bed of ketchup meringue.”
Assaf Megidash lambased the “steak” by posting a photo of a spherical loaf of bread against an all-white background with a caption that read: “Sausage bread with sesame seeds on white marble.” Yet another user jokingly asked, “Can I have my steak rare? I really feel like a lump of dough.”
The vegan restaurant’s owner, Hila Zekaim, is standing by the dish and its naming wholeheartedly. She told the Israeli-news site Ynet that if she had simply served croutons, lettuce, and dressing and called it a Caesar Salad, not only would nobody have any “beef” with the dish—please excuse the pun—and they would be totally fine with paying the $10 price. She went on to explain that both she and the rest of the folks at the restaurant “always try to give the customer a different experience.”
The otherwise-liked restaurant is just another sign that Israelis are embracing veganism more and more. A survey conducted last year found that 8 percent of Israelis are vegetarian and nearly 5 percent are vegan, up from half that four years ago. But maybe they are all missing meat more than they are willing to admit.
And if calling toast a steak makes them feel better, so be it.
