Tel Aviv is one of the great eating cities of the Middle East. The food runs from cheap-and-spectacular falafel and hummus on every street corner up to a handful of seriously ambitious restaurants doing modern Israeli cooking — a movement that has redefined the country's food culture in the last twenty years.
The base ingredients of the city kitchen are: bread, olive oil, tahini, lemon, charcoal, smoked aubergine, fresh herbs, citrus. Almost every restaurant works with some combination of these. The cuisine is built on the food traditions of the Jewish communities that arrived in the twentieth century — Yemenite, Persian, Iraqi, Bulgarian, Polish, Tunisian — mixed liberally with Palestinian Arab cooking and refined since the 1990s by chefs who trained in Paris, New York and Barcelona.
For a single celebration meal, the standout candidates are Eyal Shani's restaurants (Miznon for cheap street food, North Abraxass and Port Sa'id for full sit-down meals), The Norman Hotel for refined dining, and Taizu for pan-Asian. Cheap eating is best at the Carmel Market, the Kerem HaTeimanim neighbourhood for Yemenite food, and the Florentin quarter for late-night kitchens.
For hummus, Abu Hassan in Jaffa (also called Ali Karavan) has the queue every morning. For falafel, HaKosem on King George Street is the standard reference.